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.

Areas of UX – Much More Than a Functional Spec

Why Dextrys

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.

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?

Key performance indicators for this type of engagement model are:

• Volume.  We track the number and type of work items every month and made sure we always have the right number of resources involved.  We can adjust the resources levels up and down based on your business needs.
• Productivity. We track and analyze the work items completed per resource month and make sure our estimates are in line with our actuals. These steps are necessary to make sure we are continually improving.
• Quality.  We asses defect rates and conduct root cause analysis on a regular basis. In the last year the number of defects decreased by 12%.

Dextrys digital factory simultaneously works on multiple projects, notifies the client once the work is completed and holds monthly review meetings with client stakeholders. Some of the notable aspects of the digital factory are:

• Ticketing System. Tracking requirements without a tracking system will lead to a lot of re-work in the future. That is why we utilize the best tools and proprietary delivery processes, based on industry best practices, to track requirements and provide traceability from the initial requirements to finished product.
• Metrics Tracking. We track volume of work received and volume of work completed, as well as team efficiency and quality (defect rate). We also compare estimates that client’s R&D give us for a work item and track our own estimates and actuals. In 2014 our estimates have been in line with client’s estimates and actuals are often better.

Due to their expertise, our engineers are often invited to travel abroad for product roll-outs. This improves communication and further ensures that Dextrys digital factory is a seamless extension of our client’s team.

Dextrys Digital Factory

Dextrys provides software development and testing services to technology driven companies in the US and worldwide. We offer a range of engagement models to allow our clients to match our delivery to their project needs, processes and management styles. Let Dextrys help you reduce your software engineering costs and extend your engineering capacity.

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.

Businesses are often reluctant to implement test automation due to lack of expertise, and fear that it would take a great effort to implement. That’s what makes test automation a great candidate for outsourcing to an experienced vendor. Regression testing team can be completely independent from your Agile team. Read more on that here.

Test Automation Trends

Studies show that test automation pays for itself in the first 6 months, and return over the first 18 months is around 80%. In addition, test automation frees up your manual testers from doing tedious work and focus on more meaningful test case creation that requires more human intuition and knowledge of system business logic.

An experienced vendor will set up a process to select test cases for automation and a team of professionals will maintain and update an automated test suite – responding to the constantly changing software product –  and regularly execute the regression suite to:

• Increase code coverage
• Improve code quality

Some of the automation tools are proprietary, but there are also several open source tools that will meet all your automation needs while keeping the cost low. In addition, running automated test scripts is a repeatable process that can be reused and executed frequently and quickly pays for itself by reducing manual testing effort, improving product quality and stability.

API Testing

In addition to GUI test automation, which simulates end-user’s interactions with the system, another rising type of test automation in 2014 is API testing (often called headless testing), which tests whether application programming interfaces (APIs) are doing what they are supposed to, without GUI component. Tools such as soapUI, Jasmine, PhantomJS have been used extensively for such headless technologies as API, REST, DB, and JMS.

Cloud testing

Cloud testing can come handy for performance and load testing. If you would like to see how your system performs when it is accessed by hundreds of machines at the same time, it’s much easier to create these instances in the cloud than ask your IT to set them up in-house. Read more about cloud testing here.

Test Automation Services from Dextrys

Dextrys offers easy-to-implement, comprehensive automation testing solutions. With Dextrys’ automated testing solution, all activities of the testing process are included in the scope of automation in order to achieve a high level of system integration, increasing code coverage and improving product quality.

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.

• Flexible & Scalable – Choose the configuration, mix and match software, and run the business applications within minutes and derive metrics to select the one that suits your needs best.
• Cost Reduction – Highly efficient use of resources to shadow the capacity eliminates the exorbitant cost of in-house hardware and subsequent administration.  With cloud you pay only for what you use.
• Automatic Updates – Maintenance free to a large extent the provider takes the responsibility of updating and upgrading the software. 

Switching from in-house to Cloud: a Real World Example of Using Cloud to Your Advantage

• New product required a reliable infrastructure to support the emerging market.
• Corporate informed the client that it would take 6 months at a prohibitive price to set up the infrastructure in-house, which would undermine product launch.

Benefits: 

Cloud Computing with Dextrys

Dextrys is a US-based software outsourcing company that provides solutions using cloud computing to clients worldwide.  Our expertise in solving complex business problems such as distributed Agile development in the cloud, large deployment and testing via simulating real time environments have significantly reduced costs and time for our clients.

Click here to find out more about Dextrys cloud services.

The era of maintaining large climate controlled spaces with miles of racks holding expensive yet quickly aging hardware is so nineties. So is the idea of large in-house IT teams to support and maintain those systems.  With the emergence of Cloud computing, businesses are freed from the overhead of IT maintenance, while gaining scalability, and easy access.  No surprise that adoption of the cloud is reaching ubiquity in 2014, with 94% of surveyed organizations hosting applications in the cloud, and 87% using public cloud.

This article provides a holistic view of the cloud, with a real-world example of how to utilize the cloud to your advantage: cloud testing. Follow our blog for more examples of how to launch your business in the cloud.

How Do You Leverage Cloud?

• Use cloud-based systems for data storage and sharing.  Not too long ago, you would have backed up your files to a network server, not Box.com.
• Use cloud-based software products instead of installing the software on premises.  Classic examples is Salesforce.com (a cloud company before there was a cloud) which replaced many companies’ installations of sales force automation software (and now provide many other products beyond that).  Email and productivity software are probably the most prevalent now.
• Move your own company’s products to a cloud hosting environment.  Both customer facing and internal back office applications can be moved off premises, as can the development and testing environments that support them.

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.
• Flexible & Scalable – Choose the configuration, mix and match software, and run the business applications within minutes and derive metrics to select the one that suits your needs best.
• Cost Reduction – Highly efficient use of resources to shadow the capacity eliminates the exorbitant cost of in-house hardware and subsequent administration.  With cloud you pay only for what you use.
• Automatic Updates – Maintenance free to a large extent the provider takes the responsibility of updating and upgrading the software.

Cloud Testing: a Real World Example of Using Cloud to Your Advantage

Our client presented us with a challenge: Data from 200 plus multi-crystalline furnaces needs to be collected every 30 seconds, analyzed and dynamically reported at periodic intervals. Physically setting up hundreds of simulating machines would be a fool’s errand, so the solution required some creativity.

The team came up with this cloud-based solution:

• Created a cloud solution simulating the data generation closely shadowing real time furnaces
• Cloned multiple instances of the simulators on the cloud as required for testing
• Collected metrics from the multiple cloud instances using 1 Master Controller which also resided in the cloud
• Executed the analysis and reporting based on data received

For test automation, an instance on the cloud was spawned with Test Complete as the preferred testing software:

• Scripts were executed against the 200 plus furnace simulators for test data generation
• Master Controller functions were also tested remotely
• Update the automated scripts on the Test server on the cloud with versions updated as needed

Result

The cost reduction was significant and the testing simulation was close to a real-time implementation of a large industry.

Cloud Computing with Dextrys

Dextrys is a US-based software outsourcing company that provides solutions using cloud computing to clients worldwide.  Our expertise in solving complex business problems such as distributed Agile development in the cloud, large deployment and testing via simulating real time environments have significantly reduced costs and time for our clients.

Click here to find out more about Dextrys cloud services.

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.

What is PhoneGap?

PhoneGap (Apache Cordova) is an example of a framework that enables you to build a mobile app using familiar web tools such as HTML5, CSS3, utilizing Javascript to access device-level APIs. PhoneGap claims to have bridged the gap between web and mobile development – once the code is written, it works the same on any intended platform. In addition, hybrid apps can be downloaded via app stores just like native apps, so their exposure to the market is not impacted.

PhoneGap includes direct API support for

• Accelerometer
• Camera
• Compass
• Contacts
• File system
• Media
• Network (click here for complete list)

When combined with responsive design, PhoneGap apps perform well on devices with different screen sizes and resolutions. This flexibility offers a significant advantage as the range of display sizes in smartphone devices continually increases.

PhoneGap also offers PhoneGap Build, a cloud based tool that enables you to build a store-ready app without the need to install and maintain a native SDK on every platform you’re developing for.

Recent Advances with PhoneGap 3

In the past, PhoneGap has been criticized in the mobile development community because its performance is inferior to that of native apps and PhoneGap apps were plagued with platform specific issues. However, with PhoneGap 3 that was released in 2013, a lot of these issues have been addressed.  The result is that today hybrid app development can match the performance of native apps on newer mobile devices. PhoneGap 3 enables businesses to quickly get their product on the market – on multiple systems (e.g. both iOS and Android at the same time). Other advantages of PhoneGap 3 include:

• Much faster development process. Anyone with HTML/CSS, JS experience can build an app with PhoneGap.
• Single code base. In native development there are two code bases (iOS and Android), which means that any change/fix or new feature needs to be added twice.
• Much cheaper than native. PhoneGap framework itself is open source and free, and certainly, reduced training, design, development and testing time results in great savings.

PhoneGap Examples

These are some examples of apps developed with PhoneGap:

• Rormix – an app that connects users with music and videos of emerging/unsigned artists. The app was developed using PhoneGap in a little over a month – on both iOS and Android.
• NUS Extra – an app developed for National Union of Students (UK) to help students find discounts and deals by location, keyword, and browse by category.

Mobile Development with Dextrys

At Dextrys we’ve embraced hybrid app development early on seeing its potential of helping businesses reduce time-to-market. We’ve developed multiple native and hybrid applications, most recently a hybrid app for one of the biggest brands in cosmetics targeted for Asian market. If you’re interested going mobile and reaping the benefits of the revenue opportunities it opens up, feel free to contact Pat Lucas (plucas@dextrys.com)

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.

Cloud services provide on demand, easy, scalable access to applications, resources and services, and are fully hosted and managed by a cloud services provider. This arrangement allows the enterprise to focus on its core business and not worry about infrastructure, data centers, maintenance, and other non-core services. However the biggest advantage of using cloud service provider is scalability as business grows. An enterprise no longer needs to plan for the huge investments to regularly upgrade infrastructure. Cloud services allow a firm to scale up or down and pay only for actual usage.

The right cloud provider will have to ensure the following:

• Security and compliance. Clients need to feel confident that their information is safe and that cloud service provider is able to comply to client standards.
• Easy access to information and support
• Cost. Most cloud providers offer pay-as-you-go option.
• Choice of hosting platforms such as LAMP, WAMP etc

Due to government regulatory issues private clouds are a hot topic in China while public cloud services have no presence currently. Private cloud is expensive and makes sense only if the prospective business is for the long haul and has credible opportunities to expand. Public clouds are popular as they are relatively cheaper and billing is based on usage.

Why Companies Choose AWS Cloud Services

Amazon is rated the best among the cloud server providers by Gartner. After having expanded its reach into Asia Pacific Region, its fourth foray, Amazon has recently entered China. Prior to that Chinese companies have been using Amazon Web Services (AWS) in other regions across North & South America, Europe, Asia. AWS has partnered with China’s top data centers like ChinaNetCenter and SINNET and consultants Cloudgo, Bamboo Cloud, Bamboo Technologies, ChinaNetCloud, and Hitachi Consulting (China) to provide high value experience as well as limited regional previews for selected vendors.

Benefits of using AWS over Chinese private service providers

• Using AWS doesn’t involve any up front expenses or long term commitments. It’s scalable and it allows adding/removal of resources on demand.
• Easy to deploy globally and be in production in a few days
• Customers will be able to run their applications on infrastructure in China thereby reducing any delay

Though public cloud is an option for easy deployment and scalability of your application, getting to the point of choosing the right configuration could be daunting. Factors to consider in a service provider.

• Prior experience with hosting on AWS in the same geography
• Partnership with Amazon
• Expertise in performing due diligence based on specific scenarios
• Trained personnel who can work on AWS installs
• Security aspects over and above what the public cloud provides

Cloud Implementation Services through Dextrys

Dextrys is a China-based software services company providing developing web and mobile applications for clients worldwide. We can build and deploy to your own infrastructure or assist you in deploying it to AWS Cloud Services.

To know more about Dextrys and the services we offer please visit http://www.dextrys.com

This post is for those who are building an m-commerce website and want to understand current web design trends, and changing consumer behavior.

What is Responsive Web Design?

Responsive Web Design (RWD) describes a technique for improving the appearance and navigation of web sites on mobile devices. RWD automatically adjusts website content to fit nicely on a screen of any size. Responsive sites use the same URLs and HTML (the way content is displayed is determined by CSS) and can potentially eliminate the need for a separate mobile (m-dot) website.

Responsive web design is recommended by Google, it is SEO friendly and offers many advantages in productivity and appearance. However, since responsive is new there are currently a few constraints that will be smoothed out overtime as RWD evolves.

• Challenging for complex websites. Companies that have been around for decades and have large, complex websites might find it too costly and unnecessary to switch to responsive – at least for now. However most companies choose to make at least some of their content responsive, usually a landing page and other pages most commonly accessed via mobile.
• Not supported by older browsers.  RWD requires browsers to recognize CSS3, so if a lot of your web traffic comes from users who use older browsers, then going responsive might not be your top priority.
• May affect the speed of your website. Since your site will receive traffic from both web and mobile at the same time – that may affect your website’s load speed.

Due the rise of mobile, all websites will have to adopt new design and development techniques and become more future-friendly. The first step to figure out if responsive is worth the investment is to measure your mobile audience using Google Analytics.

mCommerce and Responsive Web Design

Mobile commerce sales have topped $38 billion in 2013 and the number is projected to reach $108 billion by 2017. Almost a quarter of all online sales come from mobile devices and trend is projected to grow quickly in 2014. Even though a lot of sales come from retails apps, there is now a significant shift to mobile websites, because the user is no longer restricted by app stores and can easily find the site via search engine.

To create a great m-commerce website you need to think “mobile first”: cater towards the mobile audience taking into account restrictions of mobile devices – then enhance the experience of a desktop user by adding additional features. At the same time, make sure that the effort to improve mobile experience, does not take away from the desktop experience. Below are a couple of examples of responsive websites that find that balance:

• Skinnyties: Great example of mobile first strategy. The site has a very clean layout. And it shows that designing responsively does not limit our designs to columns of fluid text and images on solid backgrounds.
• Stanford court (created by Dextrys): The site is simple with a classic look and feel. Notice how the menu, headline and body text re-size to achieve optimal legibility on all devices.
• Food Sense: Spacious layout and playful iconography. Fun to look at and navigate on any device. Quirky, homey design and colorful images of delicious food.

5 Best Practices for Building a Responsive mCommerce Site

At Dextrys we’ve deployed over 250 websites for hospitality and retail industries. Below are a few best practices for making a great m-commerce site:

• Simple layout. In order to provide the best mobile shopping experience and improve web site speed, content should be precise and layout simple.
• Search bar. Make sure your site features a prominent search bar with auto-suggestions to decrease typing on mobile.
• Optimize your images. Images should be flexible and workable, which speeds up load time significantly.
• Checkout page needs to be simple and purchasing should only be a couple of steps. Definitely do not send the user to a checkout page that is not optimized for mobile.
• Test thoroughly. There are many ways to improve your responsive website, and new tools and techniques are appearing every day. It’s important to try new things and test on as many devices as possible.

Dextrys web and mobile team is experienced in responsive web design, Parallax as well as integration with third party applications and social networks. 

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.
Testing Within Agile

Agile scrum teams build software incrementally. Effective teams focus on speed of delivery and completeness of the software product and use metrics to improve their productivity over time. In almost all cases, the most effective teams are co-located in the same environment. With each Sprint the team works together to deliver a fully functional release that meets the requirements (Stories) selected at the start of the Sprint.

Most Sprint teams include functional testers to improve release quality. The challenge they face is that within the short duration of each Sprint the testers must both define and execute the test cases for each Story.  There is limited time for executing a regression test covering functions from previous Sprints or even releases and even less time for updating a regression test or trying to automate parts of it.

As the team adds additional functionality, the risk of regression errors increases.  In some cases, a team will then devote an entire Sprint near the end of a release cycle dedicated to running regression tests. The challenge with this approach is that issues found are late in the development cycle and can risk significant rework.

Adding Regression Testing to Agile

One solution to this testing challenge is to establish a dedicated regression team that would work outside the Agile SCRUM team. Its role is to maintain a product regression suite. Ideally, they would maintain a set of automated scripts that would perform a subset of the test suite. While distinct from the SCRUM, the regression team would work together with the Agile team.  In their regular cycle of work, the team would

• Incrementally update the regression tests with the manual scripts created by the SCRUM’s functional testers
• Executed the manual and automated regression scripts against each Sprint release
• Update the automated scripts with any fallout from the changing software and by selectively automating new functional tests

Clearly defined metrics will help you ensure your regression team is accomplishing your quality objectives:

• Regression test coverage (as a percentage of total functional test cases)
• Automated test coverage (as a percentage of total regression scripts)
• Time to execute
• Valid defects captured
• Percent of invalid defects reported

Outsourcing the Regression Testing

When looking to saving costs in testing, outsourcing of the functional testing may not be the best solution. In most cases, keeping the testers embedded in the SCRUM with the developers will allow for the most efficient transfer of knowledge between the team members and the highest productivity for the team. Outsourcing the entire team (development and testing) may be an option, but not just the functional testers.

However, the regression testing is a prime candidate for outsourcing for several reasons:

• The interface points between the Agile scrum and the regression team can be well defined.
• You can take advantage of a time zone difference to have the regression testing completed and documented overnight.
• Clearly defined metrics will help confirm that you are meeting your business objectives of both quality and cost savings

Automated Regression Testing with Dextrys

Dextrys is a US-based software outsourcing company providing Regression Testing solutions to clients worldwide.  Our Regression Testing service can help you to decrease your defect ratio while improving your code coverage and overall software quality.

To know more about Dextrys and the services we offer please visit http://www.dextrys.com