And that is How they make you feel!

What is the experience one has while working with a company?

Is it memorable?

Is it worth talking about ?

A lot of vendors make customized software, but what really sets one apart is the extent to which they passionately tie themselves with the product, how dedicated and committed they are, how patient they are,  and how they stretch themselves above and beyond to truly create that hassle-free and high quality experience for their clients.

… And it is this sole virtue, this sole mantra that has been responsible in us, Atlogys, getting 95% repeat business YoY for last 5 years and a 90% hit ratio in getting referrals from existing clients!

At Atlogys we don’t just believe in selling the technology . We believe in selling the experience !

So when you are in the process of selecting one out of many competitors, then, provided they pass all other basic items in your checklist, pick the one whose previous clients or references can VOUCH for One or more of the following soft skills, or interact with their senior leadership and see if you witness one or more of the following:

Integrity – Doing what is right at all times even when (stress) *no one* is watching

Patience – Not just waiting… but keeping a (stress) good and (stress) positive attitude while waiting…

Passion – The Only way to do good work is to (stress) *love* what you do !

Comfort – Do you feel in safe hands with them?

Commitment –Will they go out of their way to meet your goals?

We at Atlogys are technology fanatics and we *love* to make products used by *millions* of people around the world. This keeps the *Thrill* and the *Kick* intact!

Our 5 core values which keep us motivated day in and day out are:

So once again join hands with a supplier who believes in

Don’t just sell technology, sell the experience !

Links to sample case studies by Atlogys where we worked with our clients like “their team”for them to make their projects a success , and wherein we have assured a completely *smooth and hassle free* experience are available at

https://atlogys.com/case-studies

Thank You for watching this video. You can reach us at www.atlogys.com

1. Throughput
2. Latency
3. Reliability
4. Fault-Tolerance
5. Availability

Satisfying all these parameters is an important pre-requisite to delivering world-class email systems that can be used to send millions of  concurrent emails by millions of users with 100% reliability and assurance of timely delivery.

Here, we will talk about how we, Atlogys, have revamped our Email System design and architecture to create an ideal system and how we paved our way to success.

Let’s take a tour of an old email system, which takes 6 hours to send 1 lakh emails and thus causes much upheaval.

Nothing fancy is happening here. It is a big monolithic structure working in synchronous manner. There is a cron job running which is picking up cron data from Mysql and Mongo and sending out emails. Plus the cron is doing this in a sequential manner.

Main Problems of this Approach :

1. Email Data is getting baked in sequential way
2. Email sending mechanism is synchronous
3. Long queue of emails caused new emails to wait till queue gets cleared which causes  further delay in receiving emails and
4. Heavy load on Mysql, till queue does not gets empty

Solutions we need to account for:

1. Throughput – via Parallelism, heaviest mechanism should be in async manner,
2. Fault-Tolerance, via Supervisor
3. Availability, multi-node system
4. Latency, divide email in groups depending on their type
5. Reliability, no in-memory, but disk-based solution needed

Perfect fit for this description was RabbitMQ Message Bus, Pub-Sub Model :

We divided the email system into these parts :

1. RabbitMQ High Availability Cluster
2. Mongo Populator Cronjob
3. Middle-level Publisher Cronjob (MPL)
4. Consumers –  3 for announcements & 1 for Non-announcements
5. Retry & Deque mechanism
6. Healthcheck System

And our email system looks like this  :

1. RabbitMQ High Availability Cluster

1. Cluster : For this cluster set-up we need atleast 2 Rabbitmq nodes, and all nodes are connected via High Availability Policy, this policy ensures that if one node dies, other nodes elect the Master .
2. Replication : 1^st becomes Primary and other node will be secondary and both nodes will be in sync at any given point. All exchanges,channels and queues will be in sync at any point of time, if case of lag in any exchange, channel or queue we will be notified via healthcheck system.
3. Cluster Health : Monitoring Cron will check lag between these nodes at each minute and if any lag is found, tech team will be notified via emails. Monitoring crons does a lot of other things.
4. Durability  :  There are 2 options to save data in RabbitMQ, either in Disk or in RAM, we are saving data on both nodes in Disk , this increases durability of data , However this will impact performance a bit.
5. Fault-Tolerance : Clustering itself decreases the chances of failure, So if primary node fails then Secondary will become Primary and healthcheck system will notify us by emails about the failure. However human intervention is needed to check error and to re-start failed rabbit node.

2. Mongo Populator Cronjob

This cronjob builds the data for emails by fetching records from mysql and mongo and inserts data in Mongo collection cron_emails, This cron is very fast and has a very high throughput.

3. Middle–Level Publisher Cron (MLP)

To get optimum improvement from both publisher and consumer side, we need to optimize the way we are executing the 5 mysql read queries for each email, Thus for 1 million emails, we were firing 5 million read mysql queries. We have created a new Cron for the optimization of these mysql queries.

This cron uses existing code and mysql queries are being fired in a chunk of 1000, So for 1 million emails, we will fire 1,000 queries, The throughput of this cron is good, and will be somewhere between 20k-25k per minute.

Once this middle-level cron builds the data, it pushes data to RabbitMQ in same 1000 chunk sizes and there are 2 options while we publish data to rabbitmq.

4. Consumers They picks up data in FIFO manner, so older data which was published to rabbitmq gets picked first , and consumer gets MongoID from RabbitMQ and we fetch mongo document json data from mongo and send emails, Consumer should not have any Mysql Query to get real performance.

So idea is not to use any mysql query in consumers, we shifted mysql queries from consumers to middle-level publisher (MPL).

5. Retry & Deque Mechanism,

If consumer crons fails sending email to some user, for such users there will be re-trials, We will try email delivery for 5 times, and if during re-attempts email gets successfully delivered, we treat that entry as successful and will mark status success in Mongo.

Dequeue : If some email wont goes even after 5 re-attempts, we will save the json of that email into mongo collection “dequed_mails”, and there is a cronjob which check for dequeued emails after every 2 hours and if it found any record in this mongo collection , dev team will be notified, then manual intervention will be needed .

6. Heartbeat System

To check whether RabbitMQ cluster is working fine or not, we are leveraging HTTP API provided by RabbitMQ.

https://rawcdn.githack.com/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-management/rabbitmq_v3_6_10/priv/www/api/index.html

We check these conditions of system :

1. Whether Node(s) are up or down ?
2. If there is any lag in both nodes ?
3. If all queues are available and queues count is same ?
4. If Channels/Exchanges are available on both nodes ?
5. Add dummy message on a new queue and consume the same message at same time, to check publish/subscribe operations are working fine .

Hope this amount of technical details shed light on the attention to detail and the level of complex architecture that was architected at Atlogys to deliver this system.

Used in a Lin type progressive web platform that is used by 6 million scientists all over the world.

For a consulting session with our core technologists who helped design and build this system at Atlogys, please reach out to us at:

www.atlogys.com/contact-us

OR

Schedule a 30 minute strategy consulting session with our IT experts at

https://calendly.com/atlogys-it-services

VOIP (Voice/Video) apps are everywhere and almost everyone is using them whether knowingly or unknowingly. Their presence is huge & so is their acceptability amongst people. They are becoming a trend-setter for Businesses as they allow them to own their personal space where consumers can reach them directly. Parallel to Brick-Mortar shops, VOIP apps are becoming popular online shops where a customer can talk/bargain/order to vendor & vendor can give personalized quotes using power of Data Analytics.

Decoding Requirement

Our business client was looking to build a fast, secure, scalable & integrated Real-time communication (RTC) platform for Web/Android/iOS with power to cater 1 million users & limitation to deliver within few months. Communication includes Voice and video calls (including Screen Share), chat, call appointments, payments, exchanging documents etc. Taking IT Consulting to the next level, and giving out-of-box solutions, out business development teams worked closely with the client & framed the requirement in multiple sections based on priorities.

Converting Words into Action
To build a vibrant RTC platform in a shorter development time, there was a challenge & our CTO level strategic services played a role in framing-out the layer of technology stack:

1. Lightweight Micro-Services : For the product, we have used micro-services architecture by splitting the system separate services (separate logical entity) that each handle a small set of functions/tasks, and communicate with each other over the network as and when required. The benefit of distributing different responsibilities of the system into different smaller services is that it enhances the cohesion and decreases the coupling. This made it easier to change and add functions and qualities to the system at any time. It also allowed the architecture of an individual service to emerge through continuous refactoring, and hence reduced the need for a big up-front design and allowed for releasing software early and continuously.
2. Pubnub & Firebase: Third-Party Real-time Communication APIs for sending Push Notifications over Cross Platform. I.e.  APNS (ios), VOIP (ios), FCM (android) and Web Push Notifications.
3. TokBox: Third-Party Real-time Communication API based platform for Video/Voice calls which was customized for automatic management of network Issues like Latency, Availability, Bandwidth Limitation, reconnects etc. Using tokbox we also integrated feature of Sharing screen during the video call.
4. Twilio: Third party Programmable Chat API used for allowing users to in-app chat (text) seamlessly in real time Cross Platform. Using Twilio we implemented end to end secure and realtime in-app messaging with real time data failover and horizontally scalable architecture.
5. GetStream: Third party API for building scalable newsfeeds which was used to manage feeds and followers in the application.
6. Amazon AWS: Managing cloud infrastructure & real-time scalability & flexibility in modification of resources as per application behaviour.
7. Braintree Payments: Braintree helped us to accept and process payments for charges of appointments between expert and user. We implemented advanced payment management including charging Pre checking out, Refunds etc.
8. Reporting and Logging: Going modular, we spread logging at multiple levels at both backend & front-end for deep technical analysis.
9. Analytics: Powerful analytics is the heartbeat of an application. We developed complex algorithms to track and capture user and application behaviour. Using Google Analytics we tracked and optimized user acquisition and engagement with mobile apps.

Features

• Separate Experts App to sign up as supplier of services
• Separate User App to sign up as receiver of services
• Signup/Login functionality for experts and users
• Profile and verification for experts
• Admin Panel (web based) for stakeholder review and reporting
• Feeds from Experts – atom, xml
• Exploring expert profiles, following them, and feeds functionality for users
• Experts can configure availability and create pricing charts
• Scheduling an appointment with experts for users
• Calendar Integration with reminders for appointments
• Having a one to one Video Call with Expert
• Feature of Screen sharing during video call
• Text chatting with experts
• Payment of appointment charges, Integration of Payment Gateway
• History of transactions
• Rate and review of experts
• Search for experts on basis of talent, review, expertise, pricing along with Card Layout

Integrating this stack resulted in a smart RTC platformwhich gave our client an edge over RTC solutions available in market. Why? Because of –

1. Seamless Call Experience – Imagine a dip in network when you are having a Video Call and switching automatically to voice. Our smart algorithm takes necessary decision by looking at several factors like Network, Device Power, Resources Availability, Environment etc.
2. Easy to customize, scale & manage the Project – Modularized and scrum based way of managing multiple resources and development helped technical team in Enhancements/Debugging/Tracking things.
3. Error Free Product- A combination of Manual & Automated Testing with multiple round Regression to ensure the Product Quality.
4. Always On-Time Delivery – Maintaining the Project Delivery dates are crucial and keeping up the promises is Atlogys core value and ethics. We followed the 2 week sprint agile method of development and used Jira for transparent representation of work planned vs. delivered. Post sprint retrospectives and reviews allowed us to optimize and plan efficiently to minimize loopholes.
5. An amazing after-delivery Support – This includes support for code maintenance and enhancement. It also includes support for cloud monitoring of backend servers and analyzing traffic and healthz data for ensuring 99.9% reliability and site uptime.

The contribution of technology in healthcare is growing at an exponential pace and opening infinite possibilities for measurement, tracking and diagnosis.

For example, A mobile app can within seconds and at the press of a button find out drug related information, show research studies, pull out patient history of records, prescriptions, and provide medical adherence data on which medicines are due to be taken when.

Technology can track when your healthcare insurance renewal is due, what was your claim history and predict your renewal premium. It can alert your care takers about your health parameters and configure alerts when certain parameters go out of bounds, especially biometric parameters . All of us can ask the technology application to keep track of our food intake, heart rate and exercise schedules, steps walked, and other daily activities so as to ensure adherence with our goals given our age, and prior illnesses. These apps can go an extra step and can even PREDICT upcoming illness and inform us about proactive steps to be taken to avoid the same.

Given the advancements in security and privacy compliances, the technology is now a notch higher in ensuring safe share and availability of information. Further advances in hardware like face reader, fingerprints, Iris, and Voice further ensure our data stays secure and n=only accessible to those who we allow.

We have a history and a fantastic track record of making such advanced cross platform mobile and web based healthcare technology platforms. Healthcare technology designed and coded by us is being used by Millions of people all over the world.

Listing below our Core Clients and Project samples where we have delivered large-scale business intelligent healthcare apps that have helped in B2B as well as B2C digital transformation and allowed for automation of many processes and data collection.

1. Apollo Munich Health Insurance – Atlogys revamps online process of buying and renewing insurance for health, travel for group and self.

Impact

• Reduced load time by over 70%
• Simplified process by reducing clicks by 60%, and
• Increased online renewal rate by over 150%.

2. Dr Lal Path Lab – technology helps agents plan route/trip better by optimizing distance to be travelled to collect multiple samples in a day.

https://www.lalpathlabs.com/

Impact

• Increase in efficiency of field agents by roughly 30%
• Overall cost saving of roughly 25% to labs
• Reduction in time travelled/distance of roughly 20%.

3. PainSpot – Atlogys makes an animated body tool which can be used to select your area of pain. Then answer a series of intelligently posted multiple choice questions after which the app will self-diagnose and mention your plausible reasons for pain along with diagnosis to be followed. Send this to your doctor for analysis and affirmation if required.

https://www.painspot.com/

Impact

• Being used by 5 million plus users in USA
• Acquired by GHLF (Global Health Living Foundation) in 2018

4. Johnson and Johnson – Atlogys helps with security architecture of the Care4today app for its Janssen healthcare division.

https://www.care4today.com/

App used by millions of people all over the world for medical adherence.

Available both on web as a progressive web app and on iOS and Android mobile smartphones.

Atlogys provides customized large-scale technology platforms for your business use case. We will work with you end to end to provide a hassle free experience while delivering a world class product that is scalable, performance friendly and secure.

Our services include:

• Digital Transformation solutions on web and mobile – Includes but not restricted to healthcare, social collaboration, analytics, telecom, eCommerce, Content Management, CRM, M-commerce.
• Technology consulting and Feasibility
• Large scale system Architecture design
• End to End Testing
• Cloud Optimization and Deployments

Trending IOT Industries in day to day life –

1. Airline – An equipment tracking app provides an airline’s engineers with a live view of the locations of each piece of maintenance equipment.

2. Pharmaceutical – A medication temperature monitoring app uses sensors as a way to ensure the best possible delivery of medical supplies.

3. Healthcare – A Patient monitoring app can use multiple sensors installed on the patient body which communicate with the IoT network and provides all the required information of the patient under treatment and generates alerts to doctors if immediate action required.

4. Business Services – A facility services company uses their multi-device IoT application to enable support personnel to receive alerts about service issues and take immediate action.

5. Home Security – IoT concept is used in home security devices which are monitored and controlled either locally or remotely using easy to use applications available on mobile phones or smartphones. Typical IoT devices are security alarm, Camera, sensors, door lock etc. are used in home automation environment.

6. Agriculture – An iOT system to enhance productivity and reduce the resources to help farmers and also reducing the environmental contamination .

Apps that uses IOT technologies – Here’s the top apps they are featured for using IOT features –

1. In Healthcare Industries :

   1. Using smart band with mobile app we can send heartbeat of patient at a regular time interval for monitoring health of patient and provide medical facilities like sending ambulance or doctor or any other assistance required.

   2. We can use tracking wearable device for dementia patients who have memory issue and track them if they lost or get notified if they leave certain region. And the same can be extended to many more scenarios in medical science.

2. In Home Automation and Security :

   1. In smart home automation system where app can control the light in home from anywhere by communicating with controller or gateway installed at home.

   2. We can use iOT app to observe electricity consumption at home by receiving data from digital meter with help of controller or gateway installed at home.

   3. In Smart home security system where app can be notified of forced entry (Using camera or IR sensors) at home by receiving message from controller or gateway installed at home.

3. In Agriculture Industries : We can use IOT system to get the information about soil texture along with the humidity information through various sensors that will be sent to mobile app for further analysis. The app in turn will apply appropriate algorithm and in turn will suggest the best the quantity of water as needed and would also guide in choosing the best fertilizer for a particular crop.

Structure of typical IOTs apps – The following diagram shows typical components of an IOT based mobile app architecture.

Data and logic are distributed across the device, cloud and other resources in order to deliver a full user experience. The app should use secure protocol to communicate with gateways or the remote server and it should be scalable as the traffic grows . There are multiple APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) written to create and show various dashboard and actions including integration with various data analytical services. The APIs typically makes a connection among devices, cloud and third-party web-services.

Challenges for IOT applications – We know there are certain amount of challenges we face while creating an IOT application. Following are the most challenging aspect while creating these kind of applications –

• Discovery of devices – To know when to use Messaging or IP related protocols to communicate devices with Mobile App depending upon environment and requirement. The sensor controller will poll the backend by calling some REST API to know about newer devices being added to the network.

• Sharing data between devices and cloud – The specification describing how the device will share and consume data from various sensors. The mobile app would take the raw data from the sensors , process and transform it into an appropriate format to send it over the cloud for data analysis etc.

• Data communication across network – To know how the data travels around the network.

• Data security – To avoid data intrusion/network intrusion we need to know various security measures across the communication channels.

• QoS (Quality of Service) – How reliably the network carries data, and adjusting accordingly.

Comparison of various IOT platforms :

We all will agree to the fact that mobile phones have travelled a long journey and evolved at a very fast pace. These are no longer just a means of communication but serve multiple purposes with the help of different mobile applications. The mobile application development companies have also witnessed a giant leap in the form of smart phones and advanced tablets running on different operating systems.

As the demand for the mobile applications increases, the mobile applications development process needs to be strengthened and has to cater to the diverse customer requirements. There are approximately 2 million mobile applications available in the market. But many customers use the mobile application just once and then delete it due to the inefficiency of the application. The reasons could be application crash, slow application, application launch fault and/or unexpected application behavior.

Mobile Application Development

In order to cater to the countless customer requirements, the mobile application development companies need to master the mobile applications development. The mobile application developers need to ensure the best possible solution due to different screen sizes, hardware requirements and configurations of the mobile devices.

Apart from the configuration aspects, the mobile application development process needs to design the appropriate mobile user interface. For example, the mobile application developers (say android developers) need to consider the various factors like versioning of the operating system, accomplishing a task using fewer keystrokes and managing specific functionality without delay. The developers for iOS mobile application development might experience while developing the mobile applications.

It is the culmination of both mobile user interfaces i.e. the front-end and the back-end that supports data access to the enterprises. Apart from the mobile application development companies, various mobile application consulting agencies are thriving for effective and efficient mobile applications.

The mobile application testing also plays a vital role in mobile application development. There are many emulators (Google Android) and simulators available for performing the mobile application testing. Some popular testing tools are eggplant, Ranorex and Testdroid.

Secrets for Developing Successful Mobile Applications

The main secrets for developing successful customer-friendly mobile applications are:

1. Developing a great (useful) mobile application
2. Enforcing friends/groups capability
3. Ensuring operating system portability
4. Catering the small markets
5. Effective marketing, tracking and evaluating
6. Making the mobile application free

It is important for the mobile application to be in full conformance with the customer requirement(s). For example, the functionality of the mobile application should prove itself in terms of design, visually as well as functionally. The mobile applications that enforce the involvement of groups tend to be more popular and attract the masses. For example, WhatsApp and Instagram are two such engaging mobile applications.

The next secret for developing a successful mobile application is portability across the different operating systems. Although the smart phones and mobile applications were introduced in the form of iPhone(s) but the portability aspects must not be compromised for Android platforms. The best test for the mobile applications can be observed within the smaller markets. After the mobile application(s) prove the usability and functionality at a smaller scale, it can be confidently launched in the bigger market.

The mobile application should be well promoted and should be a part of marketing campaigns. Further, there should be a complete support in the form of tracking/evaluating tools to determine as to what happens inside the mobile application(s). Although the mobile application can be monetized with the in-app purchases but the customer feels great if the mobile application is available for free.

Conclusion

Although it is a fact that there are always known limitations associated with the mobile applications but the user-friendliness and optimized functionality should be the driving force for the development of these mobile applications.

In-house vs. Outsource Software Development

Like every business, there are various advantages as well as limitations associated with the in-house versus outsource software development. The benefits and the restrictions are largely based on the following factors.

• Businesses prosper on innovation
• Software outsourcing services (may) lack security and focus
• Outsourcing software development reduces distractions
• Higher cost of employing the in-house team
• Lower costs associated with outsourcing software development
• Outsourcing software development enables focus on marketing
• Outsourcing software development ensures flexibility
• In-house team has a sense of ownership

Points to Ponder

When you utilize the software outsourcing services, you are benefitted by the different skill sets available to produce a world-class product. Although not impossible but there is always a fight to have in-house techies produce the same result. This is attributed to the lack of skill set and required experience. Moreover, the software developers usually fail to maintain the interest level while working on a project. Further, it is not feasible for the organization to satisfy the software developers with different projects. In such cases, it is best to have in-house software maintenance after the product is built. In this way, you will have the flexibility of exploring the code.

Although the cost of employing in-house team is more but there is always a risk of data security while outsourcing the software development. At the same time, while the outsourcing is costlier it also reduces distractions. The fewer the distractions, the more focus can be laid on the marketing aspects of the product.

Yet another important factor is the deadline to achieve the final result. In case you are not sure of the timeline then it is advisable to use the software outsourcing services. In case of in-house team, although there is a sense of ownership but it may be tough to manage the strategy and investments across the different stages of the product.

Conclusion

It can be well concluded that the core competency of the product remains for the complete life cycle of the product. So, it is a good idea to have in-house team if you have technical person in your team with enough funds for developing the primary features of the product. However, since the software outsourcing service providers need minimum amount of management, they can very well be hired for specific talent and skill sets. None the less, the in-house team provides a better control but if you move with a hybrid model like technical interview route before hire any outsourced techie, hire a technical project manager (technical consultant) too who is either local or work within your time zone. This process could be much cheaper than hiring someone full time and effectively follows the proper (agile) methodology.

Software outsourcing services are widely utilized by clients to create different software products within an estimated budget and stipulated timeline. However, outsourcing software development includes an entire gamut of processes and is Not restricted to just the coding and implementation phases.

The processes that provide an efficient software outsourcing service(s) are proper planning, detailed analysis, a well-thoughtful design and architecture, well managed development process, easy implementation with constant review, iterative testing, deployment on servers and effective maintenance and monitoring of the software thereafter.

Processes governing the Software Outsourcing Process

It is vital that prior to providing software outsourcing services, IT organization must possess immense technological expertise along with experience on wide range of processes (in terms of services) to offer, of course, these processes should not be limited to just coding and implementation.

The following figure illustrates various processes that govern the process of outsourcing software development.

These processes are applicable for enabling optimized outsourcing software development services across various industries, for example, e-business solutions, embedded and mobile technologies, web applications and wireless applications. Some other industries where these processes are widely used include healthcare/pharmacy, oil and petroleum, chemicals, telecommunications, education, staffing, retail outlets, utilities, etc. and the kind of software produced with this process for these industries includes applications like online recruitment’s, call center applications, online doctor survey, accounting/loans management, hospital management system, mobile network account management, etc.

Software Outsourcing Services: Best Practices

The organization(s) needs to acknowledge the following points in order to provide the best possible outsourcing software development services. Although some of these points are associated with agile methodologies but are not solely dependent on these methodologies.

Software Development Methodologies vs. Project

The selection of the software methodology differs depending on the type of the software development project. For example, a waterfall model may be chosen; if the project is a re-processing of an already identified business challenge (may be finance and accounts). But, an agile methodology may be best chosen in case of projects with an ambiguity and shorter delivery time.

Setting the Correct Expectations

The requirements should be well-defined and the expectations should be set during the course of project discussions. A proper SRS (called as Software Requirements Specifications) document should be made by vendor and signed off by client prior to inception of coding.

Effective Outsourcing Decisions

Effective outsourcing software development decisions should be made with great emphasis on the processes and the documentation quality. Proper processes and procedures should be ensured to achieve high level of compliance along with accurate documentation for user-friendly accessibility.

Solid Architecture Creation

It is very important to ensure the importance of design. This is achieved by creating solid High-level Design (HLD), Low-level Design (LLD) documentation, freezing the storage schema, and making the Application Program Interfaces (APIs), etc. before beginning with the coding.

Avoiding Communication Gaps

The project manager is always responsible for the selection of the communication mechanism. The mechanism should be open and must involve the team like Basecamp, JIRA or otherwise.

Performing Verifications

Timely verifications are very important as these verifications check whether the project is on-track or getting off-track. One can rely on the vendor but still the role of buyer’s verification called UAT (User Acceptance Testing) cannot be underestimated.

Optimizing Software Testing

The best software engineering practice is to separate the development activities from the testing activities. Most of the projects these days follow agile methodologies to optimize the testing and QA services.

Involving the End-users for Feedbacks

The involvement of the end-users for the valuable feedback should not be compromised at any cost. The agile methodology enables an earlier version of the software so as to avoid any future surprises and/or over expectations from the software.

In the earlier decades, the process of software development did not involve too much of an effort in managing the software quality testing processes. But, now the software development process not only follows the agile methodology but also accesses the various cloud applications. Accordingly, the requirement of a good software test management system arises.

During the recent years, the software quality assurance has witnessed a large number of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools. The analyst firm, Gartner also predicts worldwide enterprise software spending of $297 billion this year, up 6.4% compared to 2012. It is evident that there is a tremendous competition in the field of software quality testing.

Software Test Management System

The ALM solutions are largely based on the requirements of software developers who in turn do not acknowledge the views of quality assurance testers. In most of the cases, the software test management system is taken into account at a later stage of the process. In such cases, the entire test scenarios are not covered, which eventually leads to an ineffective test cycle.

A good software test management system is governed by various characteristics. These characteristics are vital as the software development process is involving critical phases along with the production release. Moreover, the need of the quality assurance tester is not only restricted to managing the regression testing but also deals with the effective functioning of the added features.

The characteristics governing effective software test management system are:

• Ease-of-use and Flexible
• Transparent and Traceable
• Task Assignment and Task Tracker

Characteristics of Good Software Test Management System

Ease-of-use and Flexible

As per the QA testers, the software test management system should be easy-to-use so as to avoid unnecessary training costs. Next, the system must be accessible and consistent. If the quality testing system is easier to understand then the QA testers finds its use in a faster manner and are able to adapt it to identify the bugs/errors.

For a software quality testing process, the testing scenarios vary with different projects. The flexibility aspect of the software test management system handles these testing scenarios effectively. An effective test management system efficiently adapts and relates to the testing processes. For example, specifying unnecessary field values, replicating duplicate test cases and/or connected steps result in the wastage of valuable time as well as skilled resource(s).

Transparent and Traceable

The quality assurance testers appreciate the traceability aspect of the test management system to trace various functionalities of the software. In this way, the testers are able to account for reliability and explore data, which they can use to streamline the testing process. A good software test management system traces the complete lifecycle for a software defect.

An effective test management system not only caters to all the requirements, test cases, defects, repeated test scenarios but also manages a record of the executed tests along with the quality assurance tester details. The traceability removes potential stress between the software quality assurance and software development teams thereby enhancing the transparency across the departments.

For example, you may have to cater to multiple requirements existing in a single test case and/or multiple test cases for a requirement. In such cases, clarity is very important to create a clear understanding between the requirements and test cases. This clarity and transparency results in an explicit relationship between the requirements and test cases and saves time.

Today, every organization whether small or big needs to be part of the mobile world involving not only the development of mobile applications but also effective migration of these mobile applications. Although there is a tremendous potential for mobile development but this opportunity is also accompanied with the challenges posed by the various operating systems and features/requirements.

Mobile application migration involves successful migration of various mobile applications for devices like Windows, Android, BlackBerry phones, iPad applications, and/or iPhone applications.

Mobile Application Migration

The mobile application migration involves various kinds of porting. The types of porting involved are:

• Cross-platform porting refers to porting of applications from one mobile platform to another
• Intra-platform porting refers to up-gradation of the Operating System, addition and/or integration of new feature(s)
• Multiple-device porting refers to the different characteristics associated with the multiple devices that run on the same platform

Checklists and Considerations

There are certain checklists and/or considerations that are to be ensured for achieving effective mobile application porting. The points to be considered are:

• Creating a reference port
• Performing the gap analysis
• Assessing the Platform and Device
• Developing porting mobile application
• Performing QA Testing

A reference port is created after receiving the mobile application porting requirements from the client(s). Next, the mobile platforms along with the various types of mobile devices are taken into consideration. Further, a thorough gap analysis is performed in order to assess the porting requirements. The gap analysis is followed by the assessment of the platform(s) as well as device(s). This is done to check if there are any device limitations prohibiting the mobile application porting. Next, the development of porting the mobile application begins with code rewriting, code revisions, GUI modifications, code optimization, etc. Finally, the testing is performed on the mobile device/platform after the completion of mobile application porting.

Vitals for Successful Mobile Application Migration

The mobile application development companies are always looking for effective processes to perform mobile application migration services. There are certain essential points that are vital for achieving the mobile application migration in an effective and efficient manner.

The audience analysis is important to acknowledge the use of respective resources and provide the corresponding benefits. For example, lower costs, application scope and adoption tariffs. In this case, the habits of the mobile users are also studied to understand the specific audience (in-house employees or commercial). Next, the determination of the application details is also important. For example, web services and well-defined interfaces are provided if the audience need to remotely assess the organizational data. But at the enterprise-level, HTTPS protocols and data encryption are used for securing the data before it is accessed.

It is also essential to determine whether the organization has the skills to build and manage the application migration services or requires assistance from the external team(s). The platform and device assessment is accomplished through a thorough understanding of technology. The application migration services for a single platform are costlier than multiple platforms. The application migration services may be accomplished in-house or with the help of an outside team. In either case, a complete knowledge transfer process is required to strengthen the support team.

Conclusion

With ever-increasing features in the field of mobile applications, there is an immense need for streamlined processes and policies to understand the development and migration of these applications. This effective approach will eventually lead the mobile application development companies to minimize the mobile application porting costs for the various platforms. The organizations need to explore and learn before developing the processes for mobile application porting.