- Prepare test cases or a checklist for the project you are assigned in. Include all the test scenarios you can think of. Yes you are thinking right!

P.S. All the positive and negative scenarios.

For beginners – Test a simple ‘email log in’ page!
What all scenarios you guys can think of!Yes you are going on right track.. whatever weired comes to your mind..Just do not stop playing around.

P.S. Let the application crash!!!

- Start performing tests , find and report bugs but hang on always remember there’s no end to bugs i.e. you can never say ‘This application is bug free’!!

P.S. Cant help it!

- Step into Customer’s shoes ; feel like a lay man and you will b amazed to see the number of bugs you come across.

P.S. Do not end up stepping on toes!

- Be Creative in your approach ; while writing test cases or preparing a check list. Do not assume.

P.S. Assumptions is the mother of all mistakes!

- Start Suggesting ; Dig into the details and get to know the product’s functionality and general behaviour. This will enable you to add value and suggest new features and enhancements to your product.

P.S. A smart move it is!

Last but not the least..

- Follow Processes ; Stick to the organisation standards and guidelines and process of testing.

P.S. Follow the process and find as many bugs you can..after all we are a part of QA!!

Happy Testing!!!

Author – Anisha Nayak

Previously, we have published an article regarding common mistakes to avoid when designing for mobile devices. For this entry, we want to present a list of important elements you must integrate in order to build a successful and top-selling app on the market.

1. Faster loading period

One of the most important factors that developers must focus on is the loading time for each app. Above we have mentioned that very few users will give a second try on a failing app. Most users said that they would prefer using an app that loads up under 5 seconds. However, some apps would require a large amount of data to startup, except if you have a device that has Quad-core 1.6GHz processor like the Samsung Galaxy S4. If that’s the case, then ensure that you have a loading screen page in order for the users to see how much they need to wait. A great example of an app that shows loading page is the Facebook for iPhone and Android device.

2. Reliable performance

What’s more interesting than an app that showcases its great performance despite its heavy graphics?  A successful app must be well-tested, making sure that its performance is in top shape especially during the most extreme conditions. Irrespective of the device’s connections, a top-selling app must run smoothly without any lag and doesn’t eat much of your processor or your battery life.

3. Takeout Ad banners

Although you want to earn from your work of art, a mobile app that is free yet filled with ad banners is not that appealing to most users. If you have tried the game 4 Pics 1 Word by LOTUM GmbH, you’ve perhaps tried answering 3 stages then a big ad shows up on your screen. Although this application is one of the most popular apps in the gaming section, many users find it uninteresting to play it with the banners ads and adverts popping on their screen. Instead, if you want to earn money from your app ad-free, it is advisable to create a paid version for users who choose to play, uninterrupted.

4. Mobile compatibility

Each mobile device has its own screen dimension and features, thus your app must be compatible with the platform it has been developed for. If you have noticed, when iPhone 5 was still a rumored Apple device, app developers updated their applications in order to fit the 4-inch Retina Display of the latest iPhone. Remember that the most popular apps are the one that offers the best possible UI experience.

5. Value

When we discuss about value, we are not pertaining to the price of the app, but the importance of the application to the users. You have to make sure that your app is usable, distinctive, provide assistance to the user, and make life easier. A top-selling app has to provide something extra that other apps on the market has not addressed yet. This will encourage more users to repeatedly use your app. An example of this would be the Instagram app. Once a upon a time, pictures would have to be transferred to your PC in order to edit and make it more appealing, with the Instagram app on your device, you can quickly add filters and share it on your social pages.

6. Say no to lag

Along with checking the loading time of your app, you need to make sure that it doesn’t have any issues such as crashing, freezing and pixilated screen. Although some users have the patience to wait for the loading time, most of them doesn’t give a second look for apps that has bugs and crashes while they’re using it. Take note that your general UI thread must always be active. Before actually developing an app, it’s best to check if your desired mobile platform offers thread separation or secondary thread.

About the Guest Author
Author – Reese Jones
Reese Jones is a specialist in web design, art, startup businesses. Her free time is taken up exploring her passion for playing football and she’s always available on Google+ or tweet her @r_am_jones.

Oops!

It is not surprising that during all outsourcing discussions which happen, couple of things are always discussed because those are considered to be the key elements of success – communication, pricing, work hours, deliverable, timeline, holidays, culture and others in decreasing order of priority. Each of these play a vital role in the process. And you feel the emphatic ‘Yeshh!’ feeling when you have weighed in all of them. There is another factor which needs to be factored in as well – Information Security.

I know you must be silently feeling happy and clenching your fists with that Yeshh! feeling if you had touched upon this topic in your discussions. And you must be. After all,  Information Security Services continue to grow– dramatically yet quietly.  It is not just about your data being securely used by the IT Services vendor you employed, it is also about your customers refusing to use your software product if it does not assure them of data security. Think of the financial reminder app you are planning to create for your target market. If the app does not usher faith from the data security signatures, not too many takers would even be saving their account numbers within. This might be a lame example but what I am trying to hint at is – Unless your app keeps my data secure, I ain’t gonna buy it for Free! Period.

The Guardian, UK recently reported that half of the Clearswift survey respondents were concerned that social media channels could pose significant risks to their IT security.  In addition, the UK government has identified information security as a key priority for the current year – 2013.

Information security does not just mean data breach or unidentified and fraudulent access to your confidential and proprietary data. Accidental data loss is perceived to be the biggest information security globally.  In the event of a data leak, the greatest worry is about reputational damage to the organisation (31%), followed by financial consequences (20%), with policy or compliance issues coming in third (18%) as per the survey.

John Oltsik, a Principal Analyst, NetworkWorld recently shared his estimate that about 0.60 to 0.70 cents of every security dollar is spent on either endpoint or network security.  While vendors scramble to establish positions or defend customer bases, users benefit from a much-needed wave of information security innovation and architectural integration.

Yup, there are lots of reasons like this why organizations are consuming more and more security services worldwide.

Solutions?

So what should businesses do when it comes to implementing information security strategies? What should they do when they are dealing with outsourcing partners?

It is clear that information security lapse can be harmful if not disastrous to the reputation of the company and possible financial losses as well. Hence promoting training and awareness within the organisation is clearly one way of dealing with it.

And the next step would be to adhere to a set of globally bench marked policies which help you avoid the risks because of information security. An information security management system (ISMS) is a set of policies concerned with information security management or IT related risks. The idioms arose primarily out of ISO 27001. The governing principle behind an ISMS is that an organization should design, implement and maintain a coherent set of policies, processes and systems to manage risks to its information assets, thus ensuring acceptable levels of information security risk.

The next step would be to hire a software vendor who is ISO 27001 certified. And if your vendor does not have a Infrastructure Security Management System certification from ISO, you will mostly get evasive answers to your queries on information security. Go ahead and ask your vendor the following questions as suggested by Bill Mathews, Hurricane Labs.

• What secure development lifecycle (SDL) do you use?
• What type of regression testing do you employ with bug fixes?
• What type of security training do you provide to your developers?
• What sort of logs will this application generate?
• How will the application handle authentication?
• How will the web application handle credit card payments?
• Has an application you’ve written ever been “hacked” or breached?
• Can you tell me 5 good reasons why this application will never be hacked?

By this time, you would realize that you can not risk your product and your data with someone who is not ISMS certified. Go ahead and talk to someone who is ISO 27001:2005 certified.

What do you think?  Do you agree Information security should be cared for?

Author – Subhendu Pattnaik

In today’s world every business is in the lookout for cross-border collaboration with companies in order to expand their business overseas or to leverage suitable & profitable markets. Be it software outsourcing or any other, companies today never hesitate to explore other markets. Different cultural backgrounds bring with it many obstacles and challenges. These issues are apparent in areas such as etiquette, values, expressions, behavior and non-verbal communication.

We live in a globalized world where there is increasing interconnection between different societies. But, this globalization does not infer homogeneity of culture. So, let us look at some of the major solutions to avoid cross-cultural issues in global software outsourcing.

Manage Relationships: In case of a cross-border outsourcing, actively managing client-vendor relationship on both sides is important. Using systems common to both parties would be handy as it would provide equal knowledge and control over the system. Other ways to harmonize the relationship would be use of common processes and common compatible technologies. Use of systems, processes and technology can be overcome, but major issues prevail in norms and values as they are deeply rooted in cultural backgrounds and work style. These require quite a huge effort from both parties to be eliminated. One other way of harmonizing cross-culture relationship is by adjusting to a compromise working culture wherein both parties agree to modify their work behavior to take account of the other’s cultural norms.

Staffing: Some movement across other cultures is possible but, one cannot expect expatriates to completely behave like locals. This issue can be handled by involving people who can bridge this cultural gap. Say for example if some Canadian company outsources its work to India, then the company should look for an Indian who has been residing in Canada for long and understands the culture in the outsourcing destination very well. This helps to successfully oversee complex projects as the individual involved is well acquainted with working cultures of both the places. An alternative solution for the software vendor might be to keep in place a team of mixed cultural team.

Training: Training about local culture to employees before posting them at a particular location. This can be a basic orientation course to a more focused language and cultural practice. This should not be a one-way learning. Rather, a two-way learning is required (training for employees of both parties involved in relationship) for well-informed understanding of every process involved in the project.

To work in this modern-day world, extra effort should be put in by an individual and the companies to tackle cross cultural issues. This will not only lead to effective business practice but also, increase cross-cultural understanding.

Author – Suryakant Behera

Today existing database industry is worth 40 billion dollars. NoSQL is starting up, used to provide open-source development and deployment solutions to business apps. It is focused on internet and global applications. Some of the recognizable customers coming from all different verticals are Zynga (largest customer from social gaming industry), Salesforce, Docomo, Cisco, Orbitz, AOL etc. It provides flexible, high performance and scalable database. It stores large amount of data, supports large number of users and generates lot of database operations.

A Brief Background:
In the period since the 1970s, database technology has kept pace with the increasing resources becoming available from the computing platform: notably the rapid increase in affordable capacity and speed of disk storage and of main memory. All Relational databases have dominated the database industry for the last 40 years. The main competitors are Oracle, IBM db2, Microsoft with SQL Server which powers most of the business operations but they are stagnating now.

Current Need:
Today, people are more interested in database solutions which will handle more data and render apps in seconds without fail. They need real time interactive databases, storing huge amount of information, measuring app load time in sub-milliseconds. All at the time when nowadays we have 2 billion people connected to internet at the same time browsing app stores, downloading apps, chatting, playing, hosting online meetings, video calls, listening to music etc. More and more apps with huge number of users (millions of them) using the same app simultaneously. All this needs exceptional data processing capabilities by the database.

Introducing NoSQL:
NoSQL has all that and more. It supports semi-structured and structured data fitting all tables in relations databases. NoSQL is an emerging class of data management software that is optimized for the needs of interactive web applications, providing better scalability, performance and a more flexible data model than relational database technology. Mobile users are tremendously increasing and IT market affecting globally. They provide a big effect in accessing applications, these were the underlying trends that is moving NoSQL into a new horizon.

In this new era of Big Data, Big Users, Cloud Computing and SaaS, NoSQL advocates claim that NoSQL data model flexibility, performance and horizontal scalability make them better suited to the needs of today’s applications. NoSQL users can expand a cluster up to hundreds of servers, automatically keeping the workload evenly distributed among them. With consistent sub-millisecond response time. People are getting rid of centralized relational database which is costing more to low cost NoSQL open-source database which has  distributed architecture and provides wider data horizontal database solutions.

Internet service vendors, social networks, online business services, online retail, advertising industries with big clients like  BMW, Honda prefer NoSQL scalable databases these days to support huge network traffic.

Road Ahead:
More sophisticated applications having NoSQL database solutions for the next 20 years will rule internet, enterprises, govt/military providing quick architecture solutions rendering well in all electronic gadgets like ipad, iphone etc. With NoSQL social online games scaling up from 5 to 50 million users, data which is stored very quickly with running on high performance from  6 to 600 servers. And there are fewer chances of failure or crashes.

Lets make it simple whether we will use it or not, whether a particular technology will meet our business needs, whether it will be easy enough to render apps at targeted time. For some projects, I can use Oracle, MySQL, or SQL Server (yes, I’ve used all three on different projects) for clients who have large amounts of data that fit well into a tabular structure and who will be doing queries that pull back thousands of records per query. (Think financial applications.) For software that’s more oriented towards pulling individual objects (such as an online organizer tool, or an online content management system , I can opt for something like NoSQL.

NoSQL does great with large complex structures that are typically read in individually, while the large relational databases do well when I’m processing huge amounts of data. My client’s data needs are nowhere near as big as Google, so we don’t encounter any performance and scalability problems. All depends on me, my choice which technology to choose before starting my project NoSQL or Relational database.

Interested to know how we can assist you? Contact us to know more.

Author – Shweta Chhotray
 

The topic of outsourcing continues to grab headlines irrespective of success or failure of offshore outsourcing projects. Companies have mixed response when it comes to feedback on their working experience with outsourced companies. Some companies might have had very good experience working with outsourced companies whereas others might have faced failure. Reasons may be many but identifying one or even a group of reasons is a tough task and sometimes impossible. A number of contributing factors cumulatively result in Offshore Outsourcing IT projects to fail. Some of the generic factors might be improper planning, ineffective management, inaccurate estimates or unclear objectives. But, apart from these, projects fail for some other minor but very influential factors such as communication, infrastructure complexity, culture and sometimes labor division. Let us discuss each of these minor factors to avoid mistakes and as a result avoid project failure.

Communication: We know that communication alone does not only mean language. While dealing with different teams across different geographies, it is obvious that communication would undergo other major challenges like time zones, location, distance etc. All these should be managed properly before the start of an offshore outsourcing project. Anybody dealing with an outsourcing project should previously finalize upon the modes and mechanism of communicating. By this I mean that, whether e-mails/Skype calls/video conferencing is sufficient or do they need daily status reports and other online facilities to monitor.

Infrastructure: A very important aspect of offshore outsourcing project is infrastructure. This not only includes physical presence but other underlying factors like facilities & hardware. The companies outsourcing needs to ensure that all the team members have adequate tools and access required to complete the work. Hence, they need to make sure that all issues related to privacy, licensing, intellectual property rights and trade agreements are sorted out.

Culture: Culture is an under-estimated factor for project failure but, it is very subtle and can affect offshore outsourcing projects to a great extent. Work culture is different in different countries. Hence it is imperative that, every organization should be fully aware of the outsourced location and its culture. Properly managing culture would definitely yield a successful project. One always needs to understand how people in different cultures behave to work with them as work attitude may differ from one culture to the other.

Labor Division: Sometimes work is divided among various outsourced companies by the offshore company in order to reduce money. But doing so will not reduce your pain. Instead, it will affect the project’s success, increase worries and also affect long term relationship. Evaluating companies based on their strengths and weaknesses irrespective of the price is rather a better and less risky way of allocating work.

In my knowledge, these factors are the most under-rated ones but are highly effective while deciding upon a project’s future apart from the other mentioned points of improper planning, ineffective management, inaccurate estimates and unclear objectives. Hence, these should not be neglected and taken care of prior to outsourcing a project.

Cheers,

Author – Suryakant Behera

In this case, one should study well the “do”s and “don’t”s of coming up with a mobile web site. There are several variations; from a full desktop web site to a mobile web site the scope may vary greatly. That is why one has to analyze the requirement well. Doing so could conjointly facilitate the designer do away with some common design mistakes. Here are some of the mistakes often done during designing

Don’t Forget About Scaling

It is important to think about the scale of your web site, you have to keep on top of your mind that in mobile, the web site would look smaller since the screen of mobile devices are smaller. While not considering the scale, your website won’t look smart on mobile. Set your mobile website’s breadth to suit a standard mobile device’s screen and ensure that each element is displayed with correct size and the location.

Don’t Use Very Small Buttons

Remember that the buttons in your website should be tappable or clickable by one finger. Don’t ever forget that! You simply ought to use a minimum of 30-40 pixels that matches the finger. You must even have enough area around these buttons in order that alternative components won’t be enclosed within the clicking.

Don’t Provide Lengthy Forms

Long forms would definitely not be correct for a mobile web site. You would be offering the users a tedious job filling out forms on mobile if they’re too long. Produce easy forms that don’t need a lot of information from the users. You will conjointly set the sort of inputs to numbers or letters solely counting on what’s needed for a precise field. This can be a lot of easier for mobile users.

Always Heed To Feedback

As always, you wish to check your mobile web site on different devices and by different folks.  Get feedback from them and promptly fix issues pointed out. Concentrate on each single and every detail from the audience’s feedback. Testing is the key,so, never ever skip testing and soliciting feedback from visitors.

Author – Basanta Moharana

All the planning and arrangements were very well managed by Mindfire Solutions and I had a very nice experience in staying, attending and learning from these sessions and workshops from 10-14 Dec, 2012.

In total, I attended 2 workshops and 13 sessions. Almost all of them were quite good but some of the one which I liked most are:

• Intellitrace, What is it and How Can I Use it to My Benefit?
• AKA! webforms is still not dead
• Static Analysis in .NET 
• What’s New in the .NET 4.5 BCL
• Workshop: Services – Using WCF and ASP.NET Web API
• The LINQ Programming Model
• Patterns for Parallel Programming

While attending various sessions and workshops I had a chance to interact with some of the speakers and developers and also visit the stalls of various vendors who came to showcase their products.

Everyone was excited to explore and learn the new features in VS 2012. Most of the sessions were  focusing on the new features and enhancements in ASP.net 4.5, Parallel Programming, WEB API and MVC4.

Some of the new areas which I explored and got to know more in depth are:

WEB API and WCF

With the release of new ASP.Net WEB API there was some curiosity in almost of every .NET developer working on WCF that what are new ASP.NET WEB API and how much it is similar or differs from WCF. This workshop was exactly as per expectation which walked through the WCF concepts. All complex configuration of WCF were discussed. I got to learn some interesting things like Internally WCF and WEB API are from two different teams and WEB API is not replacement of WCF services. However WEB API can be considered over WCF Rest for building true RESTful applications on the .NET Framework. WEB API features HTTP Programming Model and Uses MVC routing engine for custom routes.
ASP.NET MVC4

Throughout my professional career I have been working on Windows and ASP.net web application. I had a chance to learn about the ASP.net MVC 3 but never worked on it so I was especially looking for this workshop “Mastering ASP.NET MVC4 in Just One Day”. In 8 hour the speaker has created a personal website and walk through the various aspects of ASP.Net MVC 4 like

• Routing

• Models

• Controllers

• Views

• Web API

• Mobile Web Applications

• Advanced Features

We also learnt about the various technical challenges involved in upgrading the MVC 3 to MVC4.

Static Analysis in .NET

Being a member of code catalyst team this session was very helpful for me. I came to know about various tools and points to be considered during code review. The demo regarding the code analysis in VS 2012 was really nice. I also got to know that performance of code analysis in VS 2012 is much better than previous versions. In previous version i.e. VS 2010 when code analysis was enabled it was taking a lot of time and was really slow but in the new version, VS 2012, it is considerably faster.  Also the steps for adding team level or project level rules was interesting.

.NET 4.5 BCL

In this I got to know about the various new methods available in C# 5 and VB 11 for Asynchronous programming. It was primarily focused on file and network based APIs and how to take advantage of these two amazing keywords async/await. Prior to .net 4.5, there was no way to stop a regular expression from completing its task but in 4.5, Regex methods now accept a TimeSpan value. In .net 4.5 Read-Only Dictionary is added. Also in .net 4.5 ZipArchive and ZipArchiveEntry have been added so basically file can be zipped or unzipped using .net native code and various other new features to be discovered and implemented..

ASP.Net 4.5

Being an ASP.Net developer and when I found so many sessions, workhops and focus on MVC4, it  somehow felt that ASP.net 4.5 was being missed a bit. This session provided a lot of new features of ASP.net 4.5 which are really nice. Some of them were – Model Binding, strongly typed data type, Value provide query string, Add ScriptManager to Global.asax, Enabling 4.5 Request Validation at field level, await, Async Modules & Handlers and better support for HTML 5. It do also has some additional updates and support for performance improvements and bundling and minifications.

Apart from these there were many other areas which I also learned during VS Live like LINQ, Entity Framework, Parallel Programming, ASP.NET MVC4, SPA (Single Page Application) etc..

Once again I will like to thanks Mindfire and its unique CTC initiative which gave me an opportunity to attend a world class technical event and enhance my knowledge to improve my ability to write better codes, do code review more efficiently, mentor and help other teams members which will directly or indirectly help us deliver better.

Author – ANUJ KUMAR SAHU

“I was referred to you by a friend who has worked with Mindfire and highly recommended your services. I was impressed by the technical competence of my emails and discussion with your group. However, (and I’m sure you know this), I have been “warned” by people in the SaaS business I know over here, that subcontracting to some offshore firms can be “a nightmare” and that work, though much less expensive, can take three or four times as long. Some even say the quality of the coding is poor.”

This summarized some top points of apprehension for anyone about to start a relationship for off-shore software development. All 3 problems and points of apprehension are true in general, but at Mindfire we have these points covered . Although working with us is the only way to get a real impression of things, let me share thoughts about these as they relate to Mindfire.

1. Quality of code is poor: yes, in many cases.

Most IT/software companies in India do everything – from programming to design to graphics to SEO to data-entry to marketing and so on. You cannot be the best at everything. Often you end up being mediocre in each. We do only one thing – “off-shore small-team software development” – and we do it very well. Starting from hiring to testing to reviews to environment to training to culture, we are focused on being the rock-stars of software development – only.

2. Takes longer: yes, in many cases.

Sometimes it is due to incompetence (related to first point above) and sometimes it is intentional over-reporting for financial reasons. We have neither problem. Money has never been a driver – we want to earn with pride and only want money that we deserve. We have been around for 13 years now and want to be around for much more than that – you cannot violate Truth and Integrity, and last that long.

3. A nightmare: yes, in many cases.

Sometimes it is due to communication issues, sometimes it is due to clients expecting magical solutions to unexpressed desires (our people may weave technical magic, but no other types!). Sometimes it is due to lack of mutual respect, sometimes it is due to plain old incompetence or inexperience. In any case, we offer a pleasant experience to our clients. We have selfish reasons – when our clients can relax about work, they can focus more on growing their business, which will create more work for us! When you are focused on the long run, things are quite simple actually.

This small exchange has not touched upon even more issues in off-shore software development! Those related to communication, culture, engineering replication, understanding, attrition – the list goes on.

It is sad to have to accept these points, but often they are, indeed, true. At Mindfire, we are building an organization that accepts and addresses problems in off-shore software development, rather than denying problems. Every day we find ways of doing things better, and each of them adds up.

Author – Chinmoy Panda

Let us start with a simple task. Have you integrated your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter accounts yet? These are considered to be widely used platforms and presence in these sites will help you gain that extra mileage. Check your account settings and integrate these sites today.

For people who have already completed the first task, let’s go ahead and discuss some of the tools that will help you manage your social media efforts. You will find numerous tools available online to make use of but, let us target the ones that are free and easy to use. According to my view I have personally used a lot of tools like Hootsuite, SocialOomph, Ping.fm now Seesmic Ping etc. Out of these, I liked Hootsuite the most. So, let’s discuss Hootsuite in detail so that you can get a feel of the platform and then try out.

Hootsuite by far is the best tool that I have used for all my social media activities. You can easily add all your social media profiles like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn etc here. It creates independent tabs for all the profiles you add. After adding these to your hootsuite account there is no need for you to visit those sites again. You can keep track of updates, comments, mentions etc from this application. Hootsuite also allows you to do a lot of other jobs like tweeting, scheduling tweets, replying, re-tweets, follow, un-follow, commenting, monitoring Facebook pages and many more.

In social media it is always important to monitor your effort. Hootsuite also has this feature to track your efforts through its Analytics tab. You can use this feature to know which of your links shared has got you visitors and also the region from where he/she arrived. There are many other advanced features in Hootsuite but, those are paid services. Using Hootsuite will reduce your social media effort to a larger extent.

There are also other ways to promote your articles/blogs in the online world. We will discuss those in my next post. So, keep reading and do not hesitate to browse through the tools mentioned and choose your best one.

Author – Suryakant Behera