Get Mobile Notifications from Testomato with IFTTT
The right mix of development tools are key to staying organized, focused, and on task. It makes it a lot harder to reach your goals and deliver quality products to your users when you don’t have the right tools for the task.
At Testomato, we’re always on the search to find ways Testomato can be combined with other tools to help make your testing experience more efficient.
We recently heard from one of our users that they use IFTTT to receive mobile notifications from Testomato, and thought it was a great tip to share!
The Problem: Email Isn’t Always Enough
When Testomato discovers an issue on your website, we send you an email alert. At the moment, the only way to get other types of notifications is to use our third-party app integration with PagerDuty to receive SMS, phone calls, or iOS/Android push notifications.
If you have round-the-clock care or work on projects that aren’t time-sensitive, email notifications work well, even if you don’t receive the email until later. On the other hand, urgent issues such as a broken shopping cart can end up costing services a lot of time, money, and sleep!
We have plans to add mobile apps and notifications to Testomato, in order to be able to be able to make receiving alerts faster, easier, and more convenient.
But we’re not quite there yet, so what can you do in the meantime?
IFTTT could be a great solution for some of you.
If This, Then That – What It Is
For those of you who have already heard of IFTTT, feel free to skip ahead to learn how to set up notifications. For those of you who don’t know, IFTTT is short for “If this, then that”.
The main idea of the service is based on a simple concept of cause and effect. You create a recipe: a trigger event and a resulting action occurs.
In this case, you receive an alert email from Testomato, then IFTTT sends a push notification to your phone.
IFTTT currently supports over 150 channels – web services you can use for your triggers and results.
Let’s take a look how you can use IFTTT to get mobile notifications from Testomato!
How to Pull the Trigger on Testomato
Before you get started there’s a few things you’ll need to:
- Sign up for an IFTTT account
- Sign into your Gmail account
- Download the IFTTT app for iOS or Android
Once you’ve got all the ingredients, here’s how to create the IFTTT recipe:
- Click on the Create a Recipe button to start.
- Choose Gmail as your trigger channel and select the New email in inbox from box.
- Enter results@testomato.com as the email address.
- Choose iOS Notifications or Android Notifications as your action channel and activate the channel on your phone.
- Choose Send a notification as your action.
- Configure your notification and click Create Action.
Tip: We removed the “FromAddress” field to see the full subject line - Scroll down and click Create Recipe.
This Is Not a Perfect Solution
Before we put together this tutorial, we made sure to test out IFTTT ourselves for a day with Testomato. We found that while it’s very helpful (especially if you don’t use push notifications for email), IFTTT is not a perfect solution.
There was a slight lag between when emails were sent and when we received notifications on our phones. During our testing period, we saw delays ranging from 30 seconds to up to 5 minutes.
If we had to guess, we think that the delay is probably caused by how often Testomato emails show up in your inbox. In other words, the fewer email notifications you receive from us, the bigger the delay from IFTTT. However, we couldn’t find any official documentation that confirmed this.
Despite the small delay, we still think this is a great temporary solution for those of you who’d like to receive mobile notifications from Testomato.
Go give it a try and let us know what you think!
Have another tip for using Testomato you think we should know about?
Feel free to contact our team any time at support@testomato.com. You can also join us on Facebook or Twitter.
