Month: July 2023

DevOps is spreading rapidly throughout the technical community and the concept is wholeheartedly being embraced by developers for providing non-stop delivery. DevOps is a huge concept and covers various areas of development. Today, we will walk you through the concept of DevOps, its purpose and expert tips for securing continuous delivery through DevOps implementation.

We Need DevOps to Cope with the Dynamically Evolving Software and Internet Realm

Industries, based on software and internet, have transformed over the years and will continue transforming. Today software is an integral part of businesses, be it entertainment or banking, health or aviation.Companies use software application primarily to interact with clients in the form of online services, web applications,and other digital mediums.

Software applications are also used to boost operational efficiencies and stabilize business management. Whether it is logistics, communications, or customer management, software is ruling everything everywhere in order to transform value chain.

DevOps is vital for all businesses to improve their software delivery and boost their client service efficiency. Companies today must transform how they design and deliver software to their clients – it should be more agile, agile in methodologies, agile in principles and values, and agile in practices and tools.

What is DevOps All About?

The concept of DevOps is a new term emerging in the technology industry that combines two major trends, namely ‘Agile Operation’ or ‘Agile Infrastructure’, and ‘The Value Generated by Collaborating Development and Operation Staffs in Development Life-cycle Stages’.

In simple terms, DevOps is the collaboration of tools, practices, and ideologies that allows organization’s development team to deliver applications and services rapidly, at a higher velocity. It is a practice acquired by the development and operation team thatwork together in the entire lifecycle of a project, from design through implementation to after-delivery support.

The main purpose of being attuned to DevOps is to evolve and improve products at a faster pace than the traditional software development and infrastructural management processes what most organizations use.

DevOps provides the speed that gives organizations the capability to serve their clients more efficiently, at a reduced cost and time, and compete in the industry more confidently.

How Does DevOps Work?

Under this model, the Development and Operations team are grouped together and are required to perform under a single team. When a project is consigned, the engineers from both the teams work across the entire project development lifecycle – Design phase and Testing to Implementation and Operations – and produce a set of skills not limited to particular department or function.

Along with the Development and Operations Team, Quality Assurance and Information Security Teams may also closely work together with them throughout the application implementation process. The team integration differs in each DevOps model.

Teams refurbish the traditional manual and slow practices into automated processes. With the help of state-of-the-art technologies and defining tools, the team evolves the applications reliably and quickly.

The new set of tools and processes alsoallow individual engineers to accomplish tasks independently without having to rely on other developers. For instance, with the help of the DevOps model, engineers can easily deploy code and provision infrastructure on their own. This independence further boosts the team’s swiftness in project delivery.

DevOps promote continuous delivery, and continuous delivery reduces risks in several ways, such as:

• Breaks down work, and incremental delivery moderates delivery cost and time
• Adapting to changes becomes fast and reliable. Teams can respond to failures quickly and mitigate security threats positively
• Implementing changes becomes cheaper
• Adapting to changes and applying changes become a norm
• Continuous Delivery ensures critical ‘last miles’ of productions superiorly taken care of

Tips to Make DevOps Implementation Easy and Secure Continuous Delivery

DevOps transition should be done systematically and everything implemented should be tracked correctly. That is why experts ask us to keep an eye on KPIs when migrating over to DevOps development.

1. Track Change Lead Time

Track the period of time between when a change is designed and when it is actually implemented into the production process.

2. Have a Look at the Featured Released Per Time Period

Determine what constitutes new features, as executives may more likely be interested to see data that reflects quarters. Youhave to also determine the overall tracking of release to show how DevOps model positively influencesthe speed of work done with fewer bugs.

3. Keep an Eye on Bugs

You will want to track the number of bugs that are reported in the development process. Once you employ a DevOps model, you should be able to show the significant difference in the numbers of bugs tracked after implementation.

4. Test Case Automation

It is important to track the metrics, such as the number of test cases automated, the average percentage of all test cases automated, and the time taken to run each test case. This should be followed from the very beginning of adding automation to your QC environment.

Here are 5 more quick tips for continuous delivery

5. Safety Check Measures for Automated Processes

Since you will make changes more often, you might be prone to making mistakes. Therefore, to find mistakes, you need simple and fast safety checks, before the authorities find out. Hence, you will have to add assets or tests for common mistakes at the end of the automated build pipeline in test and production. Some of the things you need to consider include default and missing credentials, HTTPS and SSL settings, identifying vulnerabilities, open ports, and user permissions.

There are tools and services that you can use to monitor the automated processes. InSpec, Cloud Services,Gauntit, OSQuery are few to name.

6. Conduct Rapid Risk Assessment

In order to ensure risks are visible to the teams and management, a lightweight risk assessment process should be your ideal action plan. The risk management test will enable developers and engineers to make decisions quickly and safely, while they continuously look out for potential new risks upfront before coding begins.

It helps teams and management find the right tools, framework, and libraries. Usually, a rapid risk assessment takes about 30 minutes to complete. The main objective of the RRA is to recognize the effects of a process or service to the productivity of the project. The assessment focuses on the data processed, stored or accessed.

7. Software Supply Chain Security against Database Vulnerability

Install a software tool that will automatically list and secure your continuous delivery process against database vulnerability. This is necessary to mitigate risks, technical debts, and security vulnerabilities that are injected by third-party codes. Some of the tools that you can leverage on for this purpose are OWASP dependency check, Licensed, GitHub Security alerts, Retire JS and Anchor Engine.

8. Conduct Security Units Tests

Security unit tests can benefit developers in several ways: they attest vulnerabilities are being fixed regularly, they teach developers how to eliminate happy path testing completely, and they prevent regressions. Although Normal tests can do the work effectively, you will have to further conduct happy tests, sad tests and bad tests to prove it.

You can use tools such as JUnit, NUnit,and Jasmine to write test as and when your find vulnerabilities, get it fixed by developers and then run the test again.

9. Code Scanning

Since accuracy and speed is very important in continuous delivery, you need to scan codes using automated static analysis scanners as they catch common coding mistakes and bad practices. It also backstops code reviews and fits naturally into workflows. Developers will receive the results directly.

Tools that will serve your purpose include Ruby on Rails (Brakeman), Java (SpotBugs, FindSecurityBugs plugin, FBContrib plugin), Docker (Hadolint), and Dot NET (Puma Scan, Microsoft DevSkim)

Achieving DevOps is more complex than reading a few books and playing around with tools and methodologies. You can attempt to do it on your own or better yet, outsource the process to a managed DevOps firm that has through and through experience in software development and exports.

Since, you will need to fill a number of key roles, such as DevOps Evangelist, Automation Expert, Software Developer, Software Tester,and a Manager, to ensure success, in case youdecide to implement DevOps internally, we encourage you to hire a professional team and further reduce your time and cost investment. DevOps is not only about deploying the right technology at the right time but also about streamlining the process and managing the change or transition through an experienced team.

E-commerce is the most thriving business model of the current era not to forget the most promising one too. E-commerce is constantly evolving in user experience and everything towards a positive direction. However, there are plenty of areas where e-commerce can improve its UX, and we completely stress about it. UI and UX are where the customer interaction starts and ends for any e-commerce business. Multiple choices and increasing competition have put a question mark on customer loyalty. So, e-commerce websites have to create phenomenal UX to engross customers and retain their loyalty or make them buy atleast one product before they exit the website.

UX does not entail the looks of the website alone; it is also about the navigation, language, images, operation, and transitions. It affects your visitors, your customers, your profits and your business overall. If you invest one dollar in your website UX at a time, you will get 100 dollars in return from your customer.

UX is everything. But, it has always been undervalued and underestimated. Today, we shall help you understand why you should care about ecommerce UX and provide you best ways to optimise UX in your ecommerce website.

Why Should You Care about UX?

UX is User Experience in simple terms.Let’s give you an example: it’s your wedding next month and you go to a very grand show room with an empty mind. You meet a very unfriendly head-stylist, who not only turns out to be uncooperative but also in the mood of selling the most expensive dress to you instead of offering you a customised product. Even though you buy the dress, you do not feel completely satisfied. You go to another shop with a vibrant customer service. The owner congratulates you and delegates the best stylist and two assistants for you, knowing that you have less time for the wedding. They take your measurements, show you different fabrics and designs, and at the end promises to make a personalised outfit for you, in lesser price. Which one will you choose?

If you select the second shop, you went for it because of your user experience. The same concept is applied to ecommerce UX. The more personalised and comprehensive experience you provide to your customers, more profits you will earn from them.

Typically, an E-commerce UX is measured by how easy and enjoyable it was for the visitors to navigate your store, find their product, and make a purchase. It is important to know that apart from the design, there are other elements that form a positive UX of a website. They are:

• Load time of the site
• Navigation
• Site’s mobile friendliness
• Simplicity, specification,and clarity of content
• Icon’s easiness to decipher
• Icons and options clarity and labels
• Process steps lucidity

In fact, every aspect of the website, including how you track your order or enter your OTP impacts the UX of it. And UX matters because today shoppers have lots and lots of options.

If you must know the figures, then in the year 2020 retail ecommerce sales will top $4 trillion, which is 14.6% of total retail spending of that year.

57% of the shoppers already abandon carts at the last minute as opposed to storeshopping, irrespective of a good UX. So, if your UX is annoying or just plain frustrating, shoppers won’t even think twice before walking out on your website.

Ecommerce Trends That You Should Follow In Coming Years

Here are few ecommerce UX trends that is been viral-ling in 2018 and that you should watch out in 2019.

a) Functional and Fascinating Brutalist Websites: 

It means minimising the amount of clutter on websites for customers to focus on the key aspect, such as icon, products, payment etc.

b) No More Hamburger Menus: 

Yes, although most retailers follow hamburger menus, it does have many flaws, such as hide key elements and make tasks difficult for users.

c) Simplified Landing Page Navigation: 

This essentially means that users will have clearer (and fewer) options to start with, leading them to take better decisions.

d) Shortcut Payment Process: 

Removes the need for users to enter lots of data while checking out. Features include automatic OTP confirmation, no need to enter card details or user name and password.

e) No Flat Design: 

Flat design signifies everything equally, including the weaker elements, which leads to the less attractive page and more effort on shoppers’ side.

f) Include More Animation: 

Although it is nothing new, micro UX animation is still trending and will continue to do so.

How Can You Improve Your Ecommerce UX? Top UX Optimising Solutions

While optimising an ecommerce website, several elements have to be checked and refined. We will focus on each element and discuss how to optimise it.

1. Optimizing the Homepage

The homepage determines the first look of your store, i.e. the storefront. You have to display the best assets of your store here without visually cluttering the space. Your homepage should mesmerise the customers in to buying atleast something before leaving the site.

Most first-time users judge the site they have landed on totally by its homepage content. And most customers pick things out of homepage content on a random shopping day. So, make your homepage diverse and personal. Include personalised content for each shopper entering into your site.

2. Optimizing Website Accessibility and Adaptiveness

Your website users should be able to access products and services on your site easily and comfortably, regardless of their age, location, language, device, operating system and internet speed. Your ecommerce site should be present and accessible everywhere and to everyone. For instance, you could add special accessibility or ambience for differently abled people, such as inclusion of ‘talk-back’ option for people suffering from low vision.

According to an adobe study, consumers use an average of five different devices. Include an aesthetically engaging homepage, with smooth and smart navigation. Your website should be able to adapt under any circumstances.

3. Optimizing Search and Navigation Time

Consumers place a lot of value on their search and navigation time on the website. Our attention span has considerably reduced to 7 minutes from 20 minutes. So, as a website you have to quickly provide everything to your consumer in those seven minutes. Autocomplete suggestions get the highest point when it comes to search optimization. This will encourage users to stay on your site to view products that are more available.

Good site navigation provides high-grade overview level of what the website offers. Properly labelling the pages will help customers easily identify and access the details of the product. Use specific and concise options, follow design conventions and navigations, and include many automatic search keywords.

4. Improving Site’s Responsiveness

Around 54% of the shoppers shop via their mobiles. Online shopping has translated into mobile shopping. In fact, due to changing lifestyle everyone prefers shopping on-the-go, while travelling, while visiting friends, in café and restaurants, and whenever and wherever they find time to look at their phones. So, obviously smartphones are a better choice for online shopping.

Here is an interesting fact revealed by KissMetrics: more than half of the shoppers leave a website if it takes more than 6 – 10 seconds to load. These people rely on their phone apps heavily as they loadfaster, not to forget background loading.

Therefore, if a retailer fails to make their ecommerce website mobile-friendly, they will actually be losing a big chunk of their customers. All of the website parameters should be optimised to suit mobile phones.

Adapting a responsive web design helps ecommerce websites improve each and every element the site offers and make it more fun for mobile users. For example, hamburger or dropdown menu can be used instead of website icons, the text and icon size can also be changed, the design and the navigation can be made more precise and so on.

5. Optimizing Listing of Products and Filters

54% of the major ecommerce websites suffer from poor categorization and 46% of the websites are severed because of very few product attributes in product listing. Consumers should be able to search, identify, and filter products in less than 60 seconds. If a website doesn’toffer such user experience, itis not optimised enough, and should probably aim for it.

Finding the right product without much effort is not possible without an efficient filtering system.

Ecommerce websites should come with great filters that can narrow any type of search within a category. This will help customers to browse through product categories smoothly and effectively.

6. Optimizing Cross-Selling Features

Cross selling is basically giving the user a personalised and comprehensive experience. For instance, if your consumer is purchasing a smartphone, recommend him or her with related products, such as phone cover and screen-guard. This feature considerably increases the purchasing rate, which directly impacts the profit ratio.

7. Products Details and Personalization

Today’s users are smart and intelligent. They buy products only after viewing the product details, its ratings, and reviews. The product description page plays a keyrole in determining the purchase rate.

Provide relevant and appropriate information. Do not cheat and do not overdo. Mention what actually it is. Divide the product description into relevant sections, such as product dimensions, description, payment, reviews, ratings, and FAQs.

Product name, pricing, mode of payment, and video and image quality should be optimized thoroughly.

You should also make sure that you offer a personalised experience to your consumer by placing cookies to their server. So, when the customer visits your site next time, he or she will be able to view a tailor-made list of choices on the homepage based on her or his previous search.

There are tools that can identify UX problems on your site. Use them to your advantage and get in touch with a professional UX/UI designer or a digital strategist for effective solutions. You have to prioritise things. You can do it yourself if you know what to look for and think from a consumer’s point of view.

Change is constant and agility is part of the change. Agility defines the ability to swiftly re-organize into something dynamic when and as the environment asks for it. Agility in sales is very important. We live in a fast-phase world with technology driving our vehicles and lighting our rooms. Technology has changed the way we communicate and do business. So, if a sales teamfails to adapt to the rapidly changing demands in business, it will eventually land into a lot of trouble.

Before the internet, salespeople were the chief source of product information. Salesmen passed the information and based on it buyers made their purchase decision. The success of a sales team was determined on how effectively the team presented the product’s effectiveness in solving the buyers’ problems.

You either Adjust or Expire

Things have changed. Buyers research products online thoroughly and then contact the sales professionals. In fact, they complete 60% of the sales process themselves. They use the internet, run through social media, and use all possible ways to know more about the product than what they could find from the sales teams.

Phenomenal sales teams have adapted and adjusted to the changing needs by changing the way they sell. One of the tools that quick-thinking companies have implemented is developing CRM systems so that sales teams are able to produce shareable, high-quality, and widely interactive content to attract potential clients, and convert leads into customers.

What is Agile in Sales?

The agile methodology is coined by a group of software developers who were frustrated with the traditional software development process. Agile methodology brings ‘Collaboration’, ‘Flexibility’ and ‘Normalization of Uncertainties’ together. Agile Methodology focuses on four values of sales, namely:

• A working software instead of documentation
• People and communication over processes and tools
• Customer loyalty and interaction over signing off stringent contracts
• Responding to change instead of strictly following from plan A to plan B

Agile in Sales is an all-new way of project management. The traditional Waterfall approach’s rigidness – follow a step-by-step process, long planning sessions, coding and testing, and strictly adhere product planning rules – is considerably eliminated, or rather smoothened by Agile Methodology. It follows the rule, ‘complete small chunks of shippable code’, which can be designed, coded, tested, and shipped in a span of 15 to 30 days, i.e. a single sprint.

Agile developers work on short and defined periods to accomplish outputs instead of completing product in a long period of time.

Everything here is shared in daily stand-up meetings – including the challenges, current outputs, general achievements, highlights, weaknesses, and individual efforts. Feedback is asked at all times, while major strategic changes are implemented any given point based on the feedbacks, even if the product nears a delivery date. There are no set process rules in the agile method.

Agile Method is highly flexible, in terms of constant adaptation and improvement. This allows sales teams to respond to client’s specific needs and immediate demands more effectively.

Roles Defined in Agile Sales Teams

Sales Manager/ Team Leader: 

Although, he is not the major contributor, the manager or team leader is responsible for maintaining and channelizing the overall vision of the project. They coach the sales team on sales techniques, provide information, give valuable insights, and address issues faced by the team.

Scrum-master:

He is at the center of the team and acts as the coach of the team ‘Sales’. His work is to see if the team is moving in the right direction, implementing the right strategy, and making sure that the team is constantly motivated and rewarded.

Sales representatives:

Salespersons have individual and group targets and their aim is accomplishing their own target and helping team members to attain the team target. They are responsible for building the lead pipelines and initiating interaction with clients.

What Agile Sales Aim For – Their Core Values

• Ensure the organization and the solution provided is in alignmentwith the customer’s needs.
• Feed the top of the funnel with great leads by frequently collaborating with other teams to spot trends and mitigate technical and procedural issues.
• Nurture and feed existing opportunities through sales lifecycle.
• Ensure sales team is supported with the right tools and strategies, follows the correct steps, make sure their development is measured using right metrics.

You need to blend all of the above – right leadership, correct metrics, and systemized processes to bring out the best recipefor a successful Agile Sales Team

What Determines the Success of Agile Sales Teams

Agile sales, when done right, will reduce or completely uproot many issues, including a bad working environment, low team motivation, personal problems, nil team effort, and process misunderstanding. Instead of making your sales team a group of individuals who are aggressive, competitive and self-centered, adopting agile methodology will make your team an ideal model, known for working collaboratively, learning from each other, helping each other, working together to achieve a common goal.

The perfect blend of ingredients that determine success includes:

• Strong Leadership
  The team should be led by a knowledgeable, empowering, benevolent, and prudent team manager. He should not hesitate to take account of his decisions and actions. He should lead the team forefront and should understand what is best for the team and stand by it.
• Flexible yet Comprehensive Processes
  The team should thrive on an efficient process, designed by the team leader. Frequent sprint reviews, daily stand-up meetings, right feedback, and monthly and quarterly reviews should be properly implemented to help the team understand where they currently stand, where they need to work, and what worked for them and what did not.
• Right tools and Metrics
  Tools like CRM, lead databases, smart tools like Boomerang and Hoopla and task automation are must empower the team to work smart and not hard. The team leader or manager should effectively measure the sales activities and performances closely through sales call data, pipeline analysis, conversion rate, win vs. loss rate and sales funnel analysis.
• Prioritization
  One of the important keys to success is prioritization. The sales team manager should prioritize things as per ‘urgency’ and ‘importance’ and guide the team in the right direction. He should know what to do, when to do and how to do a particular task.
• Avoiding Distractions
  Distractions should be strictly avoided until the target is achieved. Agile methodology in sales highly concentrates on avoiding wastes. It follows the proverb, ‘a stitch in time, saves nine’ and works towards achieving it.

Your entire sales team should be ready to shift to an agile method. Unless it is not, it will be a chaos. Every single person should be fully engaged to fulfill the team goal – right from planning goals and setting schedules to implementing and evaluating metrics. Make sure you encourage feedback and value employee opinions to carry a successful transition of the sales team into a dynamic Agile based sales team.

Alexa is all ready to play a leading role in enterprise development

Voice-activated technology has been around for quite some time now. Remember the IVR that you often listen to while punching digits to get to your request – that is your traditional form of voice-activated technology. However, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) fails miserably to understand clear and explicit requests and ends up presenting maddening and irrelevant options.

Then there is Siri. It is good and we really appreciate its efforts, but it is still imperfect. Siri is still trying to improve its natural language processing.

On the other hand, writers, medical professionals, and medical transcriptionists have been using speech recognition software for years now. Similarly, other voice-activated devices that control your home appliances, such as the AC and washing machine, and that provides security to your home have also gained much popularity.

No doubt about it, these apps are pretty good and effective. However, if you start speaking beyond the words issued in the formatting commands, they become challenging to use. Most speech recognition software that medical transcriptionist use do not recognize words that are beyond medical terms.

Entry Alexa and Other Similar Voice-Activated Apps

Here comes Alexa, the most inventive voice-activated technology you will ever come across. From simple transactions, like answering “what’s the cricket score between India and Australia”, “what agile technology in sales means” Alexa has evolved into answering direct questions that require narrow, definable and to-the-point answers.

Alexa and similar other Voice-Activated Technology based apps, such as Google Home, Apple’s HomePod and Microsoft’s Invoke will soon be used to improve management functions and cut costs across several prime industry verticals, including IT, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Aviation, Financial Services, and Law. Alexa is already accessible from your smartphone, apart from your kitchen counter and echo.

And soon, Alexa’s new skills or voice commands will help businesses comprehensively – be it at a developing stage, or at marketing management, for an administrative purpose or for business analysis.

Alexa’s Technology Supports Smart Phones

According to a survey, 95% of Americans use some kind of smartphone and what will be more inescapable in terms of quantity is mainstream adoption are voice-enabled mobile applications. In other words, people will look for voice-activated apps that they can simply download on their existing smartphone, without fretting over purchasing a completely new device, setting it up, and learning how to use it.

Most of us are not yet comfortable with the idea of giving voice-activated devices whole access and control over our home devices, security, cars, and workplaces.

This is where Alexa makes things easier with comprehensive third-party integration, outperforming Siri, Google Voice, and Cortana. The Introduction of Amazon Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) ensures that third-party app developers are able to create apps powered by Alexa without needing any native support. ASK allows mobile and web app developers to tap the power of Alexa and it’s 30, 000 plus and growing skills.

It also lets developers build in the cloud for free without any coding required.

Alexa Allows Personalised Business Experience with Alexa Skills Sets

Alexa Skill Blueprints is a new way introduced by Amazon to create personalized skills and responses for Alexa. App developers just need few sets of easy to use templates and they will be all set to develop customized experience for their consumers, management, and end users.

Alexa allows developers to build personalized voice experiences, making it even more useful for users’ homes and offices. You can add any skill based on your requirement. It could be “Alexa, what is the best city in Madhya Pradesh, India?” or a particular skill that offers helpful information for your babysitter or driver or your housekeeper.

The experience of using Alexa Skills Blueprint is like filling in the blanks. You can use Skill Blueprints to create and share interactive stories and unlimited skills in areas like Fun and Games, Learning and Knowledge, Home, and Entertainment. Users will be able to share the skills via Social Media, Text, WhatsApp, Skype etc.

Amazon Alexa Skills KIT

Alexa’s Skills KIT are separated into Various Models, such as Custom Interactions, Smart Home Skills, Video Skills, Flash Briefing Skills, and List Skills. Developers should have a good handle on the coding basics to customize an Alexa skill. Alexa Skills Kit helps developers to strategize and develop new skills based on customer requirements.

All they need is an Amazon Developer account to develop customized skills. Based on the requirement, the Alexa interface supports Lambda, the Amazon Coding Language.
For instance, the Custom Interaction skills require more legwork in determining terminology and overall model interaction, while the rest of Skills come with a pre-defined API that allows more effective skill building. While the former provides flexibility and innovation, the latter makes work easy and quick.

Custom Interactions and Skills:

Developers define the intent of the skill, sample utterances, and invocation names when creating a custom skill. In simple words, ‘Intents’ are the actions you want Alexa to perform. ‘Sample Utterances’ represents the words and phrases used to start Intents. ‘Invocation Names’ is added to identify each skill as a whole.

Alexa furthermore allows developers to add images, audio files, and video files to accompany a skill, which helps the skills to carry out their ultimate goals. Amazon Alexa provides custom skill structures prototype, which developers can use as a tool to measure the standard, quality, and compatibility of new skills created.

API based Personalised Skills

With pre-built APIs, developers need not have to define the interactions, as is the case of Custom Interactions, which allows them to quickly build skills on the platform. Each skill is broken down furthermore to develop specific business-related skills. Each API comes with different instructions that developers must follow. Developers may have to work with different API to create a single skill. The number of APIs totally depends on the skill you plan to create.

Top 10 Business-Savvy Skills by Alexa

We have compiled a list of Alexa skills for enterprise success that would make the Artificial Intelligence behind Alexa more business-savvy.

Skill 1: Cloud Admin

As the name suggests, Alexa Cloud Admin skill manages your cloud services linked with Amazon Web Services. Developers can create invigorating functions, such as customized Lambda Functions, Analyse bills, Manage EC2 instances, and so many other interesting stuff.

Skill 2: Astrobot

Astrobot is an email assistant, which lets Alexa handle customer’s Gmail account or any other email account. Astrobot can read out messages, snooze notifications, delete and archive emails, and mark them as user instructions. What’s more? It can even send replies to mail senders. Android and iOS app developers can also integrate Astrobot’s Slack Version to power Android and iOS devices.

Skill 3: Quick Events

If you do not want to miss even a single important meeting and want to ace in time management, Quick Events will come to your rescue. You can either provide the details all at once or give them one by one. It is primarily integrated into your Google Calendar but can be personalized with other calendars as well. You can provide relative dates, such as ‘coming Thursday or two Sundays from now’.

Skill 4: Ticket Now

TicketNow empowers IT service management. It allows you to create and manage IT incident tickets in ServiceNow. By integrating Alexa TicketNow to AWS, users will be able to not only create and manage tickets but also add and review comments on them and report SLA breaches, just by talking to Alexa.

You can customize Alexa skill as per company need, functions, and IT infrastructure. Amazon is still working on its features. So, as of now, you will have to manually feed in priority and urgent details via touch-screen or keyboard.

Skill 5: Voice Metrics

Voice metrics eases out the job of going through vital business data on Slack Board, Google Sheet or Amazon REST API by reading them out to the user. The Voice Metric API also allows developers to set up ‘business briefing’ for business data. Any business data – your sales, your staffs, your customers, your orders or inventory status – will be reported by Voice Metrics.

Skill 6: Vigil Web Monitoring

This skill lets IT technicians and staffs identify website downtime and get a status update on their company website. The skill will let users know everything about a site which is down and will notify users when the site is up.

Skill 7: Git Knife

Extremely beneficial for software development and related products companies, Git Knife is all about providing information about software, new tools, new programs, and new applications in Git repositories. It also helps you pick up new tools and software based on your requirement and budget.

Skill 8: RingByName

RingByName is a smart VOIP service meant only for businesses. It lets users place calls by number, even to people who are not in the database. The skill can initiate a call to any telephone or extension in seconds.

Skill 9: Runtime Helper

This one is for the programmers out there. Whenever programmers want to know the run time of an algorithm, Alexa will butt in with an accurate answer. It acts as a vocal crib-sheet for the time complexity of algorithms or data structure. It will report user on average access, search, insertion, and deletion run times.

Skill 10: Bug Tracker

If you are a regular user or developer of Apache open source projects, then Alexa is here to help you track bugs real time by allowing you to find out how many open or recently closed tickets a project has received. Bug Tracker also offers status updates on particular tickets. There is a published code for the skill on GitHub that allows anyone to create their own version, which they can link to their bug tracker.

Alexa’s features have progressed 100% from 2017 and Amazon aims to bring in more functionalities to improve quality of life and quality of work. Soon Alexa voice-activated technology will be at the helm of the business, offering assistance to staffs to boost customer experience, reduce costs, and improve overall productivity.

New Year is around the corner and we are sure everything is merrier and happier now. However, you cannot leave your business – that secures bread and butter for your employees and you – behind. To ensure your business thrives and leaves no stone unturned in the coming year, it should function exceptionally. And, one of the best ways to make sure of that is by hiring outsourced experts and developers before the New Year.

CG Vak is here to tell you why it is important for you to hire outsourced developers now, before the New Year and reap double benefits. We also have the perfect solution – a whole new bunch of certified experts at your disposal, ready to shred your work off your shoulders instantly.

Reap the Benefits for Next 12 Months

Hiring employees is one of the important decisions that most organizations procrastinate and put off until the last minute. Unfortunately, this habit takes a heavy toll on the companies. For instance, stalling on hiring new software developers and engineers during New Year may lead to instability in normal business functions. Your business will demand your time and attention for the primary key functionalities post-New Year but you will continue dilly-dallying the outsourcing process.

Most start-ups and SMEs, and even corporations focus on planning and designing for the next year during the year-end. This process leads them to push their execution processes, such as hiring resources, on to the following year’s agenda. This is why it is important that you hire now while most of your competitors are planning.You will be able to hire the best from the lot without much negotiations or bargains.

Reasons Are Exceptional – Let Us Tell You One by One

We are going to walk you through the four most important reasons to hire outsourced developers before the New Year. Take this chance and make things easier and profitable for your company growth next year.

Reason 1: More Promotional Offers, Best Deals,and Discounts

If you think you get Black Friday and Christmas deals only on Amazon and eBay, then you are wrong. Most software development outsourcing companies are authorized to give clients lower prices and value added services during Christmas and New Year. As much as you need great experts to bring your business up, outsourced companies also need clients to get their business up and running in the coming year. So, the benefits are for both and you should take advantage of it as much as they will do.

Hiring remote developers during the holidays often save a lot of time and money. The year-end, because of many holidays, often takes a toll on business due to closed target market. So, you could use the holidays to your benefit. Get your company representative talking to the software company and see if he can get a fair deal with extra benefits for the holidays.

Reason 2: Use Your Downtime Effectively

Aswe pointed out in the last section, in the last few months of the year businesses tendto drastically slowdown, so much so that most companies operatewithout new client acquisitions or sales for a long period. You can use this downtime to your advantage by pulling the trigger.

Most companies do not have an ideaon how to use downtime productively and increase sales, and so they wind up for the New Year. On the other hand, you can make advantageous and lucrative decisions by starting to hire new developers from late November or early December at a lower price. In fact, this is the best time to start the process of interviewing new developers, hiring them and onboarding them before New Year eve.

Since this is the end of the year, and since the rate of operation tends to get slower now, you will more likely have extra time. The scenario is no different in outsourced product development companies. Therefore, if you collaborate with them now, you will stand a better chance at receiving their full attention and their comprehensive service in quick turnaround time. The takeover process will also be short and simple.

Makes Onboarding Simpler and Effective

Onboarding is the most difficult part of hiring outsourced developers. In some cases, it takes one day to get up and running, while it takes a couple of weeks for complex projects. However, if you hire now, when the market is slow and when the demand for sales is high, you will be able to use developers’ full potential at your pace, and complete projects long before your competitors even start the process in January.

Reason 3: Give Yourself a Jumpstart, Ahead of Competitors

Imagine already having best-outsourced developers approved and signed for your next year projects, while your competition is still on the design phase.

Most companies wait for the New Year to start new things, including hire outsourced software developers. As soon as January hits, your competitors will mindfully run towards hiring the best-outsourced developers for their projects.

You can avoid being one of the chasers and put yourself on top of the list of outsourcing software agencies, such as CG VAK, by taking indecisiveness to your advantage. Be fast and do not wait for ‘New Year, New Beginnings and New Hires’ motto. Jump at the first opportunity and hire new outsourced developers when everyone else is relaxing and singing carols.

Make the commitment now, and start implementing action plans from January. Don’t be in the exact same position as everyone else is.

Reason 4: Stay Focused on Your Decision

If you are a business decision maker and a leader, one of your primary job roles must be staying focused and giving all your attention to organizational goals. If you divert your attention into things that do not revolve around business goals, you will lose focus from all of them concurrently.

You may feel drained out without making any progress. And, this may lead to procrastination and stalling decisions. The more you procrastinate and stall, the more you gamble your chances of hiring best-outsourced developers for your projects.

So, making the decisions before New Year gives you an opportunity to concentrate on core business activities, new projects, and new decisions when January comes around. When new requirements and demands surface with the fall of New Year, and if you still haven’t outsourced by then, you will inevitably have to put the hiring decisions aside to deal with new work.

To avoid the unhealthy cycle year by year, simply ask your HR team to start hiring outsourced developers earlier than usual and bring them on-board before New Year. This will save your time and energy and clear your thoughts in addressing crucial business concerns.

If you are committed to working, you have to hire outsourced developers or remote talents imminently. So, instead of dilly-dallying, speed up the process a little more and make the best hiring decisions before New Year.

It is Time to Make the Right Efforts and Decisions

If you push everything after New Year, you will run the risk of getting torn between managing and hiring recruits for business processes and looking after new demands and trends. Don’tgo by what others do. Everyday is an opportunity and you should grab it by walking throughthe road taken seldom.

Contact us before the New Year and reap exceptional benefits. Also, win a chance to hire developers for the next entire year.

2019 is going to be all about customer experience over anything else. At present, high-quality software has become a table stake for organizations aiming to achieve bigger milestones. Customer expectations have matured and businesses must evolve to deal with it, as well as confront the challenges of the market. In 2018, we saw an array of new technology solutions surfacing and the empowerment of Software Testing and Quality Assurance. We also saw that Agile, DevOps, DevSecOps, and Test Automation practices soared and sustained in software testing cycle in 2018.

The continuous technology advancements keep software testers on their toes to attain precision and accuracy in process and practice. This is going to continue in 2019, and therefore, we have tried and gauged some key trends in software testing that developers should anticipate this year.

We have shared what we think development and quality assurance teams need to focus on 2019 to ensure they have the best and they will be offering the best:

Data Testing for Better Development within Business

Needless to say, data will indefinitely influence business decisions and improve decision-making capabilities of management and development team. Therefore, it is imperative to test data and make sure the results derived from it are perfect and delivered in a format that is easily understood.

Therefore, testers must test each data terabyte, verify its effectiveness, and break them down into clusters to bring out much-needed outcomes.

Quality of data is the primary concern, especially in big data testing. Quality can be attained by taking into account the characteristics, such as data accuracy, precision, duplicity, and data consistency. Testers can perform several testing, including security testing, performance testing, and functional testing.

AI and Machine Learning in Software Testing

An article on Forbes titled, ‘AI In Software Testing: Will A Bot Steal Your Spot?’ stated, “The trend of relying on technology for highly repetitive tasks while enabling people to focus on high-value activities, such as revenue generation, relationship building, and growth management, is speeding up the pace of change. Because much of testing space is repetitive, I believe AI can easily be utilized in those areas. The remainder will be left to the testers whose job will be to scrutinize the system and help work alongside AI to revolutionize the way testing is executed.”

This paraphrase concludes AI in Software Testing is extremely significant. AI should be applied in Software Testing for swiftness and accuracy. And, the application will increase with the digital transformation of businesses. Not only Artificial Intelligence will play an important role in software development and testing processes, but Machine Learning will also secure a critical role. Predictive Analytics, Defect Analytics, and Log Analytics will be positively influenced by machine learning.

Intelligent App Testing

Intelligent/instant apps today take a center stage. They include native mobile apps that are smaller in size but convenient for users. They eliminate the need to download standalone apps. Mobile apps having faster load time and state-of-the-art user experience is something that we will see high in demand in 2019.

ResearchAndMarkets predicts that the global instant app market will reach $93.4 billion by 2026 if the CAGR growth rate is estimated at 30.7% during the forecast period. The fuel for these apps is many, including the deployment of new products using the latest technology paradigms, flourishing big data & analytics market, and a persistent and soaring need for improved analytical tools.

Therefore, the requirement for instant apps is going to grow by numbers, and we cannot stop it. What we can do is boost the efficacy and astuteness of the apps furthermore by testing the apps by considering the following factors: security, performance, functionality, accuracy, and any other element specified by the client.

Continuous Testing and Integration with Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is a subject that was discussed and written about broadly in 2018. And, why not? Today businesses are uninterruptedly run and powered by digital innovation. Companies are going through unfathomable digital change. That being said, the evolution has also brought forth several challenges and insecurities that businesses are finding hard to overcome.

In the developers’ part, we have used methodologies, such as Agile and DevOps to make the testing processes responsive and streamlined to suit various business needs. However, in 2019, we will experience a tremendous need (more than demand) for continuous Software Testing, Deployment, and Integration. And, the need will only double or triple as and when the business grows.

Business digital transformation will only throw more and more challenges towards us in all segments of software development. We have to be prepared to combat these challenges in Security, Performance, and Functionality. We can easily do this by delivering new features in the measured pattern. However, the up and running apps have to continuously integrate and tested to exceed customer experience with performance engineering.

Performance Engineering will be Mandated

Performance engineering, and not just performance testing, will be a major criterion when providing supreme customer experience in 2019. Performance Testing has always been a top factor to consider when determining software testing strategies. In order to be on the top and offer uninterrupted services, developing companies make continuous efforts to ensure that client software applications work perfectly under changing and complex scenarios. However, in 2019, performance engineering will take control over the engine. Factors that influence Performance, Security, Usability, Scalability, Network Compatibility, Cost-effectiveness, and Speed will be given primary focus.

Testing is shifting its gear from mere bug removal to giving customer satisfaction while achieving business goals. Performance engineering will ensure the development of high-quality web and mobile applications, which will invariably increase customer experience and satisfaction. The entire system, right from hardware and software to configuration and evaluation will be observed to generate maximum revenue.

Testing will be hereby included earlier and earlier in process development. And more companies will promptly adopt DevOps and Agile models. Not just the methods, but also continuous testing and monitoring approaches. We have to improve the culture of ‘Continuous Software Testing and Improvement’ to enhance the quality and functionality of client products. A lot more trends will be added this year, which is an indication of the critical change companies and Software Testing and QA team will go through to stay relevant and grow in 2019 and further.

The sales team is one of the most vital parts of any organization. They are responsible for a lot of things, such as fetch revenue for the business, increase brand value, establish sustaining a relationship with clients, and be the first point of contact between the internal management and customer. A business cannot prosper if the marketing and sales team lacks productivity loses interest. Therefore, developing businesses and start-ups need to adapt and implement business utility and productivity apps into their sales and marketing models.

Identifying the Problem Early is Necessary

Most often, it is found that in order to balance both primary duties, such as bring in more clients, and secondary obligations, such as communication and administration, the sales team ends up not accomplishing their goals, which leaves them with unfulfilled targets and poor time management strategies. Organizations today must need some kind of reinforcement models that will help their sales force to eliminate redundant tasks and improve their performances.

Mobile applications bring so many unexplored opportunities for the sales team to make more sales, improve efficiency, and increase selling time for each sale personnel.

How Mobile Applications Can Benefit the Sales Field

Access to accurate and immediate information, experiencing and inculcating seamless communication, and projecting a dynamic and clearer picture of products and services to potential clients can be enhanced and tailored to suit organization requirements through mobile applications. By implementing automation in sales, the time, effort, and skill wasted on manual work, such as data entry that leads to data error, can also be reduced.

Here is how we can increase the selling time of salespersons, and more importantly, improve the quality of their work:

• Mobile applications enable sales personnel to have access to comprehensive information about their work, their to-do activities of the day, and the information needed to function at the tip of their fingertips.
• Customized mobile applications provide marketing executives with information on the retailer, manufacturer, or distribution dug out from the company’s integrated CRM. Automation also lets representatives track their own as well as external resources’activities, such as distance, time, travel, delivery, and transportation.
• Quick and comprehensive access to data allows the sales force to have greater knowledge about the client, in terms of history, payment status, customer ratings, projects implemented, products ordered and so on. With complete information, executives can prepare themselves better for pitching their products and services to prospects.
• Automation of sales force enables the marketing team to feed details and client information digitally and retrieve them from the cloud when and as needed. Mobile applications and the availability of information as ERP data remove traditional approach to data storage and sharing.
• Automation of the workflow process of the sales team through mobile app solution leads to cent percent accuracy in project/service/product delivery time. Reps will be able to send workflow processes to clients for their approval before the project is started.
• ERP system allows the sales team to store data to process when required. This promotes on-time delivery, better customer engagement, improved status updates back and forth, and proactive post-delivery service.
• When it comes to client interaction, mobile applications can be extremely useful with regards to making an interactive sales presentation, building and sending proposals, and connecting with clients at a personal level. Sales reps can design their presentation with interactive apps instead of using the traditional PPT models and make each meeting more engaging.
  When it comes to making proposals, it is important that executives are alert and attentive in noting down requirements and ideas. Customized mobile applications and tools can help them to create proposals on the go, which in return help them to close deals faster and increase efficiency in offering competitive prices.
• Sales reps can use their smartphones in more numbers of ways than they could imagine. Integrating a CRM system to smartphone boosts work clarity and quality. You could also eliminate carrying laptops everywhere if you have everything functional in a smartphone.
• More innovative ways are coming this year, number one being wearable technology. They will have a huge impact and sales representatives will be able to customize more apps using the technology.

We conclude by stating: with the advent of smart technology, you just need one mobile application to change the dynamics of the sales force. From keeping clients informed and boosting sales, to improved loyalty and trust, one can leverage mobile apps as a powerful marketing tool. The cost of mobile app development is very small compared to the payoffs you would receive in the future. A mobile can work as a promotional channel, business catalog, product/service information page, online shop, client base and a doorway for new opportunities and collaborations.

If you are looking for a Mobile app development company to boost your sales team productivity we can help you achieve enterprise mobility through a streamlined approach. 

What should an enterprise do if its dated architecture slowly starts affecting the business negatively? What if you are failing to provide your users what they are wanting? What is the best way to redesign a business value?

Successful companies do not aim to increase the software delivery speed for its own sake. They do it for they are obligated by their business growth and speed.

If you are unable to scale your business and give best to your customer, re-platform to a microservices architecture to build a system that is elastic enough to scale out to handle the peak without negatively affecting the user experience.

After reading this article, you will gain considerable knowledge of microservice best practices and their benefits. You will learn this by reading through the experiences of the world’s best innovative enterprises, Amazon, Walmart, and Spotify.

Why Microservices Architecture is Working Worldwide?

A large suite of application is built as a suite of modular service. All of them are small, independent versioned and customer-centric services that have specific business goals, where standard protocols with well-defined interfaces are used for communication between each individual service.

Since each microservice is independently deployed and scaled, they allow firms module boundary, which implies that different services can be written in different programming languages and can be managed by different development teams.

Microservices platforms are considered ideal for businesses that have the need to enable support for a range of platforms and devices, such as the Internet of Things, wearables, web, mobile, or when the company is not sure what kind of devices it will require to support cloud in future.

Benefits of building microservices architecture are tremendous because its functionalities bring the right balance between delivery speed, the safety of systems, and organizations’ growth in terms of functional scope and scale.

As more companies are recognizing (due to an increasingly digital economy) that software development needs to be a core business competency and fast delivery of the solution is essential to defeating the competition, microservice architecture is gaining precedence over other architectural patterns.

Strategic Importance of Blockchain

Since its inception, the technology has been widely associated with finance because of its connection to cryptocurrencies, which made most industries to view Blockchain as a technology reserved only for the fin-tech industry. However, if we explore, we will find that the solicitation of this electronic ledger is much vast than cryptocurrencies.

It is a building block for many industries presently, since it acts as a legitimate ledger data structure. Apart from bitcoins and transaction records, blockchain has many more functionalities, most prominently allowing digital data distribution instead of data copying.

There are no centralized databases in a blockchain. It ensures that no one individual or party in the system has the power to modify or tamper with the data. It also removes the need for a third party or central authority to authenticate or process peer-peer transactions and hence increases transparency.

Blockchain technology has been hailed as revolutionary and can dramatically lower cost, increase speed, and present transparency of all transactions. Take, for instance, a typical stock purchase or bank wire transaction. The transaction can be executed in minutes but the settlement — the ownership transfer of the stock or funds — takes a few business days. This is because the parties have no access to each other ledgers and therefore cannot automatically verify that the assets are in fact owned and can be transferred. A number of intermediaries (i.e. banks, escrow, credit card companies) act as guarantors of assets as the transaction is verified and the ledgers are individually updated. On the other hand, blockchain transactions reside on a public ledger and are not controlled by a central authority. Decentralizing control removes the need for intermediaries and middle-men. As a result, these transactions can be executed and settled between both parties in minutes with verification that is transparent, public, and validated by the network itself. Whether an emergency or just a normal transaction, this is particularly advantageous where the transfer and receipt of funds are required immediately. While this is just one example, these benefits will collectively alter existing business processes, disrupt industries, and create new business models; similarly, as the Internet did during the digital revolution.

Advantages of Microservices for Businesses

The desire for speed (coupled with safety) is a desire for immediate change, which ultimately takes us to microservices.

When it comes to ‘Speed’, microservices architecture provides the following benefits to businesses:

• The agility of small services allows businesses to deliver products, services, and features quickly.

• Composability allows developers to reduce the development time of the solutions and additionally provides supplementary benefit through reusability over time.

Independent deployment of components offers flexible options for prototyping and piloting and addition of new features in production. It reduces the need to require teams to rewrite the whole application of new features.

• Polyglotism quickens technology introduction and increases solution options by authorizing the use of the right tool for the right task.

• The comprehensiveness of system streamlines planning boosts accuracy and increases the speed of adaptability of new resources.

• Organizational alignment of services reduces team ramp-up time and lets the team build complex products continuously.

When it comes to ‘Safety’, microservices architecture has the following advantages over other architectural models:

• Efficiency in the software development system reduces the cost of infrastructure and the risk capacity related to service outages.

• Independent manageability reduces the need for scheduled downtime.

Smaller codebases make maintenance easier and faster saving a lot of development time and increasing productivity.

• Easy replacement of components reduces technical debts that eventually leads to unreliable environments and dated structure. Unparalleled independent runtime scalability leads to software growth as and when the business grows.

• Improved testing allows for the implementation of risk mitigation.

Microservices architecture deployment case studies of the world’s leading Enterprises

Walmart, Canada, Revitalizes a Failing Architecture

Kevin Webber helped to re-architect Walmart’s online business after the retail giant failed to provide its customers on Black Fridays for two continuous years. Walmart, Canada could not handle the six million page views per minute, which made them incapable of providing positive user experience further.

The old architecture of Walmart was based on a 2005 architecture, designed around monoliths, laptops, and desktops. Since they were unable to scale for six million views per minute, in 2012, Spotify had to renew their age-old legacy system and prepare for the 2020 world – a network connection having 4 billion people, 25+ million apps, and 5.2 GB of data for each user. Their aim was a 100% availability achieved with reasonable costs.

And so, they chose to migrate to microservice. They experienced the following changes almost instantly:

• Conversions boosted by 20% just within 24 hours.
• Mobile app orders were up by 98% on the same day.
• The company experienced superb sales on Black Friday or Boxing Day (Canada). It has seen no downtime since re-platforming to microservice.
• But what was most significant was the operational savings. Since they moved onto commodity hardware (affordable virtual x86 servers) from expensive hardware, they saved 40% of the computing power and 20% to 50% of the overall cost.

Kevin Webber remarked upon this migration, “Building microservice architecture is really the key to staying in front of the demands of the market. It’s not just a sort of re-platforming for the sake of technology. It’s about the overall market in general, about what users expect and what business expects to stay competitive.”

Amazon Incorporated Two-Pizza Teams

Amazon.com, the phenomenal retail website, was running on a massive architectural monolith until 2001. Rob Bingham, senior AWS product manager shared the story of how Amazon from there migrated to the microservices platform by approaching the DevOps philosophy.

“A lot of startups and enterprise projects start out this way (Amazon’s was a multiple tiered, and each had many components in them that were coupled together very tightly) They take a monolith first approach, because it’s very quick, but over time, as that project matures and has more developers on it, as it grows and the codebase gets larger, and the architecture gets more complex, that monolith is going to add overhead to your process, and the software development lifecycle is going to slow down.” – Rob

The development team faced many challenges due to the monolith architecture, including:

• Large number of developers working aimlessly on one big monolith website
• Continuous need to deal with coordinating changes with overheads that were also on the same project.
• They had to make sure any new change (bug fixes or new feature addition) did not affect something else on the big project.
• Convince everyone else on the big project to upgrade at the same time, if one particular team wanted to update a shared library.
• Coordinating even small issues like quick fixing a customer issue needed a massive wait period for processes needed to be changed and circulated.

All of these led to something called Merge Week or Merge Friday. However, this large merged version also did not solve the problem and it still added a lot of overhead to the delivery pipeline. Building new code databases, rerunning test cases, and deploying the whole application to full production fleet was crazy and frustrating for software engineers. And we are talking Amazon here, the world’s largest online retail platform.

So, Amazon decided to go for the BIG Organizational and Architectural Change – They teased their monolithic application apart and made it into Service Oriented Architecture. They created highly decoupled architecture, where each service could iterate independently without the need for coordination between those services as long as they followed the standard web service interface.

They also implemented changes in their organizational structure and operations and broke down their central, hierarchical product development team into small ‘Two-Pizza teams’ – teams that were small enough to feed two pizzas.

“We went through the code and pulled out functional units that served a single purpose and wrapped those with a web service interface. We then established a rule, that from now on, they can only talk to each other through their web service APIs.

Back then it didn’t have a name, but now we call it as a microservice architecture.” – Rob

Each of these teams was given new powers and controls, such as:

• Full ownership of one to four microservices, including customer control, defining their own feature roadmap, designing features, and implementing, testing, deploying and operating the new features.

• If anything went wrong in a particular service lifecycle, the two-pizza team appointed for that microservice has to take full accountability to fix it and change it, even if it was in the middle of the night.

• Since organizational teams were properly aligned, engineering teams were energized and motivated to make sure their end-to-end cycle worked properly.

After building microservices architecture, Amazon experienced the following changes:

• Dramatic improvement in the front-end development lifecycle.
• Decision making improved by 100%.
• New features were launched perfectly and quickly.
• Zero coordination issues.
• Now the company makes 50 million developments a year.

Spotify Reached Flawless User Experience

Spotify serves 75 million users per month. An average session lasts 23 minutes. Spotify runs extremely complicated business roles behind the scene. Their competitors are Apple and Google.

A global enterprise, such as Spotify, that has an unparalleled brand name and two most inventive competitors, must move fast and innovate constantly. And this requires a highly scalable and stable architecture, remembers the VP Engineering at Spotify, Kevin Goldsmith.

“If you’re worried about scaling to hundreds of millions of users, you build your system in a way that you scale components independently. The problem is, if you want to build a new feature in this kind of (monolithic) world, then the client team have to ask the core team: please get us an API and let us do this. The core team asks the server team: please implement this on the server side so we can do whatever we need to do. And after that, the server team has to ask the infrastructure team for a new database. It is a lot of asking.” – Kevin Goldsmith.

Since Spotify has 90 teams, 600 software engineers, and 5 development offices operating in two continents working on the same product, they built an autonomous microservices architecture with full-stack teams to minimize the level of dependencies.

Now each of their microservices with full-stack teams consists of its own back-end developers, front-end developers, UI designers, testers, and product owners. Since the teams are autonomous, their goals and mission do not interfere or overlap with other teams’ objectives.

Although the company faces a couple of challenges with microservices, such as difficulty in monitoring thousands of instances running simultaneously and increased latency, microservices architecture have clear advantages for enterprises which Spotify have fully experienced:

• Bottlenecks can be easily identified, tracked, removed or fixed within a microservice, which is complicated in huge monolith applications.

• Testing a smaller surface is easier. Developers can test services locally without having to deploy them to a test environment.

• Since applications are smaller, they deploy quickly and easily.

• Monitoring services is easy in most instances, especially when rectifying a bottleneck.

• In order to stop the addition of multiple versions to the same binary, the need to add support for multiple versions in the same instances is removed. Therefore, versioning can be done independently.

• Microservices will never experience large failures, for their failures will be as small and easily manageable as they are.

Spotify has built its microservices architecture system with the thought that their services can fail all the time. Therefore, building microservices architecture has allowed the enterprise to face downtime of a large number of services without the users even realizing it.

In the end, this is what Kevin Goldsmith had to say about embracing microservices for business value development – “We’ve been doing microservices at Spotify for years. We do it on a pretty large scale. We do it with thousands and thousands of running instances. We have been incredibly happy with it because we have scaled stuff up. We can rewrite our services at will – which we do, rather than continue to refactor them or to add more and more technical data over time. We just rewrite them when we get to a scaling inflection point. We do this kind of stuff all the time because it’s really easy with this kind of architecture, and it’s working incredibly well for us. So if you are trying to convince somebody at your company, point to Spotify, point to Netflix, point to other companies and say: This is really working for them, they’re super happy with it.”

There is no one right way to use microservices architecture for every company. Organizational changes, cultural challenges, process changes, customers, operations, and existing infra need to be considered. Companies need tools to fund the visibility of their microservice infrastructure. The balance of speed and safety at scale is the primary key to understand the value of microservices in business.

Want to enable the security and flexibility of Microservice Architecture for your business applications? Book a free consultation with our team now.

PHP, also known as the Hypertext Preprocessor, is considered to the best open-source server-side scripting language for developing web applications. PHP has vast storage of modern tools and solutions that allow developers to build state-of-the-art websites, enterprise web applications and lot many other things. PHP solutions save time, streamlines backend operations, and lets developers re-use codes, making their job effortless.

Listed below are the top 6 trending PHP frameworks. Go through each one of them and we are sure you will find few appropriate for your needs.

Why PHP Frameworks

Although there are other frameworks, such as Python and Ruby, that are equally robust, most developers prefer PHP frameworks because it helps to tick the right boxes for different types of web application development projects.

It is a dynamic and smart choice because of the following factors:

Speed: 

Web apps developed by PHP frameworks are responsive and have fast loading time.

Cross-Platform Integration: 

PHP coding can be used in both Website and Mobile app development projects. Additionally, in mobile app development, it can stably integrate with all operating systems.

Stable: 

Since PHP frameworks are being deployed for a number of years now, developers have discovered and fixed many new bugs over the years, which has made this programming language even more stable and advanced.

CMS Support: 

PHP frameworks also support CMS, and widely used for CMS development. Content Management System is must today in successful application development for enhanced digital data experience.

Diverse: 

Most PHP frameworks use object-relational mapping to work with different databases. Developers need not have to punch in complicated SOL codes because of this functionality.

Must-Have PHP Frameworks

Software development tools must evolve to adhere to the latest technology trends. With software development shift, new frameworks emerge to meet the newer requirements. Therefore, due to its abundant resources, a PHP framework will be the first choice for a server-side programming language as well. However, the choices may vary depending upon the developer’s experience, scale, and type of project, and development timeframe etc.

Laravel

Laravel follows the model-view-controller (MVC) architectural pattern that makes it one of the most widely used PHP frameworks. Taylor Otwell developed this open-source framework in 2011, which is essentially based on Symphony.

One can easily learn the nuances of Laravel web framework and continuously upgrade their knowledge with the help of the enormous information documented for each framework released.

The framework is known for its impeccable use in rapid web application development. You can do a whole array of common tasks, such as cashing, authentication, RESTful routing, user management etc, using Laravel’s super-performing templating engine that invariably makes work of software developer easy and efficient.

Exclusive Features of Lavarel Include:

• Improves performance by running tasks in the background asynchronously. The process is shortly known as Refined Syntax.
• Perfect and stable integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
• Well-built templating engine.

Symfony

No one can beat the record that Symfony has created over the years. It still holds a position on the chartbuster list of best PHP frameworks even after so many years. If we recall the best features of this PHP MVC framework, then they would be:

• Reusable components
• Built-in testing functionality
• Reusable codes

Depending on the project requirements, developers can use some or all of Symfony’s components. Symfony is an ideal option for solutions that rely on modularity. It is essentially deployed to develop huge enterprise-scale software development projects. What’s more? You will always be benefited with the latest technical documentation about the framework, for Symfony is continually backed-up by a tremendous community of expert developers and engineers.

However, the only con that we can find is that the learning curve is rather steep. So, you may need both time and effort to grasp the whole concept of Symfony and its several functionalities.

Zend Framework

Any large-scale project can be easily developed using the Zend Framework. Developers across the world rely on the features and functionalities of this framework over others for enterprise-scale project development. Today most web application development follow the agile methodology, and this framework was specially built to support agile technology, allowing software engineers to create cutting-edge products to big companies in half time and at a reduced cost.

The benefits that Zend Framework gives to the developers is hard to beat. They include:

• A commendable architecture that lets developers pay attention to only those components that they choose.
• Lot of re-usable codes.
• It has great extension capabilities. For instance, it can integrate with external libraries seamlessly.
• It is scalable.
• It comes with instant debugging tools online.
• Has drag and drop editor and cryptographic coding tools, and the list is never-ending.

Its superpower and unique functionalities make it one of the anticipated PHP frameworks. However, since it is vast and contains several dynamic features, it could be one of the most difficult to learn PHP frameworks.

CakePHP

An old and most reliable PHP framework, CakePHP has been on the top six lists for the past several years in a row. A huge community of software engineers supports it and takes diligent efforts to improve the framework further in terms of consistency and efficiency.

Launched in the year 2000, CakePHP is known for fast builds and proper class validation and therefore it is highly preferred for developing state-of-the-art, smart, beautiful and feature-rich websites. And, the demand for it  will be higher than before.

Some of the unique features of CakePHP include:

• Build on CRUD Framework (Create, Read, Update, and Delete).
• Upbeat security functionality, such as SQL injection prevention, cross-site scripting protection, cross-site request forgery, and data input validation.
• Backed by a sophisticated community of expert engineers that offer free and premium support.

CodeIgniter

CodeIgniter is simple, reliable, scalable, and tried and tested web app development framework that has been on continuous improvement since 2005. It operates perfectly on most of the hosting platforms and needs zero configuration from the users. Did we just miss to say that it is also well built and efficient?

One of the greatest reasons why this Framework is selected over other PHP frameworks is its speed. CodeIgniter works faster with database tasks. However, CodeIgniter is not based upon the MVC architecture, even though it falls under the Models-Views-Controller Category. While Controller is obligatory in this Framework, Models and Views are optional.

Also, amateurs can learn the features and functionalities of CodeIgniter quicker than most other PHP frameworks, including Zend.

Yii2

One of the quirky frameworks is what we will call Yii2 as. It is as simple as its name, “Yes It Is”. This is version 2, which has the features of the old one but improvises in its loading time. In fact, it is deemed as that framework that outshines all other frameworks in load time.

Yii2 is an object-oriented programming language that is integrated with Ajax and JQuery. It works on the principle of, “Don’t Repeat Yourself”, which avoids the use of the same software patterns recurrently. With this unique principle as a super-power, Yii2 is the first choice for developing large-scale web development projects.

It also supports the class-code generator, which enables it to boost rapid prototyping and object-oriented programming.

The aforementioned PHP frameworks are ranked in random order. Each one has its own pros and unique usability. Therefore, your Framework choice must be based upon the project, the amount of time you have, and your preferences. If your developers have time to learn a new option, then choose a framework that best fits your project requirement. For instance, if you need an absolutely classy website, use CakePHP and if you are assigned with enterprise-scale projects, go with either Symfony or Zend.

CG-VAK has the right expertise and perfect infrastructure that enables development support for projects on each framework mentioned above. We offer project development in fixed price model and retainer model. Contact us for more information and for free of cost consultation today.

Most of our customers frequently ask us, ‘why should we outsource software development?’

The basic answer is simple and logical- Companies outsource software development requirements primarily to cut costs. But today, it is not only about cutting costs but also about reaping the benefits of strategic outsourcing software development projects such as accessing skilled expertise, reducing overhead, having a choice of flexible staffing, and increasing efficiency, reducing turnaround time, and eventually generating more profit.

Why India is the world’s preferred software development outsourcing destination?

In a recent survey, 80% of European and US outsourcing firms ranked India as their number one outsourcing destination. The National Association of Software & Service Companies (NASSCOM) also reported that almost half of all Fortune 500 companies choose to outsource software development to Indian It outsourcing companies. Even though many other countries (including China, Mexico, Ireland and the Philippines) have emerged as major competitors, India has managed to outmaneuver all others and emerge as the top outsourcing destination.

Here are the advantages of software development outsourcing:

Large Pool of Talent Resources

India has a population of over 1.2 billion people and every year approximately 3.1 million students hold a degree of graduation from Indian universities in different fields. The talented workforce enables India to deliver quality services in various sectors.

No Communication Barriers

With India, you will not face any language or communication barriers as India is one of the largest English-speaking nations in the world. In India, the Education system is mainly in English and thus, Indian people are fluent in the English language and it encourages outsourcers to choose India as their outsourcing destination.

Time saving

Time becomes very crucial in business. According to statistics, India is the most preferred location for software development outsourcing due to the time zone of their working. Thus, it enables flexibility in working for outsourcing projects and can deliver the given project successfully in a fixed time.

Professional touch

By outsourcing your software development requirements, you can have an immediate access to some of the talented and expert professionals with a high-class work quality.

Before you choose your right offshore software development company for your business needs, do spend a little amount of you time to opt best software development outsourcing company. Check out their services, testimonials, software development outsourcing models, pricing and more. It could help you much better in finding a right destination. And, now let’s have a glance on CGVAK as your IT software outsourcing company.

Why Choose CG-VAK as your Software Development Outsourcing Partner?

CG-VAK is a successful software development outsourcing partner to several offshore clients in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and Africa for the past 2 decades. We focus on building fast and effective software development solutions with just the kind of optimization one would need. Our team builds high-performance software platforms for our clients that help them accelerate operations, reduce cost overheads, minimize go-to-market time, and maximize customer experience

CG-VAK take the hassle out of your day to day software development needs so you can focus on running your business.

Below is the list of reasons why CG-VAK stand out of the crowd in the offshore outsourcing market.

Committed Employees

In CG-VAK, you get a committed workforce to work on your ongoing projects. Most of the companies in India work 8 hours a day and 5 days a week. In addition to that our team stay back during critical phases of the project and run the extra mile to ensure success of the project. Also, our team can work extended hours to meet short project deadlines.

Flexible Pricing Options

A range of flexible pricing options CG-VAK a top outsourcing provider for global outsourcers. CG-VAK bill their clients per hour or on fixed pricing (based on defined scope) so that they can choose the best suited option. By hiring resources from CG-VAK for your projects, you can save more than 65% on your operational expenses and increase company profits.

Consistent High-Quality Services

Flexible cost is not the only reason which makes CG-VAK one of the top software development outsourcing companies in India, the consistent high-quality services provided CG-VAK is one of the ultimate reasons for being a successful player in the offshore software development outsourcing market for the past 2 decades. When you choose CG-VAK as your strategic outsourcing partner, you gain significant cost savings, quicker turnaround time and experience optimum quality at all times.

Superior Infrastructure

CG-VAK offer their clients best solutions utilizing latest equipment’s or software. Moreover, CG-VAK high-speed internet bandwidth to maintain constant support and communication for their clients. Most importantly CG-VAK ensures 24/7 Power back-up using multiple UPS and Generators.

CG-VAK`s Comprehensive Approach

CG-VAK`s comprehensive approach has enabled it to emerge as a trusted and dependable partner. It has progressively shouldered technical responsibilities to ensure astute product and Custom Software development. We have been delivering cutting-edge solutions to business challenges by setting up a simple yet robust architecture. Transforming to adapt to the changing environment is our key characteristic that is driven by high energy and intense passion.

Building a product or a custom solution that is self-sufficient is a challenging task. One of the most successful ways to create such a product or a custom solution is to partner with a seasoned offshore product / custom service provider that suits well with your budget and understands your project requirements. CG-VAK has a rich history of serving small to large scale enterprises from across the globe. The company shares the same energy and enthusiasm in building the product / custom solution as its client’s; and ensures delivery of a quality, timely cutting-edge solution.

Difference in Delivery:

CG-VAK follows proven agile methodologies such as Scrum and Extreme programming to maintain agility in the way the project runs as well as enhance the scope of development of the product/solution to the best of possibilities. This process ensures the better understanding of the scope of work in order to deliver the product/solution within the planned deadline.

Minimum project size-At least 4 sprints with 2 weeks duration each

CG-VAK is a leading Outsourced Product Development & Custom Software Development company that provides end-to-end services to global ISVs and enterprises.

In the global competition, it is essential for businesses to focus on their core competencies and outsource non-core activities in order to gain strategic advantage and a competitive edge.

With proven technical expertise and a rich experience in Outsourced Product Development & Custom Software Development, CG-VAK has been recognized as a leading Outsourced Product Development & Custom Software Development partner for global enterprises.

From small to mid-sized to large companies, we have helped enterprises in digital transformation, building robust enterprise solutions, business process re-engineering, in order to deliver product excellence and customer satisfaction.

Our team of expert developers perform an in-depth analysis of client needs and adopt agile development processes to deliver:

• Technical expertise
• Reduced development costs
• Additional skilled resources
• Focus on new competencies
• Full-fledged PDLC
• Co-development
• Faster time-to-market

If you are looking to outsource software development to India, Yes! Your search has ended up to a right place for all your software development needs.