Author: galaxy-admin

Bugzilla vs Jira: Choosing the Right Agile Bug Tracking Tool in 2024

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According to a 2023 IDC analysis, ineffective bug tracking caused 74% of software projects to incur cost overruns and delays. Clearly indicates in 2024 that selecting an appropriate tool is a strategic choice as well as a technical one. This choice impacts not just project timelines but a business’s agility and success. Bugzilla and Jira stand out as key tools in this domain, each offering unique benefits to streamline development and enhance team productivity. Understanding their differences and strengths is essential for any team aiming to deliver high-quality software efficiently in today’s fast-paced market.

Understanding Bugzilla and Jira

Bugzilla, a tool developed by the Mozilla Foundation, is known for its straightforward approach to tracking bugs and issues. Bugzilla offers a robust, open-source solution for bug tracking, emphasizing simplicity and effectiveness. It shines in environments where straightforward bug tracking is paramount, supported by its customizable issue fields and automated email notifications. However, its integration into Agile workflows can be less intuitive, requiring additional configuration to align with Agile methodologies.

Jira,  developed by Atlassian, renowned for its comprehensive project management features, seamlessly integrates Agile methodologies with bug tracking. It offers scrum and kanban boards, customizable workflows, and extensive reporting capabilities, making it an ideal choice for teams deeply invested in Agile practices. Jira’s ability to adapt to complex project needs, coupled with its wide range of integrations, positions it as a versatile tool for dynamic development environments. 

Feature Comparison: Jira and Bugzilla

Bugzilla Features:

  • Open-source and free to use
  • Customizable fields and workflows for bug tracking
  • Advanced search capabilities for issue management
  • Email notifications for updates and changes

Jira Features:

  • Agile project management tools, including scrum and kanban boards
  • Customizable workflows to match team or project needs
  • Extensive integration options with other tools and platforms
  • Advanced reporting and analytics for better decision-making

Agile Bug Tracking: The Core of Agile Success

Agile methodologies prioritize continuous improvement and adaptability, with bug tracking being a key component. Efficient bug tracking helps teams identify, prioritize, and resolve issues quickly, minimizing disruption and maintaining project momentum. The right tool should integrate seamlessly into the team’s workflow, facilitating swift identification, prioritization, and resolution of issues. Integrating bug tracking tools into Agile workflows enhances team collaboration, sprint planning, and overall project visibility. Jira’s built-in Agile features, like sprints and boards, provide teams with efficient task management tools, reflecting Agile principles. Bugzilla, with its customizable approach, can be tailored to fit Agile workflows but may require more effort.

Bugzilla vs Jira in Agile Environments

In Agile environments, the flexibility and adaptability of the bug tracking tool are paramount. Jira, with its agile project management features, is designed to support Agile methodologies out of the box. It allows teams to create sprints, track progress with boards, and adapt workflows on the fly. Bugzilla, while highly effective in bug tracking, requires more customization to fit into Agile workflows but offers unparalleled depth in issue management.

The Importance of Choosing the Right Tool

An ill-suited bug tracking system can be a bottleneck, causing delays, inefficiencies, and communication breakdowns. Startups might gravitate towards Bugzilla for its cost-effectiveness and simplicity, whereas larger entities with intricate Agile projects might prefer Jira’s comprehensive suite of project management tools.

The decision between Bugzilla and Jira transcends mere preference; it’s a strategic one. A tool that aligns with your team’s size, workflow, and project complexity can significantly impact productivity and project outcomes. For instance, startups or small teams might lean towards Bugzilla for its cost-effectiveness and simplicity, while larger teams or those with intricate Agile projects might find Jira’s extensive features more aligned with their needs.

The Business Impact in 2024

The contemporary software development scene demands swift adaptation, efficient workflows, and high-quality outputs. The selection between Bugzilla and Jira has far-reaching implications on a company’s agility, project management efficacy, and market responsiveness.

Actionable Insights for Tool Adoption

  1. Evaluate Your Team’s Workflow: Choose a tool that mirrors your team’s current workflow or the Agile methodology you aspire to implement.
  2. Consider Integration Needs: Assess the need for integration with other tools and platforms. Jira’s extensive marketplace offers a wide range of add-ons, whereas Bugzilla’s open-source nature allows for custom integration.
  3. Prioritize Usability: Ensure the tool you choose is user-friendly for your team. A complex tool might offer extensive features but can lead to low adoption rates.

Empowering Agile Teams with Strategic Tool Selection

As the debate of Bugzilla vs Jira continues, it’s clear that the choice depends on specific project needs, organizational size, and workflow preferences. Whether you’re leaning towards the comprehensive Agile project management features of Jira or the straightforward, focused approach of Bugzilla, the key is to select a tool that supports your team’s journey towards Agile excellence.

At Galaxy Weblinks, we understand the crucial role of efficient bug tracking in achieving Agile success. We’re not just technology experts; we’re strategic partners, offering comprehensive IT consulting and software services to support your journey at every stage. From selecting the ideal bug tracking tool aligned with your needs to streamlining your entire software development process, we craft tailored solutions to ensure your projects run smoothly, your teams operate efficiently, and your business achieves enduring success.

Is your business fully leveraging its technology potential? Book a free discovery call with us at Galaxy Weblinks to explore how our wide range of IT consulting and software services can align with your goals, ensuring you’re equipped with the right tools and strategies for success.

The ultimate best practices guide to a robust mobile application

Posted on by galaxy-admin

No software is perfect, just like humans. But the pursuit of perfection is not futile.

If you look around the web you’ll find thousands, maybe millions of posts telling you how to code, improve performance & stability, scale, and secure your applications. What you might not find is a comprehensive guide that has all the aspects that are needed for a robust mobile application. 

In this blog you’ll get to learn about the best practices from design pattern and server setup to coding and security. 

Design

Designing is the most crucial stage in an applications development life cycle. Conversions rely heavily on designs and how they’re implemented. Here are some of the best practices that can make your app a usability treat.

  • Create efficient onboarding: The goal of onboarding is to show the value of your app to the user by demonstrating how they can achieve what they want in a quick and efficient way. If the user is having trouble within the first few screens, they’ll likely drop off without hesitation.
  • Improve usability: Help your users by telling them which icons can be selected, tapped, or swiped. Ensure that you remain consistent with gestures throughout the app to optimize usability, e.g., if swiping up deletes an item, make sure that the same is true for all screens within the app. 
  • Prioritize actions: For each screen, there should be a primary action. This results in an easy-to-learn interface. You can show prioritization with contrasting colors, different fonts, or buttons.
  • Construct a navigation that’s easy and apparent: But, how do I do this? Here are a few points that we follow during our development :
    • Don’t hide it — the more obvious it is, the better. Never make a user hunt for it.
    • Deliver consistent navigation throughout the app. If you hide it on internal pages, you’ll only add confusion.
    • Indicate to users where they are by highlighting their location. This can be a problem for apps as users become “lost” and may abandon the task.
    • Utilize a standard navigation platform. For iOS, “Tab Bar” is a good option, while Android works well with “Navigation Drawer.” Stick to simple — it will help you more than spending time on clever.

Scalability

An app that isn’t designed and developed to seamlessly handle continuous growth will eventually end up being a failure. Hence here are some scalability best practices that ensure your app holds up as your business grows.

  • Choose the right architecture that way the app can grow organically with increasing traffic to the user base. Based on your needs you can go for MVVM, MVP or MVC pattern. 
  • When it comes to the server side, it must use “Auto Scaling” so that the server can perform well when the user base grows.
  • Try going stateless: Keep APIs stateless. In each request, the client should provide all the information which would be required to fulfill that request. This might not be possible in all cases. Sometimes, we might have to query our database and other services. But try to follow as much as possible.

Security

We know that security is key to putting web/app users’ minds at ease as well as your own! There are six essential security elements that will protect users’ information. If one of these six elements is omitted, then the information is at risk.

  • Availability refers to how you’re able to access information or resources in a particular location as well as in the right format. When a system isn’t functioning properly, information and data availability is compromised and it will affect the users.
  • Utility isn’t always considered as a pillar in information security, but let’s say that you encrypt one copy of some important information and then the encryption key is accidentally deleted. The information would be available — it just wouldn’t be accessible or usable.
  • Integrity references methods of guaranteeing that the data is real, accurate, and protected from any changes from an unauthorized user.
  • Authenticity aka “authentication” makes certain that the user’s identity is validated.
  • Confidentiality allows authorized users to access sensitive and protected information. Sensitive information and data needs to be disclosed to only authorized users.
  • Nonrepudiation is a method of ensuring that message transmissions between parties have a digital signature and/or encryption. A data hash will help you acquire proof of authentic data and data origination. 

Cloud and DevOps

Now that almost every app is on cloud with user bases exceeding millions on an average, it is business-critical to have a proper cloud infrastructure and DevOps in place. Here are some practices related to the same. 

  • Create isolated environment with the help of VPC (virtual private cloud) and define subnet on GCP (Google Cloud Platform)            .
  • Using IAM(Identity and Access management) services is handy to provide role-based access to any external users.
  • For database services, we recommend using cloud SQL.
  • For some of our clients, we have used Kubernetes engine for container based hosting.
  • Use Continuous Integration (CI) and continuous Delivery/Deployment (CD) to make deployment strategy automatic.
  • Using GCP Firewall for server security.
  • Configure server environment with auto scaling.
  • For email servicing, being experienced in configuring G-Suite will help.   
  • Use multi-region, load balancer on GCP to route the traffic region wise.

Testing and Optimization

Testing is crucial for a successful project as it enables developers to reveal performance gaps at early stages preventing any development overheads. Based on the identified performance gaps the app can optimized for quality and stability.

  • Apply profiling tools for monitoring: Use tools like X-code profiler and Android profiler. With the help of profiling tools, you can detect the crashes and, thereby, get an alternate code against the same instantly.
  • Test the app on multiple devices in order to make sure it performs well on most popular devices.
  • Prepare for varying network speeds: A mobile user would mostly be using the app on the go, so make sure the app works well in case of switching from WIFI to mobile data or vice versa. 
  • Optimize queries:
  • By optimizing queries, you can control output at the first end, which helps to prevent use of looping, reduce the number of statements, and the excessive use of other controls on the code end. This results in optimal performance for your site.
  • Optimizing will create database normalization rules.

Monitoring and Maintenance

Contemporary applications are accessed from different platforms like phones, tablets and desktops. These platforms come with different operating systems, software/hardware platforms, security setups and other limitations. Therefore, continuous application performance monitoring is an essential part for smooth operations.

  • Load testing: Check performance of the site with speed test tools, such as GTmetrix, pagespeedtest.org, etc., and implement its suggestions
  • Use crash reporting: We recommend integrating a crash reporting tool, such as Fabric Crashlytics
  • Make use of short statements — fragmentation of a big function to reduce the same code across multiple places
  • Maintain error logs: This helps keep you organized
  • Write rules to send email notification to developers/responsible person in case of any issue/error occurs.

Combining the above best practices will help you deliver a site/app above the rest

If the above seems like it’s overwhelming to handle or even for your team to handle alone, reach out to us and we’d be happy to help you in all things related to optimizing your site or app.

Galaxy Weblinks has a dedicated team of designers and developers that are well-versed in creating efficient websites and mobile apps, so reach out to us a

How can I create an effective User Story?

Posted on by galaxy-admin

If you’ve heard of what a user story is, that’s great. If not, then here’s a general understanding. It’s basically mapping out your ideal user’s end goal when using either your website or mobile app. Creating a user story will convey what your customer wants to accomplish, laid out in a simple way.

Why should I create a User Story?

A user story gets your whole team on the same page about why they are building a feature for potential customers as well as the value it produces for end users. This will really help you when it comes to improving your user experience (UX), guaranteeing that the user can follow through and complete the task they set out to accomplish on your software.

Here are 3 benefits to user stories:

  • User stories focus on a user’s desires and help your team remember that they’re solving problems for real people, not a generalized audience.
  • Developers, project managers, stakeholders, and clients, all understand what’s expected and how best to serve the target audience, supporting better collaboration and understanding across all teams from client to provider.
  • Stories foster more creative solutions. Instead of focusing on the “what” and “how,” your team can dive into the “why” customers do what they do, which helps when developing ideas for functionality.

When should I use a User Story?

Galaxy Weblinks recommends that you start forming a user story during discovery phase of your development project. It might be a good idea to have a business analyst, who is assigned to the project, develop the user stories in the discovery phase and maintain it throughout the agile project.

Once the discovery phase is finished, the rest of the team should contribute to create a product backlog of user stories. This backlog will fully lay out the functionality that needs to be added during the lifespan of the project. In an agile project, you can always add new stories to the product backlog at any time and by anyone.

Where to start? Here are our 4 steps in forming a great user story:

1. Recognize the needs of the users

Your client will have to clearly define the users who will use the application. This sets the tone for the whole process — you need to know the user, their pain points, needs, and goals. It’s advisable to have a strong understanding of your users, but even if you think you know them well, market research and interviewing potential users before and during the discovery phase will be your greatest ally.

This is a great time to encourage your clients to collaborate with you on the process and will show them that you care enough to do your homework on their target audience. Work with business analysts and UX researchers to deliver focus groups, perform interviews, and compile other findings to create data-driven UX maps and user personas.

2. Form Epics

An Epic is usually a large portion of work that has a single, common objective. These are usually formed before the user stories are written. They’re also continually developed as more user stories are identified. The user stories are then grouped into these epics.

Let’s say a user wants to fill out a contact form to reach you. The user will probably appreciate if your contact form is autofill-friendly. As you can imagine, this step really helps when planning what features developers need to build, in what order, and provides them with a high-level understanding of the features of the application.

3. Creating the actual User Story

Once you have narrowed down the users and started considering the epics, the business analyst on the project will start a draft of the user story. Along the way, the analyst may add and redefine some of the epics, and that will happen. It’s also a good idea to ask your clients if they’d like to contribute during this time — they may greatly appreciate being kept “in the loop.”

Most user stories follow this format – Define type of user and their role, user seeks a goal (to have pain taken away, to add happiness, etc.), and user seeks this goal for a result — will we be able to deliver their desired outcome?

Here are 6 guidelines to make sure your user story hits its mark:

  • Should be autonomous. When the developers implement the user story, it should work with any sequence.
  • Keep it flexible. Don’t fill it out with minute details. It needs to be adaptable for different user situations.
  • Make it human. Remember that the user should get some value from the story.
  • Plan ahead. Use project management to help your team plan project timelines.
  • The shorter, the better. It shouldn’t be void of content or only have a few sentences, but smaller stories are easier to manage than large ones.
  • Measurable. Your team should be able to know when and where the story “ends.” What’s the outcome/result for the user?

4. Define your acceptance criteria

This is used to layout the specifics of your user story in layman’s terms. This will help the developers get a better grasp for the requirements and details of the user story. Testers can also use this as a checklist when testing the application.

The business analyst defines acceptance criteria, and then once the project moves onto development, the entire team contributes in defining it. When the developers contribute along with the team, it guarantees that the details of the user story are doable and can be efficiently implemented.

Some handy tips:

  • Define the acceptance criteria before development starts. It will help you to understand the user intent first before the development begins, rather than forming the user story around the development reality.
  • Remove all ambiguity. It is important to consider edge cases and be prepared for possible scenarios, i.e., “What if they log out during a transaction?” You’ll be on top of UX and will give you superior test coverage.

What Should the User Story Look Like by the End?

At the end of the day, user stories are crucial in helping us form applications that solve real problems for real people. If you can research your users and truly understand their needs, you can create a great set of user stories that clearly lists the users’ goals/desires and how you can solve their needs.

We love working with clients to form user stories based on research and their knowledge. We conduct interviews and collect data that way when we work on your website or mobile app, we’ll have an advanced understanding of your customers’ needs.

Drop us message here and we’d be glad to answer any questions you have about our process and how it can benefit you, your business, and your clients.

5G is not just an extension of 4G technology

Posted on by galaxy-admin

Commercial 5G network is going live. Big carriers like Verizon, AT&T, Qualcomm, and SKT are building out their 5G networks. But, it’s going to take them some time before they can make it a new standard and available for most people.

The world is going to need high-speed connectivity and 5G will offer it with higher spectrum use and data rates, where 4G falls short. 5G will offer opportunities in various uses cases like self-driving cars, cloud gaming, instant movie streaming, and more.

5G is not there yet. Why should I bother?

When 4G emerged, it improved speed and the user experience on devices. But, when it wasn’t reliable, we still leaned on 3G. Similar to 4G, 5G is on its way. Although that means 5G won’t replace 4G overnight, it does mean that you need to prepare for when it does.

Although Apple and Google haven’t adopted 5G yet, according to The National Interest, around 1.5 billion mobile users (40% of current global activity) will be using 5G wireless networks by 2024.

Such clear insight into the bright future of 5G will impact the app development process. Developers that launch and prepare new and existing apps with 5G possibilities in mind are going to be ahead of the curve and reap the rewards once 5G becomes widespread.

Let’s first dive into the 5G landscape to understand how it’s defining the future of connectivity.

What difference will 5G make over 4G?

Picture of building with stair case direction on it

Speed is the biggest noticeable difference. 5G promises device speeds around 10 times faster than 4G.

Whereas, latency of 10-20 ms less than 4G will make delays virtually impossible to perceive — and in the best cases to around 1 ms of delay.

That means, with 5G, things will be a lot faster. Consumers won’t have to deal with the frustration of high-quality videos buffering or the disruptions when sharing videos from crowded places. This is a great advantage for creating 4K/8K video streaming and AR/VR applications.

In a test environment (UK’s 5G Innovation Centre), 5G has reached around 1Tbps, which is roughly 65,000 times faster than a typical 4G connection.

But, it doesn’t mean 4G is done. Many of us rely on 3G when 4G is unavailable and that’s exactly what will happen when 5G is on end user’s devices. As a matter of fact, many speed tests performed in Chicago lately have proved this in a way that while even walking halfway down the block/node, it’d start bouncing back and forth between 4G and 5G.

Here is the reason why…

Faster speeds of 5G come at the cost of shorter range

5G uses millimeter waves and here is the catch — the higher the frequency of any wave, the shorter the wavelength. The other reason why 5G doesn’t travel well is that it can’t make it through solid objects like buildings, trees, or walls.

There are some solutions out there, however. One could use carrier-specific signal boosters or hotspots. In order for 5G to have larger coverage, there would need to be many more, which is another reason why 5G has a little way to go before it reaches mainstream adoption.

But, it’s not only about speed

4G’s popularity boils down to higher speeds for data and video streaming. But, 5G will also enable any device that has a chip in it to be connected to the network all the time. Whether that’s a car, television, refrigerator, tablet, smartphone — you name it. So, it will be much more advanced than 4G ever was, which is why it isn’t simply an extension of 4G.

This also comes with other app development advantages:

  • Location Accuracy 5G will ship with much better precision capabilities because of its shorter wavelengths and higher radio frequencies than those used by 4G. This is a great advantage for developers creating high-precision, GPS-enabled mobile apps.
  • Increased Connection Density 5G supports the connectivity of up to 98,000 devices more in the same space as compared to 4G. This will prove extremely useful for IoT mobile app developers.

How will 5G impact app development?

Picture of a tablet with AR

Mobile users will consume 3 hours’ worth more video content weekly — of which one hour will be on AR/VR glasses in a 5G future. This belongs to the predictions of massive change in future usage of 5G.

With such game-changing opportunities, the mobile app development will experience major changes. Some include:

  • Apps related to 3D gaming and immersive augmented reality will get a great boost
  • Less dependency on the processing power of the hardware of mobile devices
  • Some good UX practices such as loaders will slowly become irrelevant with 5G
  • VR experiences will be smoother and the frustrating buffering and lag will be a thing of the past

What’s Next?

5G will serve enterprises, consumers, and take IoT to the next level, instead of personal communication only. But real, widespread adoption is still a few years away. In the grand scheme of a business, though, that isn’t an abundance of time when it comes to developing and implementing fully functional, top-of-the-line mobile apps.

Developers all over the world have started working on applications, existing and new, that’ll be able to utilize the full potential of 5G. These preemptive plans aim to release an app at the right time when 5G becomes mainstream, which gives their app a huge advantage over others. If you want your app to be ahead of the curve, you can count on us to create one for you.

If you want to do more than just understanding near-term consumer benefits of 5G, contact us to make sure that your applications will stand out above the rest.

An inside look at our Design Teams’ Remote Collaboration

Posted on by galaxy-admin

Design professionals today are not confined to office spaces for design thinking and execution. Teams don’t have to stay in proximity to deliver the best design work. This is an era of remote working and even with team members located across continents, companies need to keep up the flow of creative innovation.

Design Team Collaboration in Commonly located Spaces

Remote working in regards to design projects is not a cakewalk as the value proposition depends on collaborative design sessions and team cooperation. Challenges like juggling through time zones, scheduling meetings, communication breakdowns, bad collaboration, etc., keep the designers on their toes.

Design projects are tricky. The bigger they get, the more complex it becomes to track activities and prompt the designers to get the tasks done. When it comes to remote collaboration, it doesn’t get any easier as designers can’t interact face-to-face. Given the illustrative nature of the designing, designers are supposed to work shoulder-to-shoulder and be able to draw, point, note, and gesture to get the work done.

At first, it seems like these tasks don’t fit well into a virtual teamwork setting. But that isn’t true. In the last few years, prevalent cloud technology has made remote collaboration smooth and sought-after by design agencies. So much so that it has redrawn the employee structure across companies.

How our Design Teams Collaborate Remotely

Our designers use cloud technology, multimedia, internet communication, and an array of cutting-edge technology tools. They partake in design sprints, brainstorming activities, face-to-face team interactions, and constant exchange of feedback and suggestions.

We use a structured and transparent communication setup that helps us navigate through the glitches of remote collaboration. Our communication spectrum goes from asynchronous and text-based communication to video conferencing. Our design leaders effectively discuss the action plan with the team, including what each unique team member is supposed to do, and by when. On the plus side, this helps foster a symbiotic practice and a sense of camaraderie among Galaxy’s design staff.

1) We count on the best collaboration tools:

Whether working remotely or in-person, sharing designs and gathering feedback are the most important facets of design validation and prototyping. In the process, the possibility of small details being overlooked and context being misunderstood remains. To avoid that, we employ Slack— a well-crafted collaboration platform that supports audio and video calls, all kinds of media file transfer, and integration with other tools. This makes our communication transparent, fast, and smooth.

Slack: Slack is our meeting room, notice board, water-cooler, call tree, and news broadcaster. It accommodates both team and one-on-one communications. It is a fun and all-inclusive alternative to monotonous email and messaging options.

2) A single, co-owned repository to tell us the work in progress:

Remote work setups are prone to confusion and miscommunication. Too many information repository tools only add up redundancy and confusion. We use Confluence to centralize all the technical documentation and progress of the projects in motion. For every step in design, an entry is illustrated with commentary, screenshots, and comments. This is to make sure everyone is on the same page, speaking the same language.

Confluence is a wiki for team collaboration. Team members can create, share and receive information about any ongoing project. As soon as any development takes place in the project, it is updated in the confluence knowledge base and becomes available to the team members.

3) We organize FREQUENT online meetings:

Remote teams don’t get in touch before a teething problem turns into a quandary. But design teams at Galaxy hold virtual team meetings thrice every week where we chew over design challenges, and fix them while they’re still manageable. Our intra-team meetings are complemented by impromptu pairing sessions where designers find themselves brainstorming with programmers, business developers, and documentation teams.

Zoom: For intra-team communication, we typically use a combination of video conferencing tools including Zoom. Conducting virtual meetings is fun with Zoom, which allows a participant count ranging from 7 to 70. From joining meetings midway and toggling between participants to sharing screens, Zoom accommodates it all.

4) Show, don’t tell:

Asynchronous and text-based communication (telling) becomes intricate in big projects. Showing, on the other hand, is more powerful than telling and visual inspiration goes a long way. Thus, we prefer using online whiteboards, sending screenshots and snapshots of plans, paper prototypes, sketches, personal notes, etc. When words fall short in conveying design nuances, screenshots and pictures do the job effortlessly.

InVision Freehand: Freehand, a feature of InVision, is a new, exciting, and creative way to collaborate in real-time. InVision Freehand features tools like Draw, Write, Sketch, and Comment as well as a lot of other functionalities. We use this tool for planning, feedback, and design presentation purposes. Freehand is a virtual whiteboard for us and any team member regardless of the location and can contribute to the ideation and other processes through this tool.

5) We keep a check on our competence as a team:

“When working remotely, there’s a concern about how the efficiency and productivity of remote teams can be measured.”

It’s a lot easier than measuring efficiency of co-located teams. Organizations having remote work culture are result-oriented by necessity. At Galaxy, we draw clear work goals and deadlines. There are indicators like— reached budget, extra work hours, timely delivery, adherence to the task backlog, client feedback, etc., to measure performance. We also calculate the efficiency by calculating the progress of teams/individuals in prioritized tasks in the given time frame.

Trello: In Trello’s own words — “It’s a collaboration tool that gives you a visual overview of what is being worked on, who is working on it, and how far they’ve gotten.”

Simply put, Trello is an online corkboard, allowing users to enlist tasks, projects, files, resources, and everything else needed for working together. It is designed for task-based communication, and we use it as task calendar, checking off completed tasks and scrutinizing what is in motion. We use Trello for Value Stream Mapping of all our projects and processes.

In conclusion, we would like to leave you with some tips:

  • In the context of remote working, what works for one organization might not work for others, so experiment with pilot efforts.
  • Like a co-located environment, have an organizational structure for remote teams.
  • In a remote team setup, there should be one key person who owns the project and is aware of all the progress. 
  • Keep up with with new communication software and technology features. Don’t try to use them all — pick and choose just a few that best suit your team.
  • Set goals and deadlines the same way you would have if the teams were co-located.
  • Giving your team the freedom to be innovative and experimental with their work will have a positive impact on your business.

Remote Collaboration between Design Teams Infographic

Tips To Remember While Designing a Website

Posted on by galaxy-admin

In the world of online business and marketing, website plays an important role. Website signifies the online presence of your business. Hence your website should look good and it should represent your company or business.

Your website should be attractive and presentable. An online business fate depends upon the structure of your website. There are many important factors that should be considered in creating a successful website.

Here are some tips that should be remembered while designing a website:

Website objective

Before designing a website, you should properly know what are your goals? After that you can start working on them. You should make a plan before designing a website. Planning is the best way to reach to your objectives. Your website objective can be anything from selling of a product or service to providing information. Objectives will help you in overall designing of the website.

Budget

You can spend a lot of money on designing a website, but it’s better to make a budget. Your budget should be planned according to the elements of your website. If you don’t have enough money, you can go to online software program which will help you in designing a website. But still you need to spend money on marketing and hosting of the website. Experts say that you should spend 50% on marketing and 50% on website design and updating your website.

Quality content

It is mostly seen that people spend a lot of time on the designing part of the website and they forget about the content. Content is the king of the website. Content has the power to attract the potential audience. Content on the website explains your business goals and objectives which will help you to excel your business. If you are not a good writer, you can hire someone. If you want to grab attention of your target audience unique and quality content will help you.

Visual Aspects

You only have 8 seconds to grab your visitor’s attention. And it all starts with a good visual hierarchy. A clean and organized hierarchy will act as an invisible guide for your visitors. It will lead users on your designed user flow. You can achieve it by using visual cues, typography, color, contrast ratios, and ample white space. Avoid using a lot of typography and colors as it may distract your visitors. But you can play around in CTAs, as these are supposed to draw visitor’s attention.

Branding

Which style represents your organization? Is it chic, elegant ,old school, or a bold brand. Design a website which mirrors your brand’s style. Make your logo the first thing a user encounters by placing it in the upper left corner as users will scan your website in F or Z pattern. Leverage your current client testimonials as evidence of your work. You should link your active social media accounts for letting visitors connect with you instantly. Your social media activities will help in establishing your stand on various topics, CSR activities, work culture, etc. All this will play a role in building your brand.

Usability and Accessibility

Your website’s usability will be established with its intuitiveness from the user’s perspective. Are all possible answers that your user is looking for available to them? It includes an easy CTA for your newsletter subscription, simple navigation, having autofill activated for forms, et al. Carry out usability tests to know where your users are struggling and if the features are easily discoverable. It will help in establishing your website’s usability from the end user perspective.

One in every five American citizens has some disability pertaining to eye sight, hearing, and motor skills among others. When you design your website without taking care of accessibility norms, you are missing out on potential clients. Use the accessibility guidelines to make the website content compliant to at least AA level of the WCAG. Level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is widely accepted, highest level being AAA.

Responsive website

We live in an era of varying screen sizes. Designing only for PCs and Macs is no longer the norm. Design your website keeping in mind your mobile and tablet visitors as well. Your website should not appear cluttered when seen on smaller screens. You should check for the
functionality of your website on every device. Test out every button and interaction before the final release. Taking care of these aspects will ensure similar user experience across all the screens.

Market your website

After designing your website, don’t think that your work is done. Submit your website to all search engines. You can also do active marketing through social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google+. You can add your website links to other famous websites so that traffic gets diverted to your site. Marketing and advertising of a website may take some time, you need to be patient.

A website is an identity of your business. And when it comes to online business, your first impression is the last impression. So you should be careful while designing a website.

At Galaxy Weblinks we offer web development services. We specialize in developing custom websites and web applications with robust and stable backend process. For details please visit us here.

Hamburger menu | To use or not to use

Posted on by galaxy-admin

Even though it might seem like a contemporary design element but Hamburger menu is as old as our personal computers. It was designed by Norm Cox, design lead for the first ever graphical user interface made for Xerox Star.

Since then Hamburger icon has become synonymous with menu and a way to make the screens clutter free. Almost all of the internet recognizes it as the menu icon.

But as ubiquitous as the hamburger is, it is not going to stay that way. Here’s why

Makes feature discovery a task

Practically every designer has used hamburger menu as a goto navigation component. What a lot of people miss is the fact that it’s hidden and whatever is out of sight, is out of mind.

It’s proven that using hidden menu adds to the friction and user would rather skip than go through the difficulty of revealing and discovering hidden features.

Besides, people are more likely to use visible navigation than a hidden one.

Conflicts with system navigation

When smartphones sacrificed the capacitive and solid buttons for screen real estate, on-screen and gesture navigation had to make their way in the UI.

iOS apps have been struggling with hidden navigation long before no-buttons-all-screen went mainstream. Designer can only put so much in a navigation bar. It’s either menu or back button for navigation because none or both are a bad option for usability.

Non-glanceable

Adding a layer of difficulty just so that interface looks cleaner is bad for engagement and conversion. Visible menu such as tab bar lets the user see right away what’s what. It also makes notifications more contextual.

People find it easier to switch between tabs than discover hidden features via menus.

It’s just like choosing what to order when you’re hungry. What are you more likely to order, a dish for which you can see the ingredients for or a dish for which you can’t?

The former, of course, nobody likes to experiment on an empty stomach.

Now that the hamburger is out, what are your options

Tabbed navigation

This menu is prominently used in mobile phones. Smartphone screen sizes have increased substantially and single handed usage has become more difficult than ever. The hamburger which was easily approachable once with smaller sized screens is now even out of the stretch zone of the palm.

Tabbed navigation at the bottom brings the navigation down where everything is easily reachable within the reach of your thumb.

If you look at the Android UI Guidelines you will find that the Tab Bar is now a main navigation component. Which means that it’s more suitable for current and upcoming devices.

Progressively collapsing menu

This is a progressive approach towards hamburger menu. But unlike hamburger, this navigation adapts to screen size without hiding the features.

This menu utilizes familiar iconography to collapse the navigation according to the screen size without losing much information.

Combination of tab and hamburger

Combination menu comes in handy in the scenarios where the design calls for more than 5 menu items. Phone screens are big but they can only be as wide as the grip of the palm. There is no way to accommodate the amount of items that a hidden menu can house.

A combination menu has four tabs and a hamburger to house more items.

Takeaway

Hamburger menu has its share of good and bad. A bad implementation doesn’t necessarily mean that the UI component is bad. There are apps where hamburger makes for an ideal choice and in other cases it causes friction in user experience.

It all boils down to what’s more suitable for your app or website. Any of the hamburger alternatives will work for you as long as it’s not hidden.

8 essential tools your startup will need in 2020

Posted on by galaxy-admin

When it comes to choosing the right tools, it’s important to choose the ones that make sense for your needs and work best for you.

While defining what’s right for you, you must consider cost efficiency, productivity, ROI, and the number of third-party app integrations.

Don’t sweat we’ve saved the labour for you, here is a list of the fastest growing tools to be useful in 2020 for a startup.

1. Take workstream collab to a whole new level

When working with a remote team, calling and emailing each other is not the way to get things done. Infact, relying on platform that keeps all the communication styles together is crucial.

Slack is the most used team conversation tool among smaller and independent users. Around 60% of startups pay for Slack’s workplace communications software. It is popular among group that’s more platform-agnostic, integrating almost 800 apps.

Trusted by: Upwork, Gitlab, Pinterest, Salesforce, and more.

2. They say only the most organized will survive!

Every startup needs a desk manager where you can store all your ideas. Where you can manage broad-range of projects and daily To-dos.

Asana streamlines projects and prevents details from slipping through the cracks. It’s a great tool for start-ups which have several clients and multiple ongoing projects. The tool is popular among small to medium-sized teams because of its easy task workflows.

Trusted by: Airbnb, Dropbox, Khanacademy, Lyft, and more.

3. Ensure your brand reach with social engagement

Your business’ online presence is vital for your marketing and brand image. Using the right social media monitoring and management tools you can enhance customer engagement.

Buffer lets you manage and schedule posts on many social media channels. You can even schedule all your content at once or schedule before days, saving you a lot of time. It’s quite an essential tool for businesses starting with online marketing.

Trusted by: WebFX, AJ&Smart, Huckberry, The Seattle Times, and more.

4. Communication works for those who work at it

If you are just starting, you are not going to have customer service and sales team right from the very start. You need a way to communicate in the most efficient way with the users.

Drift lets you integrate chatbots and real-time conversations on your website. It provides a full suite of tools for live chat, scheduling sales meetings, and more. This marketing and sales platform helps to generate more qualified leads.

Trusted by: MongoDB, HubSpot, TreeRing, Clio, and more.

5. Add real-time feedback in your business decisions

Survey tools help in reaching your goal of offering best product to your customer. As customer feedback helps from validating your MVP to choosing ideal marketing strategy.

SurveyGizmo is an online survey platform for small businesses or intermediate users. It conducts and creates questionnaires, quizzes, polls, and surveys. This tool can also get integrated into other digital, and social media platforms.

Trusted by: Adobe, Verizon, Sonos, The Home Depot, and more.

6. Solve user problems with intuitive designs

Screen has become the most important place in the world. People look at screens so much so that they’ve developed a critical eye for designs. It’s now more important than ever to adopt tools for design management, prototyping, design, and ideation.

Figma is a design tool for complex prototyping, wireframing and UX design. It is ahead of Sketch and InVision in areas of learning curve, design layout, app speed, and interface. It has also outranked Adobe XD in connecting processes of prototyping, and design.

Trusted by: Zoom, Uber, Berkley, Dribbble, and more.

7. Change the way your development team creates software

Changing your development workflow again and again is not a good idea for your business. Especially if your company relies on its software for mission-critical applications. That’s where you need a distributed version control system.

Git is a favorite among millions of developers and open source contributors. You can build software, manage projects, host and review code. Git is a frontrunner among Bitbucket, Microsoft TFS, Glitlab and more.

Trusted by: Netflix, Reddit, Lyft, Shopify, and more.

8. Enhance performance with loaded security and testing

Manual testing is slow and error-prone. This is where test automation tools shine. These are best poised to take advantage of the latest automation trends like ML as well.

Ranorex Studio has a comprehensive set of features for web, mobile, desktop, and API testing. It also provides all in one test automation across devices, platforms, and technologies. It integrates with tools like Travis CI, Git, TestRail, Jenkins, Jira, and more.

Trusted by: Varigence, Sage, Cisco, Fujitsu, and more.

Software industry is very dynamic, hundreds of tools are released on a daily and they disappear just as fast. For the very reason choosing a reliable and promising solution can go a long way in ensuring your business’ stability.

We have an end-to-end experience of working with organizations big and small. If you need design or development related assistance, we’re always happy to help.

7 actionable tips for being a great programmer

Posted on by galaxy-admin

What makes a great programmer?

If you’ve spent a significant time speaking in between curly braces then you must know that it’s not just about shipping code that works. You need to be able to write code that’s easy to read and refactor. Soft skills are also crucial to understand requirements and communicate the same with your teammates, so that nothing gets lost in translation.

Here are 7 similar tips to help you through the process of becoming a pro

A woman working on a computer

1) Use pragmatic comments and consistent naming convention

Programming is like any other language and if you really know how to speak or write programming then developers after you won’t have to struggle to crack naming conventions or comments on your code.

Comments on code are generally a bad practice because it means that the code’s not good enough. If it needs additional explanation, then it can be written in a better way. You know it’s a bad code when you see unnecessary and repetitive comments or commented codes.

Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute –Harold Abelson

It’s not that all comments are bad. In some situations comments can be really helpful, like warning comments or reminder comments.

It is always advised to name packages, classes, variables, and functions consistently to make code easy for the next developer to work with. You can use your naming conventions for dynamically and statistically typed languages. It will enhance the readability of code.

2) Test and debug your code smartly

We all make mistakes at some point while developing software. It is a part of any process. No one gets it right in the first attempt.

Fix the cause, not the symptom- Steve Maguire

Identify hidden flaws through implementation and final module testing in different stages of development cycle. These include requirement analysis, designing, development, implementation and integration stages.

IDEs like Eclipse, NetBeans or IntelliJ IDEA works best these days for writing test programs, testing, and debugging code.

3) Keep it healthy

Old functions and replaceable variables can add to the dead code tally. To get rid of such code, delete old function or a class from the location completely otherwise it will get compiled during the run of the project.

Of course bad code can be cleaned up. But it’s very expensive – Robert C. Martin

Besides, timely removal of unnecessary code can reduce your code size by 30% to 40%.

Use Codepro Analytix, Cobertura, Sonar, and other such tools to improve the quality of your code.

4) Choose tech for longevity

Selecting tech based on immediate requirements may prove to be detrimental in the long run. When investing in new technology and tools, make sure that it aligns with your future goals and requirements.

We always look for everything in the immediate proximity, that is a mistake – Thomas Bernhard Ghen

For example, VBA, Delphi and Perl were once popular. But they are obsolete now. Developers either use top tier languages like Java and Python or second-tier languages like Scala and Swift to build contemporary programs and applications. There is also a third tier of programming languages like Rust and Crystal that you can use for learning and experimentation.

5) Master soft skills

When working in teams, understanding your fellow programmer needs and in turn making them understand your needs requires effective communication skills.

Soft skills get little respect but they will make or break your career – Peggy Klaus

Encouraging interactions within the team can also help in building your own discussion forum. Create a learning environment within the team by developing curiosity and adaptable approach.

6) Under-promise and over-deliver

You need to be realistic when setting project deadlines. Keeping a buffer of a few extra days in your project timeline can be helpful for any unexpected delays.

Make it work, make it right, make it fast- Kent Beck

And in case everything goes smoothly, kudos to you for completing the project before the set dates.

7) Focus on solving a real-world problem

Research on real world problems and try finding the solutions for them. This will help in building your programming skills. Besides it provides a sense of purpose, especially when you’re trying to adopt a new skill. It’s easy to get distracted and lose the motivation when you’re faced with complex problems.

First solve the problem then write the code – John Johnson

You also need to develop creative outlook and problem solving skills to solve problems that are too complex for conventional approaches. Simply learning a programming language won’t help until you focus on solving real-world problems.

Bonus tip: Practice…practice..and more practice.

With these tips integrated in your process and enough practice, you’ll be on your way to greatness. Just as this guy..

Simply put, there’s a lot to gain and little to lose while taking the time to really understand the core concepts. Keeping in mind it requires a deliberate practice to improve your work and build credibility with others.

Why it’s a bad idea to ignore older adults from your app demographics

Posted on by galaxy-admin

Modern technology has two problems: Devices have too many integrated features and everything is smaller.

A good implementation of more-than-what’s-necessary features can give some users an all-in-one experience. While a bad implementation can make it a nightmare to use for an often ignored demographic which is older adults.

Who exactly are these older adults:
Older adults are users aged 50 years and above. The learning curve isn’t that smooth for this demographic as compared to millennials or Gen Z.

UI that has too much going on with it often confuses older adults and they tend to blame themselves for not being able to use technology rather than the design.

But, one can’t put their lives on hold just because of their age. It’s simply a question of need. If they can go to YouTube and learn how to make a cake then they can also learn how to get a cab with Uber.

Infact, generational stereotypes are getting out of the way while building app interfaces for this demographic. As this cohort is not so far behind when it comes to using Facebook, Uber, WhatsApp or YouTube.

Myth #1 Targeting old users deemed as being the last Internet frontier

Video of Snapchat dog filter

Attracting older adults as part of the user-base was considered to be a niche market. Maybe ageing adults aren’t the target of Silicon Valley’s latest service or dating apps but startups believe there is value in addressing the elderly’s needs.

San Francisco-based company Honor (custom home care for seniors) has recently closed a Series C round. It has raised a total of $115 million in funding in just four years.

Myth #2 Elderly do not want to use modern technology at all

It’s not like they don’t understand technology and associated benefits. They want to use the tech but it’s targeted towards and tailored for younger audience. Besides older people are the ones who face trouble getting in a car and driving to get groceries or medical supplies. They need these apps as much as any other group of people.

Martin Gerstell, 94, volunteered at the National Gallery in Washington last month, used the Uber app his granddaughter installed on his iPhone.

Why should older adults matter to designers?

Man on a DJ console

From getting into the swing of mobile phones and computers to watching monologues of the late night show on YouTube or owning a fitness tracker, for decades people aged 50+ have used digital technology in one way or another.

  • Almost 70% of old people all over the world today have some sort of internet exposure on a daily basis.
  • According to the census report, by 2030, about 20% of the U.S. will be old.

The number of older netizens using smartphones is significantly more than ever but contemporary digital products continue to ignore and fail this demographic.

As Don Norman observed, bad design abounds, in both digital and physical products. Current interaction designs often feature startling sounds, tiny targets, illegible text, and other features that make the online world unfriendly to older users.

Good design for older adults is often recognized as good design for everyone

It’s worth giving a thought that when you’re designing for maximum accessibility you’re automatically designing something that is engaging and easier to use. Design guidelines below are consistent with the principles of Universal Design in most of the big enterprises.

  • Distinguish the primary buttons from their surrounding UI elements by proper pairing of color, contrast, layering, shadow and highlights.
  • A simple navigation is essential to allow users to easily and quickly get from point A to point B. Flexible patterns like grids, minimizing sublevel, keeping menus in a single function, etc. are among today’s best navigation practices.
  • Button and text sizes should be kept scaled up. Like keeping icons labeled with bigger text whenever possible or preferring Sans serif typefaces for on-screen readability.

Feeling bogged down while designing an ideal interface for this ‘optimistic’ crowd? Start a project with us for creating an inclusive experience that’s unique and accessible at the same time.