Month: December 2020

Leveraging MVP For Your Business

Posted on by galaxy-admin
MVP is your product idea with the bare necessary features that you will test with real users. Feedback received from this stage will then be used for developing your actual product. The response from your MVP sets the direction of your product and answers essential questions like:
  • Is your idea marketable?
  • Will the users pay for your idea in the future?
  • Does your MVP solve the problem as you anticipated it?
  • What additional features users expect in your product?
Your MVP gives a reality check of the viability of your product, hence it’s vital not to skip it.

Why is MVP necessary?  

To further elaborate on the importance of MVP and to convince anyone who says otherwise, reason with them with the points below:
  • An MVP lets you test a basic product before it goes for design and development stages, thereby saving you time and effort.
  • Helps you in identifying a group of early adopters for future testing.
  • Is cost-effective viability and feasibility check.
  • Gives you insight into user expectations concerning your product.

When does MVP come into play? 

The obvious answer here is right after the ideation of your product. However, there are times when you take the MVP route apart from this. If you wish to venture into a new category in your existing product. For example, you are an online bakery shop with great reach and wish to leverage your brand to diversify offerings. You are thinking of including frozen food in your product offerings. You need to see if there is a separate website to be developed or you can integrate the new products into the existing one. If you wish to revamp your older website with a new design and improved UI. There will be a new color scheme, different navigation, basically a complete makeover. You can create an MVP for both scenarios to see your response. Your existing customer base can be reached out for their inputs on the new MVPs and give their feedback on whether your vision is being reflected in the new design. So the scope of MVP is not restricted to just a new product, it can be for:
  • New features
  • Different design
  • Introducing your product to newer demographics

Which MVP model to go for?

The decision to build an MVP of your product is not complete yet. You need to select which MVP  model is feasible for you to build with the available resources and timeline. Here are the most popular ones.

Landing page MVP

You create a landing page with the basics:
  • A description of your product
  • How is it different from your competitors, i.e. your USP
  • A CTA button can be added for signing up for newsletters, more content about your product, contact information, etc.
Buffer went with the landing page MVP. Google Ads helped Joe Gascoigne got 120 sign-ups and was able to talk to many of them to get their thoughts on his product and what they liked the most about it.

Explainer videos MVP 

In this, you create a video, preferably a short one that describes your product and a demo of your product in action. You will need access to your audience, via their email IDs, or targeted ads. Animated videos can also be created here. Videos are known for higher engagement rates when compared to text, so you have a chance of creating a buzz on social media as well. Dropbox’s four-minute-long video went viral, and they got the attention of the potential users within a short period, thanks to the video.

Wizard of Oz MVP

This is the “Fake it till you make it” scenario! In this, the customer interacts with your product thinking that it’s the final one. But in the background, a person will be handling the responses to your customer. The tasks performed by your team will eventually be done by certain algorithms or automated technology. But before you invest your time in that, you wish to see if users need it. Plus you get user responses this way that will act as the base for your future assumptions. Jeff Bezos similarly launched Amazon from his garage.

Concierge MVP

Concierge MVP is helping your users manually to achieve their end goals. Every customer that visits you, will be guided by a human resource. Via this method, you get a one on one conversation with your real users and understand their pain points. It’s testing the waters yourself! You interact with your users and incorporate their feedback to your original idea. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to develop a complete prototype to test as you are present to guide your users. Airbnb started similarly. Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky tested if people were willing to stay in houses and build a website around the same concept and three people signed up.

Email MVP

The starter pack for this method is an email list and a good response rate from the same list. Sending a product via email is way more convenient than building a website. However, a good click rate is a must, otherwise, your emails are of no use due to lack of feedback. An existing user base can be helpful here as they are familiar with your product and brand. They will be more willing to spare a few minutes as opposed to shooting emails to strangers. A lack of response can lead to a dead-end here, so it must be avoided at all costs. Ryan Hoover’s Product Hunt received a huge response from the emails he sent and could thus leverage that for creating a successful platform. Everything said, skipping an MVP is never a good start. Numerous options can be taken to see the viability of your product. They vary as per resource availability, timeline, and tech friendliness. If you think that developing an MVP involves a lot of work, call us, and we will make the MVP journey smooth for you. About us  We specialize in delivering end-to-end software design & development services. Our digital product experts are creative problem-solvers with a decade of experience in all facets of digital and interactive design and development. We create compelling and human-focused web and mobile experiences delivered through clean, and minimalistic UI.

GWL 2020 Wrapped: Top 10 Blogs You Must Read for App/Website Design & Development

Posted on by galaxy-admin

At Galaxy Weblinks, we build high-performing software solutions that help teams scale. And write about it in the process. You may have spotted us on some of the popular platforms such as Hackernoon, The Startup, Level Up Coding, and Muzli to name a few.

In hopes of helping you fine-tune your design and development strategy, we fetched this blog list to help designers, developers, project managers, or decision-makers with:

  • Tips on automating the redundant tasks and improving the productivity level using tools that worked wonders while collaboration.
  • Best practices in design and development processes for building apps that scale and perform better.
  • Give updates on best in industry trends for website and app development technologies.

Here are Galaxy’s most read and interesting Medium pieces from 2020. This is an opportunity to learn from the best in the design and development processes, so feel free to peruse our comprehensive list!

1. Migration Plan to the All New Vue JS 3 

Published in: The Startup Main topics covered:  Vue 2 to Vue 3 upgrade, app migration process, new features.

If you have been involved in building a custom or single-page application with Vue.js, you will find its development nitty-gritty interesting for your project. If you want your Vue.js application to become faster, smaller, more maintainable, you should check out this blog that focuses on upgrading to Vue 3 with an easier approach to target native.

In this article, you’ll get a comprehensive insight on how you can upgrade your Vue.js 2 application into Vue 3, and what are the breaking changes you should expect in Vue 3.

2. 6 Productivity Tools that all Developers Should Try

Published in: Level Up Coding Main topics covered: Code editing, collaboration, development tools.

A developer’s life is filled with many unknown errors and glitches waiting to pop up at the most inconvenient times. The blog entails some interesting tools focused on keeping your developers’ productivity levels at their peak while assisting you in improving your project deliveries and turnarounds. The tools it vouched for include Typora, Codernotes, Mindly, and others.

There are numerous software tools available to assist and streamline the development team and decrease their cognitive load. These tools mentioned will help you as a developer to concentrate more on creating robust solutions quickly.

3. Atom vs Sublime: Which text editor to choose in 2020?

Published: Internal release Main topics covered: Text editor, code editing.

Developers are familiar with code editors that contain features like quick navigation, syntax highlighting, automatic indenting, etc. This blog focuses on the side by side comparison between these two popular text editors, Atom and Sublime.

Both Text Editors offer a more familiar code editing experience without an integrated terminal and debugger. It will help you in understanding the core differences between the two to choose from, depending on your development needs.

4. How To Decide The Right Tech Stack For Web/Mobile App

Published: JavaScript in Plain English Main topics covered: Frontend and backend technologies, web and mobile app tech stack.

A well-chosen tech stack gives a competitive advantage and helps your mobile or web application grow, whereas the wrong technology can set you back by months. This blog focuses on things you need to know about choosing the right tech stack, and some clues for making smart decisions for the same.

The decision will determine whether your mobile and web application will perform well and be scalable. The blog also involves some useful resources for frontend and backend technologies. A checklist for choosing the tech stack is a must-check.

5. A Practical Checklist for Quickest App Release

Published: Bits and Pieces Main topics covered: software development process, app development speed, best practices.

In this blog, we have churned out best practices for ensuring that your software development and deployment takes place within the set timeline. Practical tips like avoiding technical debt and investment in automated tools will help you shorten your SDLC.

These best practices will help you immensely in taking your product to the market faster. Your team will be able to save time, work on more complex tasks and increase their knowledge base.

6. 5 Alternatives To WordPress that You Should Try

Published: Dev Genius Main topics covered: CMS platforms, website development.

In this blog, we curated CMS platforms that are tried and tested by our team. We have worked on them, so we know where they trump and where they lack. It will be a great piece for you if you are planning to switch your CMS platform or looking for a new platform other than WordPress.

The list will prove to be a huge deciding factor for you to choose the right CMS platform for you according to your business requirements.

7. 10+ Best UX Practices For Your Ecommerce Store

Published: Muzli Main topics covered: Ecommerce, UX design, website development.

In this blog, we have covered some best practices that we employ while designing our client ecommerce stores. From optimizing your website’s loading time to streamlining your checkout process, we have mentioned design hacks that will help you improve your website traffic.

All the mentioned practices will get you closer to your growth goals. And since the online marketplace is a crowded one, you can either nail the fundamentals perfectly or do something out of the box.

8. Why should you build a UI Component Library?

Published: Design + Sketch Main topics covered: Design system, UI component library, Collaboration, and design tools.

Building a component library is an optimized way to reduce the overhead that comes with maintaining multiple repositories for multiple components. This blog focused on the benefits, and the practices to build a component library for your design system that will facilitate tighter integration between design and development.

From building and distributing components, documentation, and leveraging the right tools, this piece will help you collaborate with your team smoothly.

9. How to improve your design workflow with Zeplin and Sketch?

Published: Design + Sketch Main topics covered: Design system, UI design workflow, web, and app development.

The designers need to transfer their ideas or designs of a digital product for development. Tools, such as Zeplin enable this handover, while also supporting design tools like Sketch. In this article, we guided through how the winning combination of Zeplin and Sketch can improve the transition of design towards development.

This blog will help you identify the similarities between projects more quickly to help plan out how code or designs should be managed.

10. 11 Collaboration Tools for Designers, Developers, and PMs

Published in: Level Up Coding

Main topics covered: Collaboration tools, Design tools, Productivity tools

We curated a list of tools for all our fellow designers, developers, and project managers to help them find the best-suited one for their team, including the ones that meet your remote collaboration requirements.

Our teams use all the listed tools for smooth collaboration, and many industry experts vouch for them too.

These are some of the most-read pieces of 2020 curated for you. Do read our other blogs here and on our Medium as well. And in case you have some 2021 revamping plans for your online product, we have got a team for you. Just drop us your details here, and we will connect with you.

Galaxy Weblinks

We specialize in delivering end-to-end software design & development services. Our digital product experts are creative problem-solvers with a decade of experience in all facets of digital and interactive design and development. We create compelling and human-focused web and mobile experiences delivered through clean, and minimalistic UI.

How to decide what’s the right tech stack for your Mobile/Web App?

Posted on by galaxy-admin

Choosing the best technology to build a robust solution is a very crucial decision. This is the third step while planning mobile and web application development. It comes after establishing the business perspective and product structure. With large companies, in-house and offshore developers typically make the choice collaboratively. It’s more complicated if you’re a small startup.

The decision will generally decide whether your mobile and web application will perform well and be scalable. It will also impact your budget! A well-chosen tech stack gives a competitive advantage and helps it grow, whereas the wrong technology can set you back by months.

This article will give you insights on things you need to know about the tech stack, and some clues for making smart decisions when the time comes.

Differences Between Web and Mobile App Tech Stack

What is a tech stack anyway? Bluntly put, it’s a set of software tools, databases, frameworks, programming languages, and technologies that are used to build a mobile, web app, or a website.

Web applications are generally internet-enabled. Thus, users don’t have to download them to access it. Web app tech stack uses the resources provided by the system. In this way, to build a web app, you will need to use a combination of front-end and back-end technologies.

Mobile apps are created for a specific mobile platform, i.e. a particular environment and cannot be replicated to another environment. To use a mobile app, the user should download it from the app/play store. Thus, apart from front-end and back-end technologies, to build a mobile app, you should use platform-oriented technologies – Swift and Objective-C for iOS and Java or Kotlin for Android app development.

Front-end technologies include:

  • HTML/HTML5
  • CSS
  • JavaScript
  • UI-frameworks and libraries: ReactJS, AngularJS, React, jQuery, and others

HTML and CSS Toolkit

There are several frameworks used for CSS and HTML. Some of them include:

  • Pure
  • Materialize
  • Susy
  • Bootstrap
  • UIkit
  • Bulma
  • Foundation

Popular choices among them are Foundation and Bootstrap. While Foundation is ideal for developing nimble, responsive websites, Bootstrap uses HTML, CSS, and jQuery library to make responsive web pages,

JavaScript Frameworks For Front-End Development

Modern web applications use JavaScript in the front-end. We have listed the best frontend frameworks to use in 2021 for web and mobile applications.

Back-end technologies include:

  • Operating system
  • Web server: Apache, Nginx
  • Databases: Neo4j, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and others
  • Programming languages:  Objective-C, Python, PHP, Java, C#, and others
  • Cloud infrastructures and services: AWS, Heroku, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and others.
  • Various frameworks build over programming languages: Django, .NET, Node.js, and others;

Once again, we have listed the best backend frameworks to use in 2021 that you may use.

Here are a few types of popular back-end tech stack combinations used mostly:

LAMP Stack

The LAMP stack helps in building an environment for running PHP applications. It’s used for hosting websites on Linux. The stack is made up of the following technologies: Linux (the environments OS), Apache (the HTTP server), MySQL (the database), and PHP (the server-side programming language).

Wins Stack

Windows Internet Naming Service (Wins) is another back-end stack that consists of a Windows server, internet information services, .Net, and Microsoft SQL Server. It’s a system that is used to determine the IP address associated with a particular network computer.

MEAN Stack

The mean stack consists of MongoDB, Express.js, Angular, and Node.js. It is more of a full-stack structure. It‘s an open-source JavaScript software stack for building dynamic websites and web applications.

Xampp Stack

Xampp toolkit consists of X, Apache, MySQL or MariaDB, PHP, Perl. AMP stack lets you install Apache, MySQL, and PHP on your computer together with some other useful software. It’s designed to provide you an easy installation experience.

MERN Stack

MERN consists, MongoDB, Express, React/Redux, and Node.js. The MERN stack is very similar to the MEAN stack. This stack is sought after because of the growth in popularity of ReactJS in front-end development and NodeJS in back-end development and is useful for building high-end single-page applications.

Choosing the right Tech Stack | 11 must-know things

Your choice of technology stack should be based primarily on the quality and functional requirements you want to have in your app or website. If that tech stack can develop all the desired features and functions you want, then, it’s the right choice.

The Size & Complexity of the Project

One of the key factors to watch out for is the size of your project. The tech stack needed for a mid-sized or even large project will vary from that needed for a small project. Besides the size, the complexity of the project also matters a lot. Complex projects ask for thorough technologies and tools.

The Product Functionality and Specification 

You need to be sure that your defined functionalities should solve the problems of your target audience. It makes sense to run this step after or along with market research to find out what products already exist and what additional specifications your software needs to have to beat the competition. According to this, you will be able to choose your right set of tools.

Products’ Required Speed and Functions

It goes forward to double-check the compatibility and efficiency rate of pairing a project and tech stack. Here, the functions, and speed expected with the project is supposed to deliver to its users well, which goes a long way in determining which tech stack to use.

System Load Requirements

This is another very important aspect to pay attention to. Several projects have different processing loads and therefore not all tech stacks can serve all processing load requirements. With this, you will need to compare your prospective product processing loads with the capacity of the tech stack to ensure that it can meet that need.

Clearly defined requirements for MVP

MVP is the imperative to the mobile & web application development process of a product. As a bare-bones set of crucial elements, MVP is generally designed for experimental proof of the competitiveness and viability of the product in a real market situation. Thus, it’s essential to understand what matters to an app right from the start and what technologies will be needed in the future.

Scalability Requirements

It’s essential to understand that there are two types of scalability — horizontal and vertical.

Horizontal scalability means the capability of running on more devices. Vertical scalability helps in adding more elements to an application. Both are equally important for the growth and efficient operation of the product.

The tech stack you choose should be able to support your app as it scales up. When you are ready to enhance your productivity, your tech stack should be equipped with the right tools, frameworks, and aspects that would step up the process without wasting time or money. As the app landscape is dominated by MVP models, your stack should be able to support upgrade and scalability at various stages after the launch of a prototype without complicating things.

Performance Requirements

The influence of performance stats comes from two sources. One from the business requirement and the other is what the technology is capable of in a situation.

Performance requirements determine how fast the system can react and how many requests the system can process at what rate. Since the whole operation must react to thousands of events at millisecond speed – it makes sense to pick the most reliable option.

Costs

Budgeting the tech stack is probably the trickiest thing in the entire development process. Why? Well, software development is not precisely writing on a piece of paper with a pencil — it demands a significant financial resource to get the job done. There are:

  • Subsequent maintenance costs
  • Technology education & licensing fees
  • Developers’ salaries
  • Hosting costs for keeping the product

The trick is to avoid overspending wherever possible, avoid bloating, and balance things out.

DevOps & security requirement

The kind of DevOps practices you are used to, as well as the level of the security requirement, is a crucial factor, too. Will your app just serve as an informational hub for end-users or your app will manage their financial data?

If you need to manage user data, security is of paramount importance and hence, you should also consider choosing a tech stack that always facilitates a high-end security framework to fulfill app development goals.

Maintenance

The Tech stack should be easy to manage without lengthy codes. If your tech stack confuses your developers with complex codes and takes a long time to process and complete a task, then you might get stuck after a point in development.

At the same time, choosing a stack that has a very illegible coding structure can lead to additional spending on training and development of resources. So, your focus should be on finding a tech stack on which code is easy to maintain for your development team.

Seek out professional guidance

If you are new to the world of application tech stacks, then seeking out the help of an IT professional is a good idea. These professionals will be able to provide the guidance needed to get the best tech stack components.

Conclusion

These are the essential things you need to know about Tech Stack as a concept and how it affects the development of a project and defines its prospects.

With these tips, you will be able to navigate in the vast sea of options, not get caught in the shuffle, or lose sight of your goals.

Contact Us right away to discuss your website or app development tech stack according to your business requirement and complexities.

About Galaxy Weblinks

We specialize in delivering end-to-end software design & development services and have hands-on experience with large, medium, and startup business development requirements. Our engineers also help in improving security, reliability, and features to make sure your business application scale and remain secure.

Customer Journey Mapping For Better Website Performance

Posted on by galaxy-admin
The most important question that project managers should ask themselves is, “How do I help my customers achieve their goals on my website while still achieving mine?” Focusing on that question is the starting point for improving your website experience and building a customer journey map. The first goal for preparing a customer journey map is to identify the customers’ requirements and what they are seeking using your website. Your team (Designer/ Developer/ Tester) should understand the entire process your customers go through.

The Journey Phases

This implies the different stages in the customer’s journey. They may vary as per particular scenarios. Each company can use data to analyze what these phases are as per the corresponding situation. Here are some examples:
  • For a B2B scenario (like rolling out an internal tool), the stages could be purchase, adoption, retention, expansion, advocacy.
  • For a big (or luxury) purchase (like test driving and buying a car), the stages can be engagement, education, research, evaluation, justification.
  • For an ecommerce scenario (like buying Bluetooth speakers), the stages can be – discovery, try, buy, use, seek support.
This will help you determine your journey phases according to your business type. There’s a common saying that you can’t understand someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes – and that’s exactly what customer journey maps do. They help you put yourself in your customers’ shoes and understand your business from their point of view. Based on this rationale, you can’t deny the importance of a customer journey map. Thus, we’ve created the following steps for crafting the best map to help your company website improve.

1. Set clear objectives

Before you can dive into creating your map, you need to ask yourself why you are making one in the first place. What goals are you directing this map towards? Who is it specifically about? What experience is it based upon? You can start by writing down the objectives on sticky notes or use a customer journey template. A customer experience map will help you narrow down one specific interaction with your business. You can have individual customer experience maps for each of the following scenarios of your business:
  • Reading your blog or exploring your website
  • Interacting with a customer support agent
  • Visiting your store or your ecommerce site
  • Using your product at home or work
  • Interacting with sales during the process of becoming a customer

2. Profile your personas and define their goals

Next, you should conduct research. Some great ways to get valuable customer feedback is through questionnaires and user testing. The important thing is to only reach out to actual customers or prospects. You want the feedback of people who are interested in purchasing your products and services and who have interacted with your company before or plan to do so. TIP: It’s best to pick your most common customer persona and consider the route they would typically take while engaging with your business for the first time. You can use a marketing dashboard to compare each one and determine which would be the best fit for your journey map. Don’t worry about the ones you leave out, as you can always go back and create a new map that’s specific to these customer types.

3. Monitor how your customers move on your site

It’s important to understand how users move through your website. For example, if you’re offering a discount code to all first-time visitors, then why is the sales low? The offer (or, ability) might be great, but consumers still lack the motivation to buy. In this case, it doesn’t matter how much products are discounted. This common scenario can be uncovered with the Behavior Flow report from Google Analytics. Make sure to examine different segments of users, whether it’s first-time visitors, returning visitors, purchasers, or create a custom segment for visitors with long session durations but no purchases: Google Analytics: Behavior Flow Look for trends, like specific drop-off points were so many users are leaving your site without converting. What page do most first-time visitors view after landing on your homepage?

4. List out all the touchpoints

Touchpoints are all the places on your website that your customers can interact with you. Based on your research on Google Analytics or basic research on your CMS dashboard, you should list out all the touchpoints your customers and prospects are currently using, as well as the ones you believe they should be used if there is no overlap. Apart from Analytics on your website, you need to determine how your customer might come across you online. These might include:
  • Social channels
  • Paid ads
  • Email marketing
  • Third-party review sites or mentions
This is an important step in creating a customer journey map because it gives you insight into what actions your customers are performing. If the number is more than expected, it is likely that your website navigation is complicated. However, if they are using fewer touchpoints than expected, this may imply that they are not convinced with your offerings and may leave the website early.

5. Map the pain points

Go back over the map and jot down pain points on sticky notes. Place them underneath the corresponding touchpoints on the journey. For added value, talk about the impact of each pain point. Is it trivial, or is it likely to necessitate some kind of hack or workaround? Even worse: does it cause the user to bounce off the website and leave their journey entirely? Get to know what roadblocks are stopping your customer from making their desired action.

6. Improvement Ideas

Start by prioritizing which touchpoints or pages to address first. You can rank pages by cost-effectiveness and or how easy they are to change. Improvement ideas are usually integrations, services, or features that we can enable. Then, it’s a matter of determining what to test. For instance, if research suggests that customers worry about getting locked into a particular plan after they sign up, tweaking your copy on a relevant page could minimize their hesitations.

Conclusion:

Once you have a better understanding of the customer journey, you can use that knowledge to improve your site by honing your messaging to match customer needs, smoothing out frustration points, eliminating extra steps, and even creating content. This will ensure your website is providing a seamless and effective interaction for customers, which leads to a better user experience. The companies need to anticipate the routes their customers may take, and optimize their customer experience along the multiple touchpoints rather than relying on one assumed journey. About Galaxy Weblinks We specialize in delivering end-to-end software design & development services. Our digital product designers are creative problem-solvers with a decade of experience in all facets of digital and interactive design. We create compelling and human-focused experiences delivered through clean, and minimalist UI.

A lowdown of PHP 8.0 update

Posted on by galaxy-admin
The latest major update in PHP 8 has been made available to the public. It’s a typical three-year cycle version upgrade of PHP. Comes with a few radical alterations, so there’s a high chance you’ll need to make a few changes in code before upgrading. Some of the major features and optimizations introduced in this update are named arguments, union types, attributes, constructor property promotion, match expression, nullsafe operator, JIT, and improvements in the type system, error handling, and consistency. Here’s a lowdown of the official update announcement:

PHP 8 Named arguments

// PHP 7 htmlspecialchars($string, ENT_COMPAT | ENT_HTML401, ‘UTF-8’, false); // PHP 8 // Specify only required parameters, skipping optional ones. // Arguments are order-independent and self-documented. htmlspecialchars($string, double_encode: false);

PHP 8 Attributes

Instead of PHPDoc annotations, you can now use structured metadata with PHP’s native syntax. // PHP 7 class PostsController { /** * @Route(“/api/posts/{id}”, methods={“GET”}) */ public function get($id) { /* … */ } } // PHP 8 class PostsController { #[Route(“/api/posts/{id}”, methods: [“GET”])] public function get($id) { /* … */ } }

PHP 8 Constructor property promotion

Less boilerplate code to define and initialize properties. // PHP 7 class Point { public float $x; public float $y; public float $z; public function __construct( float $x = 0.0, float $y = 0.0, float $z = 0.0, ) { $this->x = $x; $this->y = $y; $this->z = $z; } } // PHP 8 class Point { public function __construct( public float $x = 0.0, public float $y = 0.0, public float $z = 0.0, ) {} }

PHP 8 Union types

Instead of PHPDoc annotations for a combination of types, you can use native union type declarations that are validated at runtime. // PHP 7 class Number { /** @var int|float */ private $number; /** * @param float|int $number */ public function __construct($number) { $this->number = $number; } } new Number(‘NaN’); // Ok // PHP 8 class Number { public function __construct( private int|float $number ) {} } new Number(‘NaN’); // TypeError

PHP 8 Nullsafe operator

In the latest version you can use a chain of calls with the new nullsafe operator instead if null check conditions. In case of chain failure, the execution of the entire chain aborts, and the entire chain evaluates to null. // PHP 7 $country =  null; if ($session !== null) { $user = $session->user; if ($user !== null) { $address = $user->getAddress(); if ($address !== null) { $country = $address->country; } } } // PHP 8 $country = $session?->user?->getAddress()?->country;

PHP 8 Match expression

The new match is similar to switch and has the following features: Match is an expression, meaning its result can be stored in a variable or returned. Match branches only support single-line expressions and do not need a break; statement. Match does strict comparisons. // PHP 7 switch (8.0) { case ‘8.0’: $result = “Oh no!”; break; case 8.0: $result = “This is what I expected”; break; } echo $result; //> Oh no! // PHP 8 echo match (8.0) { ‘8.0’ => “Oh no!”, 8.0 => “This is what I expected”, }; //> This is what I expected Since the update has breaking changes, it’s advisable to have experts help you with the migration to avoid any unexpected downtime. We have a team of experts that’s well versed in PHP. Get in touch with us here if you’re looking for a quick and hassle-free upgrade.

Test-Driven Development (TDD): How to choose the Right Team To Drive TDD (Part 2)

Posted on by galaxy-admin
This is the second in a series of blog posts in which we outline the roadmap to TDD for your organization and how to choose the right experts for your projects. Find Part 1 here. TDD works in very small increments of coding a test, writing the program code, and improving the code. This results in many (in fact hundreds) of automated small tests that need to be executed. This is not easy, especially when it comes to legacy code, proper unit test isolation, and other integration tests. To ensure that the people you are going to bring on board have mastered that, you have to understand the factors to consider while collaborating with them. Below are the important aspects that you should not ignore while hiring dedicated testers and QA team for projects based on the TDD process:

Skills Needed

Technical and Analytical Skills of Business Analysts:
  • Ability to analyze a set of techniques and tasks to be used to work as a liaison among stakeholders and recommend solutions that enable the organization to achieve its goals.
  • Collecting requirements and analyzing how they’ll work as a product. And what will be the future problems they may face. According to that unit tests are defined and the acceptance criteria are defined for further development.
Technical Skills of Testers/Developers:
  • Writing a unit test before writing the code and able to write code sufficiently to make a failing test pass.
  • Expertise in “test-driven bug fixing”, i.e. when a defect is found, writes a test exposing the defect before correction.
  • Knows and can name several tactics to guide the writing of tests (for instance “when testing a recursive algorithm, first write a test for the recursion terminating case”).
  • Able to factor out reusable elements from existing unit tests, through using situation-specific testing tools.
  • Creating a “roadmap” of planned unit tests for macroscopic features (and revising it as necessary).
  • Ability to “test drive” a variety of design paradigms: event-driven, functional, and object-oriented; Also the technical domains like persistent data access, user interfaces, and computation.
Soft skills of QA manager:
  • Communicate properly with non-technical as well as technical people, especially explaining the technical challenges to the management team.
  • Understand the client provided specs and visualize a real-time business situation. He/She must also be ready for a knowledge-sharing session with either his/her team or higher management every time the situation arises.
  • Must also have a strong programming base to keep up with their team w.r.t. understanding what the client needs.

How To Pick the Right Team?

Evaluate your company’s methodology: If you’re a startup or an established firm looking for an overhaul in methodologies, then it’s important to determine what type of team you prefer that can successfully collaborate with your company. Check out websites and portfolios: A company’s website is the face you can judge it by. If the website works smoothly and the interface and user experience are user-centric, it means the company pays a great deal of attention to details. Assess the testing experience of the team: It is important to find out what types of testing a team can provide in general; what approach the team applies in each particular case, and understand what tests the team has performed on specific projects. Find out the industry focus of tested products: The quality assurance and testing team you hire needs to be experienced in testing apps or websites similar to yours. Compare the size/complexity of the company’s projects with yours: The size/complexity of the project also matters a lot. If a QA team has worked only on simple projects, it may not be ready to step up on a large and more complex project and test it comprehensively.

Asking The Right Questions 

In-depth questions will help you learn how they create and maintain quality assurance procedures, as well as filter out what meets your requirements. Here are some examples of questions you should ask: – What will TDD give us that we can’t get by building tests later? This question will help determine how well they understand and practice the benefits of TDD as mentioned above in the benefits section. – What quality assurance and testing process do you use and why? Gauge their understanding of QA processes and whether they have experience establishing these processes. This will also include the type of model they use to design the test plan. – What are the best practices, automation toolkits, and testing methodologies the team employs? This will enable you to understand the general testing approaches the team uses. Whether the team knows how to do automation testing, how they use automation testing, and with what tools they conduct it. – Do you use TDD for accessibility concerns as well? Since accessible features are getting a lot of attention, you can ask about their plans and involvement of accessibility concerns in your project. The concerns such as “does the correct ARIA hints are used for components?” and “is the correct semantic markup being used?” can be easily unit tested. -How will you evaluate that testing was successful? At this stage, specific expectations of testing may be revealed. Often, expectations don’t match that can be usually obtained through testing. In this case, it’s important to explain what exactly is impossible to do and why. -What will be the format for bug reports and testing results? This will help you agree on a specific format of bug reporting and testing results to ensure that you have all the information you need.

Conclusion

Collaboratively discuss the complete project with the team and clear all the queries that you may have in your mind. Remember to be transparent, honest, and open about everything. Define your budget prior. Use the opportunity to build a personal connection with the offshore development agency. This rapport will decide to work with you in a better manner. Not only the Quality Assurance team, but you can also hire highly skilled developers, designers, testers, and digital product development experts. We follow agile methodologies like TDD to build robust custom applications for our clients. Contact us to know more about the development process and how we can help you to build and launch your application. About Galaxy Weblinks We specialize in delivering end-to-end software design & development services and have hands-on experience with automation testing in agile development environments. Our engineers, QA analysts, and developers help improve security, reliability, and features to make sure your business application and IT structure scale and remain secure.

Test-Driven Development (TDD): How to choose the Right Team To Drive TDD (Part 1)

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This is the first in a series of blog posts in which we outline the benefits of TDD for your organization and what are the projects to consider while adopting this agile process. Link of Part Two. Test-Driven Development essentially lets the testing process drive the development and design of your application. This incorporates acceptance tests, functional tests, and unit tests. It leads you to create very different kinds of tests that tend to be more resilient to change in the future because you’re verifying behaviors rather than testing pieces of code. If you are asking why TDD, we will just say that “it’s the easiest way to get both good test coverage and good quality code, which leads to 40%-80% fewer bugs in production”. Wouldn’t it be better to write the code in a manner where a bug can be spotted immediately and not after the production stage? If this sounds good to you, let’s go to the next step. How do you successfully roll out TDD in your organization with the right team? We’ll explore this here, as well as share some important insights on TDD.

What Are The Expected Benefits of TDD?

Better designed, extensible, and cleaner code: It helps to understand how the code will interact with other modules and will be used. It results in more maintainable code and better design decisions. It helps in writing smaller code having single responsibility rather than monolithic procedures with multiple responsibilities. This makes the code simpler to understand. Reduced Scrap work and Time to Repair: TDD allows problems to be detected as early as possible, which has the effect of reducing the number of bugs. De facto, the technical debt is better controlled with a reusable, maintainable, and flexible code that allows the addition of new functionalities and reduces time to repair. Eliminates fear of change: Developers get quick alerts when a code change introduces a bug, and TDD’s tight feedback loop quickly notifies them when it’s fixed. Better code coverage: It provides better code coverage than writing tests after the fact. Because we create code to make a specific test pass, code coverage will be close to 100%. Faster developer feedback loop: Without TDD, developers are supposed to manually test each change to make sure that it works. With TDD, unit tests can run on-change automatically, allowing faster-debugging sessions and feedback during development.

Common Pitfalls of TDD

Time-Intensive: While TDD generally results in higher-quality code, it is often a time-consuming process. But at the same time creating and maintaining a test suite, in addition to the software itself, is a significant investment. Many teams have seen significant reductions in defect rates, at the cost of a moderate increase in the initial development effort. Increased Overhead: The TDD process involves a great deal of overhead in the form of unit tests. Poor choices of testing, design, or architecture strategy at the early stage can be difficult to recover later in the project. Hence, it becomes difficult or impossible to make changes in the codebase without making dozens or hundreds of existing tests fail. Whereas, businesses that prefer to invest time in manual QA, or the ones that lack the technical resources to implement unit tests, are not the ideal candidates for TDD.

Choosing projects for TDD

Existing Project (Legacy code) And New Projects A common TDD implementation problem rears its ugly head when an organization has inherited a system that wasn’t built with testability in mind. In such scenarios, questions arise like — Should the code be refactored? If so, how much refactoring is important to start practicing TDD in an achievable, and meaningful way? So, if the legacy code is already out there and working, the risk associated with the technical debt is low relative to the risk of new untested work. By applying TDD to the new code you’re writing, i.e., making changes in the existing code, you minimize the risk as well as don’t increase the technical debt.

Microservices

Microservice-based architectures have far more complexities and dependencies than traditional application stacks. Creating tests for microservices-based applications and other complex architectures can be difficult due to the requirement for advanced stubbing and mocking. A microservice-based architecture, however, presents the opportunity to leverage TDD best practices in a very efficient way. The TDD pragmatist approach becomes very useful when you think about treating the microservice as the unit, rather than the compilation unit.

Who should use it?

Most organizations simply do not have enough developers or time to cover all of their use-cases. This is especially true for enterprises that have a mix of skills and roles contributing to their projects. Leveraging TDD helps address the issue of limited technical resources by defining tests against the contract. With this approach, stakeholders, business analysts, testers, and other non-developer resources together can contribute to the TDD testing efforts since the Requirement Gathering phase.

Conclusion:

TDD is a process that helps you start development projects with a healthy base of tests to ensure software quality throughout the development lifecycle. It helps you to produce maintainable, testable, and efficient code. But real-world conditions do not always make TDD adoption easy. It depends totally on your product requirement and can be made easier with the kind of team you have onboard. Contact us to know more about the development process and how we can help you to build and launch your application. In Part Two, we enumerated the skills and factors to consider while picking the best team. And we highlighted the right questions to ask the team to ensure how your requirements will be met w.r.t. the project.  About Galaxy Weblinks We specialize in delivering end-to-end software design & development services and have hands-on experience with automation testing in agile development environments. Our engineers, QA analysts, and developers help improve security, reliability, and features to make sure your business application and IT structure scale and remain secure.

Galaxy Weblinks Proud to be Named a Top Development Partner in Massachusetts by Clutch!

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Here at Galaxy Weblinks, we realize it can be tough to balance high impact app development while also staying afloat in a weak global economy. That’s why we’re here to help! We’re a web and mobile app development firm that’s been in the game for over two decades. With over 1000 projects under our belt, we have the technical expertise and know how to help your business achieve its goals. All of our clients appreciate our dedicated project management style and how we communicate effectively in all of our projects. Whether you need Android, iOS, or Hybrid app development, we’ve got your back!

In light of our accomplishments, we’ve been considered one of the top companies for app development in Massachusetts by Clutch, a B2B market research authority. They employ a one of a kind ranking formula to compare leaders in the business services sector. Clutch’s work helps interested buyers find and partner with the vendor of their dreams!

We couldn’t have earned this award without our wonderful clients! They took time out of their day to engage with the Clutch team to assess our performance. We were evaluated on the basis of quality, attention to deadlines, fairness of cost, and overall ability to drive results. We’re happy to report, we’ve earned a lovely 4.8 out of five stars on Clutch! Take a look at our most recent review below:

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“We are thrilled to be listed in top 15 companies in Massachusetts for web and mobile development by Clutch”  Varun Bihani, partner Galaxy Weblinks.

We’re over the moon to be recognized for our accomplishments! Thank you to our clients and to the Clutch team for making this award a reality. Drop us a line today if you’re interested in learning more about how Galaxy Weblinks can help your business thrive!