Why Cost-Cutting fails as a strategy?

There is constant pressure on businesses to improve margins through cost-cutting. Most of them find opportunities by identifying areas that can receive a 10% trim or even a 100% trim.

Cost-cutting continues to be a standard business practice. In fact, more companies could soon engage in cost-cutting with talk of recession in the air. People, processes, and systems are examined and restructured to reduce costs and increase customer satisfaction that often leads to increased sales and heightened profitability.

But an improper and chronic cost-cutting holds the power to create opportunities for new brands to out-premium the premium brands.

Cost-cutting programs in software development are as prevalent as other industry domain. But inappropriate cost-cutting can have an adverse effect on software quality…

The cost… 9-digit failures and defects

Last year, Boeing 737 Max crash killed 157 people aboard immediately after takeoff. It was due to a computing system failure of its life-critical system. Boeing’s over emphasis on cost-savings made them outsource engineering to cheap contractors to try to increase production bandwidth. The consequent software failure cost them $6 billion dollars overnight.

Software failures and nonperformance is expensive. According to a survey report by Tricentis, software failures caused around $1.7 trillion of financial losses to 314 companies. Whereas, software bugs were the most common reason behind these failures.

The failure of cost programs in software development can be linked to multiple factors, including: challenges in implementing the initiative, poor design, and tracking, etc. Let’s have a look at few takeaways from software failures due to improper cost-cutting.

Why cost-cutting initiatives fail?

Broken street lamps

Valuing cheap over quality:

Fostering an engineering culture where management values cheap and fast over quality software and continuous progress will have a tremendously negative impact on both the timely delivery and quality of your software – as buggy software takes longer to build.

Wrong outsourcing:

Companies often tend to partner with outsourcing vendors quoting lower than the proposal. And eventually realize that the low software development rates don’t necessarily mean best price-quality ratio. It is important to pay attention to the organization’s reliability and their understanding of basic market research.

Cutting R&D expenses:

Without spurring cutting-edge R&D, companies leave loopholes in evaluating product and respective improvements. Such improvements are cost-effective that are needed to be implemented during the development phase.

Underestimating testing:

Testing is basically done to make sure that the software runs without bugs. But, if testing is done when the code is in production or prior to the complete development, debugging becomes more expensive.

Breaking down cost-cutting in stages

Man climbing coconut tree

Why cost-cutting programs of many companies end up making short-term financial gains at the expense of long-term business performance and health? Let’s divide cost-cutting into 3 stages providing a perspective to that question.

  • Stage 1: At initial stage, cost-cutting harvests the low hanging fruit and is well worth doing.
  • Stage 2: And when there is no more low hanging fruit left to harvest, it takes a lot more work to make cost savings materialize, and the return from that work decreases.
  • Stage 3: Eventually a cost-cutting strategy runs out of costs to cut and the effects of unwise cost-cutting starts to damage the business.

When fast is slow and cheap is expensive

Two neighbourhoods poor and rich

We are used to trade-off time, quality, and cost. This is where the businesses face challenges when asked to pick any two. The cost-price-time triangle suggests that it is not possible to optimise all three. As, all three properties of the project are interrelated – one will always suffer. In other words you have three options:

  • Design something cheaply and with high quality, but it will take a long time
  • Design something cheaply and quickly, but it will not be of high quality
  • Design something to a high standard and quickly, but then it will not be cheap

People involved in a software development process are typically motivated with different goals. Some are motivated to publish software quickly whereas some want to be sure that a solid and mostly error-free product is being introduced to the market. Cost-cutting plans are based on such motivations taken on priority.

There is a thin line between good and catastrophic cost cutting. A proper plan of gradual cost cutting can save and even make you money but a cost-cutting initiative that focuses only on immediate benefits, is doomed to fail. Because haste makes waste.

Forging Automation Testing Framework for an E-Commerce mobile platform

The client was looking for help to test critical functionalities of its mobile application for which they found a solution in Galaxy’s automation testing.

Our client is a trusted peer-to-peer rental marketplace for buying, selling, and renting almost anything. Our client’s dream is to offer a platform where all goods from cufflinks to computers can be borrowed within minutes. Why? Because we all own something that could be of value to someone else.

And with so many users constantly engaging with their mobile app daily, they needed to be certain that the UI runs smoothly on every device and platform without frustrating the users – which could be achieved through a comprehensive well-written automation testing.

Challenge

The client follows agile methodology in its software development process. This allows them to detect bugs earlier in the cycle, which results in speedy bug fixes. While testing early in the software development life cycle, there are certain tests that need to be repeated.

Such cases, when handled manually, were taking a lot of time and effort. Here, they felt the need to implement test automation that can overcome various challenges and help them improve the quality of the product in less time.

The main challenge for our client was to test major functionalities of their app on Android device. The goal was to complete test execution in a less amount of time. Due to the complexity of the application, it was difficult for them to zero in on the best automation framework for their app. They wanted to adopt an automated testing environment to ensure a highly reliable and secure system, and reduce the cost of future changes to their system. Seeking to adopt an efficient automated testing environment and reduce testing time, the client turned to Galaxy.

Solution

Our client came to us with the aim to develop a scaffolding that is laid to provide an execution environment for the automation test scripts. A framework that could increase test speed and efficiency, improve test accuracy, and minimize test maintenance costs while eliminating the scope for human error.

We needed to automate test cases for user portal of their core application. And for that we decided to solve their mobile test automation challenges and build the automation framework from scratch using open-source frameworks for their hybrid App.

Our testing team identified automation objectives and goals. This is determined through consultation between our client’s testing & development team and our testers. We then identified the test cases for automation based on different test case categories like difficulty to be tested manually, chances of human error, repetition, and data required for testing.

Login Test Scenarios:

  • Verify if a user will be able to login with a valid username and valid password.
  • Verify if the ‘Enter’ key of the keyboard is working correctly on the login page.
  • Verify homepage after login

Renting Flow Test Scenarios:

  • To click Search icon from the homepage and start searching for the product.
  • When user starts typing words in text box, it should suggest words that matches typed keyword.
  • To select date from date-picker/calendar for starting to end date of renting.
  • To validate that the application supports payment gateway transaction as required by the application.
  • Ensure that user can access the Checkout Page after adding a product to the cart.
  • To check the logout session and whether the link or button for logout accessible for all users.
  • To validate the rest of the test cases like scrolling, navigation, double taps, etc.

Having covered all the crucial scenarios and cases to ensure a smooth user experience, it was time to see how the tests pan out.

Testing the functionality

The client needed a team who can collaborate with them having the knowledge of web testing techniques and the e-commerce domain. We undergo discussion over special considerations of various aspects of project understanding such as business goals, current state of automation, and future roadmap.

To further ensure that the app was performing as expected, we did functional and smoke testing on major features, themes, and structure of the application i.e. from login to logout.

We created a testing framework using Java, Appium, Selenium, TestNG, and Maven. Such approach to select multiple open source tools and combine them with a custom framework helped us leverage a number of benefits:

  • To reduce the time to create and maintain scripts.
  • We used data-driven automated testing to separate test procedures from test data, allowing to cover more scenarios with a minimum amount of effort.
  • We used POM concept, and developed special features that could be reused by all scripts, such as to create automated reports with screenshots for failed case/step, common methods for AppiumDriver (click, wait, etc.).

Integrating testing in development cycle

We integrated the script with Jenkins in the client’s environment in windows machine using the batch command. We configured Jenkins in such a way that smoke tests were first executed for sign in, flow of renting a product (on the same day), verify homepage, and verify rental page. And after the successful completion, functional tests were executed for verifying a renting a product on different days.

Results

Our testing team worked with the client and successfully crafted a testing and development plan tailored to their release cycle and pace of customer demands. We helped the client automate the system installation, smoke testing, functional testing, and system deployment process as well.

How we helped the client to get the best out of their automation testing:

  • Selected test tools that leverage the best-of-breed approaches.
  • Completed test execution in a less amount of time.
  • Updated tests in accordance with changes in the UI and function of the application.
  • Ensured verification of test results generated by automation testing.
  • Ensured timely submission of test results to the client.
  • Ensured that the user’s search experience in the site is of the highest quality.

With effective automation testing, our client managed to reduce time-to-market and launched a bug-free product. In addition, integrating continuous testing in the CI/CD process helped shorten mobile app release cycle and ensured high customer satisfaction. And as we took care of repetitive tasks with less number of resources on-board, we thereby helped in maximizing Return on Investment for our client.

Retainer Pricing Model: A double-edged sword for agencies

According to a study done by pricing experts at McKinsey and Company, 1% price improvement results in an 11.1% increase in profits. This can make a big difference for growing and small firms looking to invest in new team members and additional resources.

Similarly, for digital agencies, there is a great way to create recurring income, and having their fee and salary paid all or mostly upfront in the form of a client retainer pricing model.

As you know how much money is going to come in!

But, in the past five years, clients have been asking to move their agency remuneration from retainers to other pricing models.

Let’s dive into the trend of client’s changing requirements that is subsequently making it a bad choice for agencies.

Retainers are safe but limiting

A Running Cheetah

The first thing to realize is that most agencies love a retainer. But the retainer often acts as a double-edged sword for the agency.

On one side, the retainer is directly linked to the cost-recovery of the single biggest expense — human resources, as it is guaranteed cash flow. But on the other side, it forces you to reserve a set amount of time for each of your clients, leaving you with uncertainties a client can bring.

And what if there’s a project delay with the client or delay in reviewing your work or a late signing off? You end up turning new clients away because you may or may not have the time to commit to them.

A perfect market with many options

A lit up market after the sunset

Clients are finding themselves not working with one Agency of Record (AoR) but at its most basic, two, with media separated from the creative agency. Then they add on a B2B specialist, brand activation agency, digital specialist, and perhaps PR, then suddenly there is a roster of 6 to 8 core agencies or marketing suppliers.

In other words, more competition and a lot of other options present in the market make clients prefer different agencies for different services, as they find it’s ineffective and pricey to pay retainers for each one.

Change in business strategies

Picture of an audio mixer

Clients are increasingly finding themselves having to react to their competitors and the market due to downward pressure on prices. This makes them to adopt changes in business strategy not on an annual basis but on a weekly basis making it difficult to commit to an annual retainer.

Cost reductions are usually a sign that their budgets don’t go as far, hence the reluctance to throw money into a retainer.

Incomplete scope of work

Picture of an unfinished car

A client’s overall budget plays the biggest role in deciding retainer prices. In addition, just like selling a course on Udemy — you need to learn about how many hours you plan to devote to the client as well as the anticipated scope of services you perform.

You cannot be sure about how much work is coming your way. Sometimes, it might be sufficient, sometimes less or sometimes more. This needs a plan that is better for all your hours to be used up so that your resources are utilized well.

Agencies for which retainers work best

  • Agencies who work quickly and can produce a large volume of work each month
  • Agencies having big clients with bigger budgets
  • Agencies with established relationships with their clients (long-term clients are easier to transition into a retainer model)

Ultimately, to choose the best pricing model comes down to what you value most. For those who are driven more by the overall results, they will be attracted to a fixed retainer. Those who like to know the exact amount of time they are paying for, an hourly billing is a way to go.

Gutenberg vs Page builders | Settling an year long debate

The appeal of WordPress is simplicity. The debate on Gutenberg and Page builders is much more than functionalities. It’s more about ease of use.

In the world of page builders, Gutenberg emerged as a complete paradigm shift for the users. The battle goes on whether the page builders will be replaced by Gutenberg and lose their influence? Or is Gutenberg alienating most of the current user base because of its workflow?

In this blog, we are going to compare WordPress page builder plugins with Gutenberg to help you select an ideal choice that suits your WordPress website requirement.

Live visual editing

If you want to figure out how things would appear without saving the page – through an actual live preview of a page as you edit it – then here is a big turn up you will find in the differences.

Page builder offers the level of visual editing that Gutenberg doesn’t. A page builder lets you design the entire page in a WYSIWYG interface. You can save the preview time by making direct changes in the layout and style of the web page.

Styles and themes compatibility

Page builders provide more style options in comparison to Gutenberg editor. Elementor and Divi Builders are among the perfect examples for it.

For a button, Page builder offers a lot of customizations like color, border radius, animations, filters etc. But Guntenberg will only have few choices in its bag like shape, background color, and text color.

Gutenberg relies on WordPress for themes and styles. With custom CSS, you can customize your blocks but the overall look of the page will be the same as your theme. On the other hand, Page builder lets you override themes and styles. Thus help in creating a unique experience for standalone landing pages.

Responsive design controls

Gutenberg does not have a responsive design control. But plugin like Kadence blocks adds custom blocks to extend Gutenberg’s editing capabilities. You will be able to better control columns for different screen sizes and will be responsive according to your theme.

But you can’t change how that responsive design will work in Gutenberg.

Whereas page builders provide responsive design control for each element. Therefore, if you want to have full control on the design, you must prefer page builders as an ideal option.

Layout functionality

You can’t customize margins and paddings for individual blocks in WordPress’ new default editor. It gives some basic options for alignment such as left, right, and centre. On the other hand, a page builder gives you the option to edit every single entity on the screen like margins and paddings.

Gutenberg has some third party extensions to let you use drag and drop options to adjust different layouts for different devices. One of the most popular extensions is Kadence blocks. It adds detailed layouts in a web page. But Gutenberg’s default column block is limited and cannot be compared to page builders.

It’s for this reason, you will always require a page builder to get full layout control.

Scope

Gutenberg comes with limited actions. Ease of use is the main goal of Gutenberg. It is intended to be used by writers, bloggers, and businesses.
Whereas, Page builders work well for people who rely on customizations for their development needs.

Page builders are commonly used by eCommerce stores, WordPress agencies, aspiring designers, small businesses, among others.

Takeaways

  • Gutenberg is for people who put reliability and ease-of-use over a buffet of customizations.
  • You can prefer Page builder when you have specific vision for site’s design. You can create unique designs according to your needs and preferences.
  • You can use Page builders when you want to add some specific features that are not present in Block editor. Some of these features include media carousels and subscription forms.
  • People who are used to the freedom of customizations in page builders will find the simplicity of gutenberg quite limiting.

Currently, Gutenberg is not powerful enough to replace highly flexible page builder plugins. It’s just a modern version of the classic editor. But there’s a good news Gutenberg enthusiasts…

Integrating page builder plugins within Gutenberg has the potential to bring out the best of both worlds. Maybe WordPress is heading that way only with custom fields integration.

As a result, you’ll be able to use different modules as separate blocks in Gutenberg editor itself. It would help you to create rich and more flexible web experience. At the same time a future with a win-win situation for all.

Making web more inclusive with Manual Accessibility Testing

People don’t want to miss out on the digital era. And accessibility testing is how we make sure that smart devices and computers are accessible for everyone, regardless of ability or age.

Manual testing is the oldest form of testing in which testing is done via empathy, knowledge, and experience. While automated tests are done on the basis of a set pattern written in code.

Manual accessibility testing is an amalgamation of web browser plugins, assistive computer technologies, and keyboard-only interactions which help testers determine the usability of software, applications, websites or pages.

Why manual accessibility testing is important?

People with laptops and books in front of a desk

Manual accessibility testing is very effective, as it is capable of detecting issues and defects that cannot be traced programmatically. An automation test requires coding, which is time-consuming while testing a number of small changes. Whereas you could test the same functionalities or changes manually on the fly.

Manual testing is mainly needed for keyboard-only commands, compatibility with various assistive technologies, and coordination with color-adjustment plugins for web browsers & software.

Here are the three ‘Must Do’s’ of manual testing:

Screen reader compatibility

Assistive technologies such as screen-readers (Talkback,VoiceOver, JAWS, NVDA, etc.) help people with vision impairments to understand and use the web better by reading what appears on the application.

There are certain assistive situations which are difficult to replicate in an automated setting like- understanding the context of alternative text, determining where links lead, or navigating menus. This is where manual testing is useful to determine how readable your content is for various assistive technologies.

Keyboard only navigation

It’s the most basic and the easiest way of testing accessibility manually. It is done by pressing ‘tab’ key of the keyboard. Ideally, each link will get focused on every ‘tab’ press and thus the user will be able to navigate through the application. Manual accessibility testing helps you determine if your site is optimized for keyboard-only functionality such as accessing all menu, moving between sections of a page and more.

Double-checking the colors

Most of the automated scans and browser plugins are not that accurate with contrast ratio of images related to background images. Manual testing helps in spot check for color contrast, particularly on text overlaid or embedded in images. Manually testing each area of your website against established standards help make sure your content is understandable to a broader range of users.

Who performs manual accessibility testing?

Testing experts and users are two important tester groups for manual accessibility testing. It’s only after getting the web page or application tested by the experts and users that the process of testing is termed successful. The experts test the technical aspects and basic code of the software, whereas users help validate the effectiveness and quality of the accessibility testing.

Testing experts

In manual testing, the software testers execute the test cases and generate test reports without the help of any automation software testing tools. In this process, the tester checks all the essential features of the given software or application.

Group of Users

User testing is mainly performed with the help of assistive technologies (as they check the software from the end users point of view), wherein the users check various features of the web page or software that offer accessibility to every person and not only with disabilities.

Cases where manual accessibility tests are a must

Here are the scenarios when you should go for manual accessibility tests:

Usability Testing

Here, human observation is the most important factor, so a manual approach is preferable. In this type of testing you need to measure how convenient, efficient, or user-friendly the product or software is for the end users.

Exploratory Testing

We need the human curiosity to execute the testing process in this scenario. This is an area in which you require the tester’s creativity, logical/analytical skills, experience, and knowledge. The test is characterized here by a short time for execution and/or a poorly written specification documentation.

Ad-hoc Testing

It is a totally unplanned method of testing where the insight and understanding of the tester is the only important factor. In this type of testing, there is no specific approach.

Manual accessibility testing is more preferable in small projects, when the testing phase runs for a short period of time, because:

  • Running simultaneous multiple test cases aren’t that necessary
  • Maintenance and installation is time consuming and costly
  • Lack of time to get the resources trained in the tools and start testing

In addition to first impressions, when we talk about the functionality, there’s no replacement for manual testing. It goes beyond fail/pass as manual accessibility testing also ensures less time taken between a customer issue and a fix. In fact, there will always be a place for manual testing in ensuring accessibility of an application or a web page, no matter how much automated testing evolves.

Achieving quality output well within your budget and timeline can be difficult for you. We can help you find the best approach based on your testing situation to reach your goal.

What are Design Systems and why do we vouch for one?

Design System is one of the most excessively used design terms in the software industry right now, so much so that it has given birth to a parody Twitter account that calls people out on their overuse of the concept as a mere keyword.

There is a lot of uncertainty about its definition, different professionals have different definition of Design Systems. But here’s one that will put your mind to ease.

A Design System is a set of deliverables(not a deliverable itself) that acts as a single source of truth for design and development teams to realize a product. It evolves constantly with the product, tools, and new technologies.

What a Design System isn’t

Going with the wind a lot of companies tend to claim that they have a Design System in place. But in reality, they’re just pointing towards their Sketch libraries and style guides.

You can’t call libraries or style guides Design Systems for the same reasons you can’t call individual notes of music, a song.

You can’t make a functional software with just some static designs and patterns, just as you can’t make a song with a music sheet filled with notes and melodies, you’d also need instruments and singers to conduct a piece of music.

How to find the right one?

Design Systems can be simple, comprehensive, strict, loose, mono or cross-platform. Based on the scale of projects or operations, you can define what kind of Design System you need. Because it’s always easier to find things when you know what you’re looking for.

Start by asking the right questions:

  • Number of people that’ll use the system?
  • What are their profiles?
  • Are they willing and able to adapt?
  • How many products, platforms, and technologies?
  • Degree of consistency across them

Based on the scope there are two types of Design system. You can either go for a Modular Design System or an Integrated one.

Modular

Module based Design Systems are good for large scale projects like e-commerce, finance and government websites. It’ll enable you to scale quickly and adapt to multiple user needs. There is one downside to module based system though, it can be expensive to build and maintain.

Integrated

An integrated system focuses on one unique context. It’s also composed of parts, but these parts will not be interchangeable. This kind of system suits products that have very few repeating parts and that need a strong and often changing Art Direction (portfolios, showcases, marketing campaign).

Based on the process you can either build a Centralized or Distributed Design System.

Centralized

In a centralized model, one team is in charge of the System and makes it evolve. This team ensures that the System covers everyone’s needs.

Distributed

In a distributed model, several people of several teams are in charge of the system. The adoption of the system is quicker because everyone feels involved but it also needs team leaders that will keep an overall vision of it.

Regardless of the type of system you choose, a Design System consists of:

  • Interaction models
  • Typography
  • Page layouts
  • Components
  • Colour
  • Sounds
  • Tone and voice
  • Words, grammar, and mechanics
  • Spacing
  • Code snippets paired with elements

Why building a Design System can be transformational for your organization?

If you’re a big organization, it’s likely that you have multiple products and services that need to reflect a consistent brand identity. A Design System helps you do that with it’s efficient organization and one-click implementation across all the assets. A Design System has all the pieces engineered to fit together like a lego set, as and when needed. Which makes designing highly scalable, reliable, efficient, and robust.

Here are the benefits of a Design System

  • Productive and cost-effective. Reusable components lets the team be efficient and deliver faster, as they don’t waste time on repetitive tasks or useless meetings.
  • Brand continuity across all products or services. If a UI element which is a part of hundreds of screens is changed, it conveniently reflects in all the places it’s used.
  • Better collaboration and knowledge sharing. With every essential piece of information easily accessible in the system, onboarding new team members also becomes easier.
  • No need to code. Everything is in one place just ready to be picked out and used without having to code. Just copy the required snippet and implement the visual element of your choice.

An extensive design system alone won’t solve your problems. You’ll also need good designers to create a unique and reusable system and good developers to interpret it their own way.

Let us know if you’re on the lookout for something just like this. Pardon the Coldplay wordplay.

Galaxy Weblinks featured by Clutch in Top 1000 B2B firms 2019

Here at Galaxy Weblinks, we believe that top notch web development and mobile apps are required to fuel successful companies and amazing digital strategy. We recognized the potential of technology landscape back in 1998. Since then, we’ve been helping companies understand the totality of the technology landscape and implement solutions that fit their needs. With over 1000 projects and 200 clients under our belt, we’re confident in our abilities to help companies achieve their full technical potential.

In light of our success, we’ve been recognized as a top custom software development partner on The Clutch 1000. This is a list of the top B2B service providers around the globe, verified by Clutch, a ratings and reviews platform. Out of 160,000 vendors with profiles on the platform, we fall in the top, as #830. We’re one out of over 100 web development firms featured but only one out of 16 companies listed from Boston Massachusetts!

We’d like to dedicate this award to our wonderful customers for participating in client interviews on our behalf, to gauge our impact. They rated our services based on the product quality, attention to deadlines, and cost-effectiveness. In reflection of that data, we’ve been awarded a phenomenal 4.8 out of 5-stars! Please take a look at one of the recent reviews below:

Reviews

Receiving recognition from Clutch means a lot to our organization. We’re honored to be among their list of top B2B custom software development leaders. This award has established our credibility in the industry which demonstrates our commitment, and reflects the value we offer to our global customers.” Varun Bihani – CEO of Galaxy Weblinks Inc.

For those who might not know, Clutch is a market research firm that employs a unique rating formula to assess leaders. We’re also featured on The Manifest, a business data resource that lists metrics for a range of services and industries. Visual Objects, a portfolio content site, named us on their directory of top mobile app development as well.

Thank you once again to our customers and to the Clutch team for making this award possible! Please drop us a line today if you’d like to collaborate with us.

6 factors to consider before choosing your e-commerce platform

Setting up a shop online? Well it’s easier than setting one up made of bricks and mortar.

But it doesn’t mean that E-commerce is easy. The insane level of competition aside, your problems start even before you’ve begun to build your website. You start with zeroing in on an e-commerce platform for your business but the options are numerous and all seem to offer similar functionalities. It can be a bit confusing.

This is not a comprehensive list but we intend to simplify the selection for you. So here are some factors like pricing, payment gateways supported, security, etc. to help you select the right e-commerce platform.

1. How secure is the platform?

One of the first things that you should consider in your e-commerce platform is that the language it is based on. Because the platforms based on object-oriented programming language come with embedded security protocols and hence are considered safer.

Magento and Shopify pay extra attention to reduce the vulnerabilities of websites with two factor authentication. And for platforms which do not have multi factor authentication to protect sensitive information, security plugins can provide that extra layer of safety.

A platform is safe when-

  • An e-commerce platform should conduct security audits for sustaining websites.
  • It should safeguard sensitive data from breaches and attacks.
  • Also, to prevent any monetary frauds an e-commerce platform should be PCI and SSL certified.

2. If it is SEO friendly

39% of e-commerce traffic comes from direct searches. This is a good reason for you to take SEO considerations into account.

Popularity of a website depends on various factors with content playing a significant role in attracting the audience towards the site. To understand things better, ask questions like, does the e-commerce platform allow you to write meta-information about the product or is there Google site map support? These questions are important as they have a direct impact on SEO rankings of the site.

Onveos is a perfect choice if you are considering SEO as a selection factor because it provides independent fields for SEO elements. Other than this you can also go for Magento, Woocommerce, and OpenCart as they play a significant role in inbound marketing initiatives.

3. Responsiveness

A responsive web design helps in providing a great user-experience from a desktop to tablets and mobiles of various sizes and orientations.

Having a separate mobile and desktop site requires having different marketing campaigns, product information & banners, catalogues, etc. Platforms like Magento and WooCommerce have various responsive themes and templates to make websites vertically stacked.

Shopify even lets you edit HTML and CSS directly. You can change the colors, size, and positioning of any element on the page within the platform.

4. Multi-channel support

Always prefer a platform that lets you sell product or service across different channels like Instagram, FB Messenger, Amazon, and others. It increases the revenue percentage on whole.

The best multi-channel e-commerce platforms are Shopify, Big Commerce, PrestaShop, Magento, and Woo Commerce. As soon as you choose a platform, your next step should be towards understanding the audience. It will help you analyse what your end users are looking for and how do they buy things online.

Adding more channels will increase the task of managing and tracking inventory system. Centralised management of the data creates diversified selling options in online marketplaces. Multi-channel selling increases the revenue of e-commerce sites.

5. Plugins and integrations

Even though an e-commerce platform has all the things to run an online business, it still needs integrations and plugins to add crucial functionalities like Payment gateways, Tax calculators, Inventory management, etc.

You’ll find a popular bunch of essential plugins and integrations that are common to all the platforms. But your platform of choice should be the one that has an active community and supports plugins and integrations relevant to your business.

6. Last but not the least, compare the price

Price of an e-commerce platform depends on multiple factors like design, setup configuration, custom development, maintenance, and so on.

The per month cost of Shopify platform starts from $9 and goes till $299 whereas Volusion starts from $15 and goes upto $299. Shopify is a perfect choice if you are looking for multiple features and add ons in your app. You can select Volusion for a more selling-focused experience.

Big-commerce has the highest starting price of $29.5 followed by 3dcart at $29. Big commerce is one of the best platforms for SEO considerations. 3dCart is a feature rich platform that builds and manages online stores real well.

Before you zero in on any platform, match your website’s specific needs with the platform’s features and estimated cost. E-commerce platforms can also utilize AI, VR, Chatbots, and Blockchain to help your online business stay relevant.

We know how important is it for you to get things right as your business is in question. If you’ve any doubts related to e-commerce platforms and if you need assistance developing one then feel free talk to us here.

The right and the only way of outsourcing Software Testing and QA

When you’re looking to outsource, you probably spend a lot of the project’s time in finding that “right partner”.

What if we tell you that even after choosing the right partner the performance rate for software outsourcing remains below 50%. It means that companies who outsource without considering the risks and operation costs, only get half the efficiency out of their outsourcing efforts.

Companies are so quick to handoff their work to off-shore agencies that outsourcing becomes purely transactional. Maybe we can rethink of outsourcing as a holistic approach and start with evaluating our processes and current performance instead of diving straight into a partner hunt and handing off the work to them.

The key is to have an extensive plan so that the risks are low and success rates are high. The rule of 5 P’s sums it up really good-

Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance

With this guide you’ll be able to strategize for efficient outsourcing, choose the right vendor, optimize testing costs, and streamline your development process with QA.

Getting ready for outsourcing

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  • Define Objectives and Goals

Clearly defined objectives and measurable goals makes for a good basis of an outsourcing strategy. Objectives will help you with decisions concerning a project’s business value, vendor, outsourcing models, projects to outsource, and related risks to assume. Down the line objectives will also help you evaluate the success/failure of your strategy.

Whereas, Goals are the events and functional metrics by which management can monitor progress, take corrective action, and project future performance.

  • Measure Performance Baseline

You’ll also need to define metrics with which you can represent a baseline performance for your outsourcing efforts. Use these metrics to get a baseline for your current performance which can be later referenced for future measurements. Baseline also clarifies which metrics are important in achieving specific goals and business objectives.

  • Set realistic expectations

After defining your goals and expectations, you need to check if they’re are just. Unrealistic expectations of large immediate savings is the reason behind most of the failed projects.

Practical expectations ensure stability for your offshore strategy. A careful analysis for ROIs and timing of the benefits will help you evaluate and set better expectations.

How to choose and manage an Outsourcing vendor?

Relay track picture

Shortlist a vendor –

A quick Google search will land you on the pages of thousands of vendors with a fair amount of happy client testimonials. How do you see past a few deliberately filtered out success stories? The first thing in your course of action should be checking the review and references of your shortlisted vendors.

A vendor with a good track record should be able to provide you with sufficient references. References might give you just enough green flags to go ahead in your research. You can then continue your vendor evaluation based on the below mentioned factors.

  • Gauge their expertise

To showcase one’s expertise vendors should provide you with their test documentation, portfolio, and test cases. The depth of their reports should give you a good idea about their process and cases they cover.

  • See if they have sufficient resources and services

An ideal vendor should always have more resources than you need at the moment. Regardless of your immediate needs, your vendor should be able to do all types of testing be it automated and manual for web or functional, performance, usability, compatibility, API, and security testing for mobile/desktop. It enables your vendor to scale as you do.

Vendor management and assessment –

  • Understand your vendor

Vendor management starts from understanding their needs and where they are coming from. An outsourcing vendor has to deal with operational costs, talent acquisition challenges, and problems with other projects. Excessive price negotiations might push them to cut corners by allocating insufficient or junior resources.

  • Regularly assess the vendor

Regular assessment ensures quality. You need to have a systematic assessment in place, so that when you’re unable to get the expected quality of work, you can take action or look for other vendors.

Make sure that the frequency of these tests is not on the higher side, because it will shift their focus on showing rather than actually doing things. Assessing too frequently will keep them on the edge all the time.

This assessment criteria should get you started.

– Number of missed bug – Quality of defect description – Correlation between testing efforts and outcomes – Quality of test documentation – Capacity and availability of resources – Efficiency of testing tools

  • Manage vendor performance

Assessment provides you with insight that you can use to improve the testing procedures in place and maybe introduce some measures to increase the efficiency.

You should review vendor’s testing documentation at least once a month. Based on the reviews, your QA lead should provide the test team with relevant feedback, detect hidden wasteful steps and cost drivers.

You should also be in constant touch with your vendor’s QA manager to communicate missed bugs or unclear reporting. Ensure that the test team properly understands business and software requirements.

In case a vendor fails to deliver on your expectations, you can consider a multi-vendor strategy. For big enough projects you can assign different part of projects to different vendors. Having options makes the replacement easier when and if your projects are at risk.

Dealing with cooperation issues –

  • Prioritize testing activities

Addressing urgent issues is a common practice in an agile environment but urgent requirements can often delay the important issues. Because, every time there is a change in requirement vendors need to adapt and reprioritize. While dealing with the changes they might leave business critical or problematic features out of the scope.

Your QA manager should be able to help the test team create a clear test plan and prioritize testing activities, so that nothing is swept under the rug.

  • Include several SLAs in your contract

Since it’s difficult to match a traditional contract with a flexible agile testing process, you can divide your contract into several service level agreements(SLA) to make collaboration more manageable. Each SLA should cover a part of the services to be rendered, the time required for execution, priority, and KPIs.

Which Outsourcing Model to choose?

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An outsourcing model has many variables, such as scope, distribution of responsibility, contractual flexibility, and duration, but the main variables that define a model are the distribution of responsibility between you and offshore vendor, and the scope of the outsourcing effort.

Staff augmentation

This model has the same characteristics as a traditional onshore staff-augmentation model. You hire contractors to perform a particular task or role. The contractor receives work assignments directly from your company, the same as all other developers on the team, and performs the work remotely.

However, the staff-augmentation model has the advantage of having the lowest risk and being the easiest to implement as it can be executed with a single offshore resource for a fixed task and duration.

Offshore vendors tend to shy away from this model and many strongly discourage its use due to the shared overhead costs and limited upside for the vendor.

Project-outsourcing

This model is a self-contained engagement with fixed start and end milestones where a dedicated offshore team is responsible for delivering a complete project according to your specifications.

If you have a large project, you can start with a pilot project by assigning an isolated part of the project to see if the vendor’s processes are mature and what are the overhead costs and vendor also learns how your company functions.

If the project is small, the risk is relatively contained and both parties figure out the intricacies of an effective business relationship.

This model is more appealing to many offshore vendors and represents a more significant benefit for both your company and the vendor because the model can be scaled up to more and larger projects.

Dedicated development centre

In this model the vendor has a pool of resources, resources that are dedicated to your company’s use.

As your company matures in its relationship with an offshore vendor, this is a logical next step in growing from either a staff-augmentation model or a project-outsourcing model.

This model allows the same resources to be retained for multiple successive projects and reduces the loss of intellectual capital prevalent with the project-outsourcing model.

Functional outsourcing

This model outsources an entire business function, process, application, or department. This tends to be a high-risk, high-reward endeavor.

You must be confident in your vendor’s ability to deliver significant business value and minimize the risks of business disruption before entering into this kind of relationship.

However, offshore vendors that specialize in a certain business functional area can often provide a higher level of expertise than you can — at a reduced cost.

Tests to look for

People running downhill

An experienced outsourcing vendor with structured QA processes will help you realize robust and reliable products in shorter turnaround time. With their proven industry experience they will also ensure consistent implementation of best practices.

Knowing their process can prove to be an insightful experience into their work and how they operate.

Just to give you an example here’s our process that explains how a product is tested, starting from an atomic level (lines of code) to a molecular level(modules) to an elemental level(System).

Unit testing-

This stage focuses on a small piece of an application, even something as granular as a line of code like a method or class, and ensures that it functions as per expectations.

Our Unit testing checklist

  • Write a line of code
  • Write a method to test that code
  • Implement the code
  • Launch test
  • Verify results

Unit testing accelerates productivity by streamlining development and lowering the risk of time-consuming and costly bugs down the line.

Integration testing-

Units make up a module and if units do what they are supposed to then it’s time to see how they work together as a module in integration testing.

Here are some methods used in integration testing:

  • Big bang
  • Top-down
  • Bottom-up
  • Sandwich/hybrid

Integration testing verifies the functionality, reliability, and interoperability of multiple system components working together. It also identifies and addresses problems with exception handling.

System testing-

Software system testing looks at a software product as a whole and evaluates whether it successfully meets the pre-defined functionality, end-user, and business criteria.

  • Functionality Does the system function as the requirements criteria detail it should?
  • Performance Is the software reliable, responsive, stable, and performant under various conditions?
  • Regressions Has the software retained its original functionality since its modifications?
  • Usability Is the software user-friendly, and intuitive? Does it offer an optimal experience for the end-user?
  • Stress Can the software hold up as the load and stress on the system increase?
  • Load How quickly does the system respond under normal and peak conditions?
  • Security Do the security features ensure the integrity of the software product as far as protecting sensitive data and information are concerned?
  • Recovery Can the software recover successfully and quickly following a crash or failure?
  • Interoperability Can the software successfully interact with other software systems or components?
  • Documentation Are all test scenarios and requirements agreed upon prior to and during this QA phase well-documented?

If bugs, breaks, or defects are identified during this stage of evaluation, they are fixed and then re-tested, forming a repeated quality assurance cycle until the software QA team signs off for deployment.

System testing ensures end-to-end evaluation of an entire product prior to release and lowers risk for application failures once the product is live.

Acceptance testing-

Even after all the programming, technical oversight, quality assurance, and bug fixing, software acceptance testing is necessary to evaluate that the end product fulfills the purpose for which it was originally designed and developed.

Acceptance testing mitigates any fallout from outstanding bugs or defects that weren’t identified in the previous unit, integration, or system examinations. It also improves overall user experience as testers and users relay usability and functionality feedback

The above mentioned testing process is common to all software development and testing providers. But to ensure utmost product quality and robustness we have these additional layer of tests that help us make our products flawless.

  • Load or performance testing on page and application scale
  • Security testing
  • Accessibility testing
  • Visual QA
  • Automation testing

Key takeaways

  • Software testing and QA outsourcing is an opportunity for businesses to reduce IT overheads and improve efficiency.
  • Good software testing is a specialized and professional skill, and not merely an afterthought entertained at the end of the IT project life-cycle.

Even if large-scale offshore outsourcing is not an option that you’re ready to consider, outsourcing a small part of a large project can provide an effective supplement to your existing solution.

Ultimately QA outsourcing boils down to understanding your needs, setting cautious expectations, and knowing when to withdraw.

Vue or React | Which Javascript framework should you choose?

The pursuit for finding the perfect “javascript framework” can seem like a wild goose chase. But it never is. There are one too many frameworks and each one has traits that makes choosing more difficult.

Whether you’re trying to get into frontend or shifting from PHP or C++ to Javascript, these comparison points between Vue and React are just the thing to get your started.

Popularity

Javascript is quick in releasing frameworks and libraries. The only constant thing is the continuous change in the top positions of the frameworks and libraries.

According to the trends Vue might not seem like a go-to choice of people.

Screenshot of Vue Github stars

But GitHub stars tell a different story altogether. In June this year VueJS surpassed React. And Vue is still in the lead with 152k stars in comparison to React’s 140k stars.

A point to be noted is that Vue has lesser number of commits and contributors. A possible explanation is that Vue is driven by the open source community where as React has Facebook’s employees as its contributors.

Community support

Facebook’s backing to React signifies strong community support. Till date, React has 171k questions on StackOverflow in comparison to Vue’s 44k questions. But React’s community is more fragmented than Vue’s. This makes it difficult to find answers to even common issues and roadblocks. But Vue gained immense popularity and support from the developers. Vue has successfully created its own name without any major brand’s backing.

Learning curve

Developing your website via React will require you to have a huge knowledge of third party libraries as React is a library and not a framework. Whereas Vue has tools like Vue CLI 3 and Vue UI which will help you in building MVPs real quick. Vue is considered to be more developer friendly due to it’s short learning curve. Also Vue has taken inspiration from Angular and React which makes the transition easier for developers.

Performance

Performance can be measured on various aspects. Measuring it on the basis of framework’s size, Vue has a smaller framework size in comparison with React. Vue’s framework size is of 80KB whereas React is of 100KB. This will have an impact on the initial load time as well.

Virtual DOM is used by both React and Vue. But Vue has better performance and memory allocation due to its well built structure. A word of caution, the final performance will also depend on your application size and how well your code is optimized.

Documentation

Vue’s development team has put in a lot of effort in the tool’s documentation. The API reference is said to be the best in the industry. There is a detailed overview of Vue’s ecosystem, which is absent in React’s documentation. All the information required for creating Vue’s applications is well-written and accessible with ease. All this goes in Vue’s favour. React’s documentation includes basics and some advanced concepts, however it fails to present it in an easily accessible manner.

Use cases

Vue and React are both used by known global names for their websites and applications. Behance, Louis Vuitton and LiveStorm have used Vue. And Airbnb, Netflix and PayPal have selected React. The list is long for both. Vue is scalable and gets integrated easily, so it can be used for bigger development projects as well. However, using React for smaller projects is not a smart decision according to industry experts.

So, When to select one over the other?

If you are a fan of:

  • Flexibility
  • Experimenting with lots of libraries and tools
  • Large community support
  • Javascript more than HTML

React will be your go to option.

If you are someone who:

  • Is looking for short learning curve
  • Likes clean code
  • Wants a lightweight framework
  • Need an MVP on short notice

Vue should be your go to option.

The battle for choosing the ‘best suited’ framework depends upon your specific requirements. And your requirements will change over the course of time. Be prepared for that change as well.