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UX Design as an Approach to Product Development

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If you own a software product today, you have more options than ever before over every aspect of its ecosystem – from how it’s designed, to the technology used to create it, to where and how it is distributed or published, to how it is maintained and supported. This blog post is a part of series on the web and mobile app infrastructure.  Today’s post will focus on User Experience.

Viewing Your Product as a Process – an Experience – Rather Than a Static “Thing”

You often see UX described as something along the lines of “it’s how a user feels when they use a software product”. Additionally, it’s often considered a phase of product development and is commonly associated with UI design. I would say that UX design is a way to view your product as a process – an experience – not merely as a static “thing”.
Why is it important to view your product as experience? Historically, software engineers have been mainly concerned with creating functional software, and putting a lot of weight in writing clean code, and having a low rate of defects. Today we’re at the point where, there so many products, so many options that quality is not always the decisive factor. Don’t get me wrong, it’s very important, but no matter how good your code is,  if your product is confusing or difficult to learn, — no one will use it.

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Improve Your Cloud Security

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by James Ling, Director, CISA, and Misha Kalhin, Senior Project Manager.

Switching to the cloud from in-house can transform your business, as we’ve discussed in our previous blog posts.  Cloud hosting promotes efficiency, cost reduction, and flexibility by freeing your organization from managing large air-conditioned spaces with rapidly aging hardware and by reducing your reliance on in-house IT expertise to manage functions that are not core to your business.  There are a lot of benefits of moving to the cloud, but, every executive in charge of the decision to migrate services to the cloud needs to consider the risks. This post will focus on managing the security risks of moving your systems and data out of your own facilities.

Cloud security is an issue that has been in the spotlight after Target and Home Depot data breach scandals, which prove that if your security measures are insufficient, the results will be devastating.  Tens of millions of dollars, in this case. Cloud service providers typically “share” security responsibilities with their clients, i.e. they provide fundamental security of the infrastructure, and expect their clients to secure applications that have been deployed in that infrastructure. After the incident Home Depot, for example, implemented “enhanced encryption of payment data” to avoid future breaches.

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Digital Factory – Customize Your Product to Meet Customer Needs

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by Misha Kalhin, Senior Project Manager

Software is not always on-size-fits-all. For example, if your software product is a POS system, your client, Brand A might have different requirements for their POS than your other client, Brand B. Sure, the core features would be the same, but small, yet important things like UI preferences, business logic, third party systems integration will differ from client to client. Making these changes for tens or even hundreds of customers for every release of your software product in-house is a tedious and costly endeavor. Wouldn’t you rather have your R&D team focus on making the next release of your product as good as it can be?

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Test Automation Trends – API testing, GUI Testing, Cloud Testing

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by Misha Kalhin, Senior Project Manager

Consumer demand and competition drive businesses to upgrade their software frequently, adding new features, while making sure they support all possible platforms AND keeping it intuitive, easy-to-use and visually impressive. In an effort to meet these requirements systems become more complex, and often product quality issues come up due to insufficient testing. For any business, catching bugs late in the lifecycle means lower customer satisfaction and higher fixing costs.

Manual testing is no longer sufficient in today’s rapidly changing world, it’s too labor-intensive and inefficient. Automated regression testing helps you test your system after every build, to make sure new additions have not broken existing functions.  Perhaps automated testing cannot solve all problems, but today it has to be a part of any testing strategy.

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Launch Your Product in the Cloud: Switching from In-house to Cloud

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Eric Byron, Director, Client Services 

As we learned last week, cloud adoption is reaching ubiquity (click here to read full article). Let’s recap why companies use cloud:

Why Use Cloud?

The reasons for using cloud will vary depending on how you intend to use it, but here are some of the top reasons:

  • Access Freedom – Employees, clients, end customers all can access the applications remotely in the office and on the go, from any device of their choice.

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PhoneGap – Hybrid App Development

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by Misha Kalhin, Senior Project Manager

In most cases, companies develop separate applications for each mobile platform, each coded in a different language.  For iPhone and iPad, they develop an app in Objective-C.  For Android, they use Java. While more expensive and time consuming to develop and maintain, creating these native applications ensures that the apps are optimized for their respective devices.

Tools that simplify the creation of apps for multiple platforms have always had significant drawbacks and will never be suitable for all applications. There are tools that make it possible to create apps for both iOS and Android in C#, but result in apps with a large footprint on the device, slowing download times and taking up storage. PhoneGap (Apache Cordova) uses a different approach and can present a viable development option for many situations. Businesses with limited budgets that need to launch their product fast often choose hybrid development for it’s speed and simplicity – even if it means switching to native apps once the product becomes more stable.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) in China – Why You Need a Trusted Partner in Cloud Computing

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by Rajesh Bashyam, VP Client Services & Vakeesan Rajadurai, Sr.Project Manager

According to Gartner 20% of companies that participated in the survey are using public cloud storage services and 19% for production computing. Gartner rates Amazon as the number one cloud service provider. Amazon recently announced that they are expanding their footprint to provide services directly from mainland China.This article provides an insight into cloud computing, AWS China and the importance of having a trusted partner to set up your presence on Amazon.
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Don’t Outsource Your Agile Testing – Outsource Regression Testing

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By Rajesh Bashyam – VP Client Services

Industry research shows that 35% of the software issues that are discovered in a typical software development life cycle can be avoided when prioritized regression testing is integrated into the process.

Adding an offshore regression component to your development team can help you improve your software quality, while spending about 50% less than by building that capacity in house.

This article will help to explain both how to integrate an offshore regression team into an otherwise in-house Agile development environment.
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