What Is Soft Booking, and Why Would You Need It?
Soft Booking is Kobiton’s solution to a device reservation system that balances the need for keeping devices retained for continual testing use with the benefit of having a pool of available devices ready for immediate use by testers.
You can use Soft Booking to retain a device for several hours at a time, thus removing the possibility of the device being retained by another user between your testing sessions. If you have multiple tests you would like to perform efficiently against a single device, or a single test you want to run repeatedly, Soft Booking provides you with an extended time window to reserve or “book” a device for use.
Please note that this feature is only available for devices in your private/local device pool, not Kobiton’s public device pool, except when choosing a device bundle for scriptless automation test run. If device bundle includes a public device, said public device will have a Retained status, indicating that it was booked/soft-booked for scriptless automation execution. This feature is for immediate real-time use and cannot be used to reserve a device days or weeks ahead of time.
Soft Booking can retain a device for the following time periods:
- 1 hour
- 2 hours
- 4 hours
- 8 hours
- 16 hours
- 24 hours
Retain device prior to starting session (Legacy Kobiton only)
NOTE: Soft booking prior to a session start as described in this section is currently only available on Legacy Kobiton devices. In Kobiton 4.0+, devices may be retained at the end of a session as described in the next section.
1. Within your Kobiton portal, navigate to the Devices page, then navigate to the Private & Local Devices tab.
2. Choose the device you want to book and click the ellipses (...) button in the device box.
3. You are now viewing the device details pop-out box of your selected device. At the bottom of this box is a drop-down menu currently displaying “Retain”. This is the Soft Booking menu button.
4. Click the dropdown button and the Soft Booking times will be displayed. Click the desired amount of time to retain the device.
5. Once you click your desired retention time, the device is immediately removed from the Available Devices list and is reserved under your name. The device’s change in status and a timer showing the remaining time in your reservation are displayed in the lower-left corner of the device details pop-out box. The time will continue to count down until your reservation window is completed, at which time the device will automatically return to the Available Devices pool.
6. If at any time you wish to cancel your reservation, click the X icon in the Retained box. You will be asked to confirm your cancellation before continuing.
As always, if you have any questions or issues, please submit a support ticket at support.kobiton.com.
Retain the device when exiting a session
How to retain a device when exiting a session
You might want to keep a device in its current state when ending a manual session in order to reserve the device for your next use. While the device is being retained, it cannot be accessed by other users.
NOTE: This feature is not available for automated sessions at this time.
We adjust the Exit Session dialog so that you can choose to retain the device for your next use.
Simply click the Retain drop-down to select the period for which you would retain the device, then click Exit Session to proceed.
The session will then be ended. The current device will be put to “Retained” status and no clean-up procedure will be run on this device. Note that you will be charged minutes for the retained time on public devices.
Cancel the retained status of a device
Once the device is retained, you can see and cancel the remaining retain period on the Device modal:
To cancel retain, click the Cancel icon, then click Confirm to proceed:
Once canceled, the device will be cleaned up and put back Online.
Note - if you have the permission soft_book.terminate_other_soft_book, you can cancel private/local retained devices of other users.
Limitations
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We don’t currently support retaining devices after ending mixed session.
Other notes
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If the device goes offline (electricity cut-off, unplugged USB wire) while being retained, your retainment will be canceled. When the device is back online, it would be cleaned up as normal.