Rethinking Mobile Test Automation Infrastructure: A Pragmatic Perspective with Tricentis Tosca

In enterprise QA conversations, mobile test automation is often framed as a tooling decision. Yet, in practice, most automation challenges surface not because of limitations in the automation platform, but because infrastructure choices were treated as an afterthought. At YASH Technologies, we consistently see that the success or failure of mobile automation programs hinges on how well infrastructure decisions align with the realities of test development, execution, and long-term scalability.

Tricentis Tosca, with its model-based approach and Appium-backed mobile automation, offers significant flexibility. However, flexibility alone does not guarantee efficiency. What matters is how organizations design the ecosystem around Tosca, devices, agents, access models, and environments—to support both engineering productivity and operational sustainability.

Infrastructure Drives Automation Outcomes

Mobile automation infrastructure is not a passive layer. It actively influences development speed, test stability, maintenance effort, and overall ROI. Enterprises typically begin their journey with cloud-based device farms, drawn by their promise of instant scale and device diversity. Public cloud devices are well-suited for broad execution coverage, particularly in regression cycles where clean-state validation is desirable.

However, challenges arise quickly when the same infrastructure is used for testing. Public devices reset after every session, forcing test engineers to repeatedly recreate application state—logging in, navigating flows, and configuring prerequisites before meaningful work can begin. As test scenarios grow in complexity, this overhead compounds, slowing delivery and frustrating teams.

Private cloud devices mitigate this issue by preserving state across sessions. From a productivity standpoint, they are a significant improvement. From a commercial perspective, they introduce higher subscription costs and often limit the variety of devices available for testing. This trade-off becomes especially pronounced in large programs where multiple teams compete for the same limited pool of private devices.

The Role of Tricentis Mobile Agent in Enterprise Setups

To address these challenges, many organizations turn to Tricentis Mobile Agent (TMA) to regain control without sacrificing Tosca’s flexibility. TMA allows real and virtual devices to be connected directly to a managed Appium server, either locally or within an on-premises environment.

Local TMA setups are particularly effective during test development. When engineers can work with a dedicated physical device or emulator connected to their workstation, they gain uninterrupted access to the application state. Page scanning, module refinement, and steering adjustments can be performed iteratively, without the friction introduced by session resets or network latency. In our experience, this approach can dramatically reduce development effort compared to working exclusively on public cloud devices.

That said, local infrastructure is rarely an optimal standalone strategy. It scales poorly, duplicates resources, and creates dependency on individual machines. For enterprises, the more sustainable model is often a centralized, on-premises TMA installation.

On-Premises Infrastructure: Control with Accountability

On-premises TMA environments offer many of the benefits of private cloud devices without recurring subscription costs. Devices can retain application state, credentials, and passcodes between sessions, reducing the need for complex setup automation. This model is particularly valuable for internal applications, regulated environments, and scenarios where network access or security constraints limit the use of public cloud services.

The trade-off is ownership. Device maintenance, OS updates, and lifecycle management become internal responsibilities. Device diversity may also be narrower than that offered by large cloud farms. From a YASH perspective, this is where architectural guidance becomes critical, helping clients decide which devices genuinely add value and how to balance coverage against operational effort.

Development vs. Execution: Different Needs, Different Choices

A recurring pitfall in mobile automation programs is assuming that development and execution should use identical infrastructure. In reality, they benefit from different optimizations.

Development thrives on persistence. Engineers need stable environments where application state carries forward as tests evolve. Execution, on the other hand, often benefits from clean, repeatable environments that expose defects caused by fresh installs or first-time user flows.

Mature automation programs acknowledge this distinction. They combine persistent development environments with scalable cloud execution for regression testing and cross-device validation. Tosca’s Appium-based architecture supports this hybrid approach—but only when the infrastructure is intentionally designed.

The Often-Overlooked Dependency: Application Packages

Beyond devices and agents, mobile automation is constrained by the availability of applications. Appium-based execution requires installable artifacts—APKs, AABs, or IPAs. Internal applications rarely pose a problem, but third-party apps frequently do.

When installable packages are unavailable, teams resort to workarounds: sourcing Android packages from external repositories, extracting builds from devices, or automating app store installations as part of the test flow. Each workaround introduces security, stability, and maintenance considerations that must be weighed carefully.

Android ecosystems offer more flexibility in this regard. iOS, with its stricter signing requirements and mandatory multi-factor authentication, often pushes teams toward private or on-premises devices where prerequisites can be configured outside the test flow. These realities reinforce the importance of aligning infrastructure choices with platform-specific constraints.

At YASH, we advise clients to treat mobile automation infrastructure as a strategic decision. The goal is not to find a single “best” environment, but to design a balanced ecosystem that supports speed, scale, and governance.

The most effective programs blend approaches: local or on-premises environments for development efficiency, cloud farms for execution breadth, and selective use of private devices where persistence is essential. When infrastructure is aligned with the automation lifecycle, Tricentis Tosca becomes more than a testing tool; it becomes a scalable enabler of quality engineering.

In mobile automation, success is rarely limited by what tools can do. It is defined by how thoughtfully organizations design the environments in which those tools operate.

• Mobile Test Automation
• Test Automation Infrastructure