DEV Community: Anna Boyko

DevOps Testing - Approaches and Tools

Anna Boyko — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 13:57:01 +0000

Application and software market is continuously growing and changing. Organizations compete to achieve higher velocity at delivering software to their customers. However, it’s not only about speed: clients need a high-quality product. In the chase for a perfect software delivery model, the development community has come up with DevOps testing.

What is DevOps Testing?

DevOps includes effective synergy between development and operational teams. In this model, the production is from end to end, which means the software is tested, built, deployed and released with the effort of the whole team. The main aim is customer satisfaction. The work ethics of the model requires great time and effort of all team members: QA, developers, managers, system managers.

This article dives deep into the DevOps testing strategies, tools and practices.

DevOps Testing. What You Need to Know

The DevOps testing model is the result of the waterfall and agile methods combined and taken to the next level.

Waterfall model

In this case, the product testing was considered as a final separate stage. Testing and developer teams had a communication gap and didn’t collaborate. They only did their parts of work. It resulted in long product delivery and life cycle, which wasn’t helpful at all. The Dev team was separate from the Ops team as well. Moreover, testing was mainly manual and the human factor was pulling the whole process back.

Agile Model

The agile method has increased delivery frequency. In contrast with the waterfall model, agile testing starts at the early stages of the project and becomes a continuous process. However, it’s implemented only after the code has been already written.

The development is broken down into iterations, and the testing plan is created for each release. So, it adds new features to the software building process.

Despite being better than the waterfall model, it involved the separate TechOps professionals to accomplish deployment-production stage, and it took long for the feedback to reach the development team.

DevOps Model

DevOps testing is special because its philosophy is not to test at the end but every stage of development. In technical words, the process is called continuous testing. The team benefits from such an approach since the bugs are detected step by step and are easier to fix.

The agile team here is responsible not only for testing but for development and release as well.

DevOps Testing Strategy

As you may have already grasped the main idea, DevOps testing strategy bases on joint effort of development and QA teams. They work together on big projects to gain a better understanding of the whole process, deliver the product faster and on a higher quality level. The innovative component here is that developers don’t hand their work in to QA experts, as it tends to be in hands-off centric testing, but work in tandem, which requires testing on each stage and eliminates the need to look over old mistakes.

Image Source: Guru99

How does that impact the general outcomes of app development and testing? With DevOps testing strategy you can build, test and release the product faster and more frequently compared to old methods.

Test Automation and Continuous Testing in DevOps

Test automation and continuous testing are similar yet different terms that need to be explained.

Test automation in DevOps is “a process where tool or software is used for automating tasks”. The aim is to hand repetitive tasks to AI so the work is done faster and with less error. The emphasis is on automation nowadays as it allows to add new code parts and improve very quickly and with confidence. To understand which test types you need to automate answer the following questions:

Which tests process loads of different data?
Which tests will most likely fail because of the human factor?
Which testing can’t be done manually?

You can use an open-source tool as Jenkins for the process automation. Automation can be performed without the implementation of continuous testing.

Continuous testing is “a software testing methodology which focuses on achieving continuous quality & improvement”. The purpose of this method is to find bugs at each stage and improve the quality of the application. It’s worth mentioning that continuous testing can’t be done without prior automation.

Use Selenium and Jenkins to implement the method in the DevOps model.

Our Case Study: Cost-effective AWS Infrastructure for Test Automation Suite
Romexsoft has wide professional experience of building, deploying and supporting customer solutions on AWS. Romexsoft mission is to provide extensive support to customer-centric companies to help them build and grow cloud-based businesses on AWS. You can read more about our experience successful AWS Infrastructure for Test Automation Suite in our Case Study. Cost-effective AWS Infrastructure for Test Automation Suite

Production Testing

The deployment of the product to the users isn’t the finish stage of the development lifecycle. Once you have released the application, you need to make sure that everything works as expected in real-time. Testing in production means monitoring how satisfactory the user experience is. For example, you can check CPU usage, real user monitoring, transaction tracking.

List of Top 15 DevOps Testing Tools in 2020

QuerySurge

The automated service that combines software development, testing and IT operations to make the development life cycle as short as possible.

It’s a solution for DevOps continuous testing.

Jenkins

It is an open-source automation testing solution. Jenkins can be used to automate building, testing and deploying. It integrates with almost any continuous tool, extends easily and provides test driving on multiple platforms in real-time.

Bamboo

Bamboo is a tool for continuous testing. It also helps developers to automate different processes. Bamboo is integrated with AWS CodeDeploy and can support such languages as Git, SVN, Mercurial.

Jmeter

Jmeter is used to automate load testing. It can check the velocity of websites, perform application functional testing.

Selenium

Selenium is a free solution for automated testing of web applications. It can be used with various OS and languages like Python and Java. The service offers multiple tools for different testing requirements.

Appium

It’s used to test various types of applications: hybrid, native, web, mobile. The service is great for DevOps models.

Soap UI

Soap UI is a free tool for functional testing in SOAp and REST web services.

CruiseControl

CruiseControl is a continuous integration service which additionally offers a solution for custom builds. It provides saved information about previous and present builds. CruiseControl supports connection with other tools such as NUnit, MBUNit, Nant.

Vagrant

You can use Vagrant to build virtual machines in a single workflow. It suits the DevOps philosophy well since it focuses on automated testing and reduces the time of environment development.

PagerDuty

PagerDuty is a platform that reacts to disasters in your product’s environment and sends real-time notifications about them. It provides analytics about outages and offers the opportunity to teach AI for better results, automation and alert noise reduction.

Snort

Snort is an open-source tool for network intrusion prevention and traffic debugging. It can be used both for personal and business needs. Snort sends alerts in real-time in case of malicious activity.

Docker

Docker is a solution for building and shipping containerized apps. It uses the MacOS and Windows virtual machines.

Stackify Retrace

It’s an APM tool that helps developers monitor and solve performance issues in real-time. The word “Retrace” means that it can find mistakes back in your code. Stackify provides an easy-to-use user interface where all the needed information is collected.

Puppet Enterprise

Puppet Enterprise is an automation tool that can be used at every stage of development. It grows when you grow, which means the expansion is an easy process.

Elastic APM

This is the application performance monitoring tool that tracks requests, responses, database transactions. It’s built on top of Elastic Stack.

Conclusion

Implementation of DevOps methodology in your organization will change the way you work in cultural and technological ways. Testing with DevOps responds to modern software development pace without quality loss. While the traditional approach limits the effectiveness and share of knowledge between developers and QA experts, DevOps testing is a modern solution that gives everybody a sense of responsibility.

How Can We Help

If you want to increase code deployment by 30% with 50% fewer failures, improve the overall product quality and meet the goals faster, turn to Romexsoft DevOps expert team. Romexsoft is an AWS consulting partner that provides the best DevOps solutions, manages resources wisely, builds the suitable roadmap for DevOps integration and saves costs.

How can we cooperate:

24/7 DevOps support
Team extension
Dedicated team
Time and material
Fixed price project

Original article: https://www.romexsoft.com/blog/devops-testing-strategies-tools-practices/

What are Microservices? Microservices Examples

Anna Boyko — Sat, 23 Jan 2021 12:46:46 +0000

Developers use microservices to build scalable and functional applications piece by piece. Such architectures help deliver a more complex app structure without trying to create all at once.

What are Microservices?

Microservices are the parts of an SOA (Service-Oriented Application). They are small service units that work independently. With the special approach in software engineering, developers break the app into separate sectors that have individual structure and even code language. Each accomplishes the single business goal, uses unique data storage methods and owns a different interface.

Microservices vs Monolithic Architecture

Image Source: AWS

A traditional monolithic application is the opposite of microservices architecture. It is a single software unit where all the components are interdependent. The database of this architecture serves for the whole stack. The development process is slow, yet simple. In comparison with microservices, monolithic architecture doesn’t require expert knowledge and allows to build the app from scratch.

However, if you aim to launch a complex application with a wide operational system, then microservices will do the work better. Here is why:

Monolithic architecture	Microservices architecture
The whole structure works for all the goals	Each unit accomplishes ONE business goal
The disaster affects the whole app	If the fault happens, it only impacts a single unit which is easy to rebuild and redeploy
There is only one data model and technology for the structure	Federated data allows choosing the best-suited model for each app process
Slow development process	Due to small teams that lead each microservice, the development is quicker and more efficient
Unflexible resource allocation	Depending on which service customers use the most (for example, the product listing), developers understand which unit requires more resources

Microservice Cons

As you are aware of the microservice benefits, let’s explore some of its drawbacks. Here are some of them:

Since microservice runs as a complex system, you need to establish communication between all the units, which requires additional effort;
It is hard to manage and test independently deployable structures;
The maintenance of each unit requires money and good teamwork;
Because of the different programming languages, there are more services to look after;
The processing and storage of the unstructured data is a challenge because of the separate mechanisms.

Typical Microservice Architecture

There are several approaches to building communication between microservices and users. One of them is a direct connection.

Image Source: Microsoft

Such a plan suits small apps with minimum functionality. Since the client app is directly connected with each microservice, it’s better to cut the numbers of endpoint consumption for the sake of convenient UI, easy authorization and security.

The alternative to direct communication is the API gateway implementation. It is the better option for your app if it copes with many microservices.

API is sometimes called back-end for front-end. The gateway routes requests from users to microservices. If you establish a single gateway for all the microservices, it will work as a monolithic aggregator. There are some threats, as the gateway may become bigger and overloaded with tasks. So, it would be useful to split the API into different gateways, with individual facades for client needs.

Image Source: Microsoft

As you can see from the picture, the mobile app and the web app are separated. There are special facades for each of them due to different requirements for data compression and optimization.

What Are Microservices in AWS

AWS offers many services for developing successful microservice architecture. The typical case is shown on the scheme below.

Image Source: AWS

1. User Interface

AWS uses Amazon Simple Storage Service and CloudFront to deliver the static web content. You can benefit from reduced latency level due to the convenience of edge locations. Users are served from the nearest ones.

For further information, visit our blog: Simplifying Cloud Storage Costs: How AWS S3 Pricing Work

2. Microservices

AWS pays attention to the API, especially RESTful web services API. Apart from the connection between client and server, it has additional features as traffic management, authentication, authorization.

For the microservice implementation, you may use AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate.

3. Data Store

AWS offers the Amazon ElastiCache as a managed service for storing data which is needed for microservices. The service works as a cache, controls the load balancing and the latency level.

Dynamo DB is a document database with the opportunity to retrieve and store data. It can process 10 trillion requests per day.

Amazon Aurora is a relational database constructed for a cloud. It works 5 times faster than MySQL and saves costs, providing the same reliability. The service sends data copies to several regions to ensure security and fast disaster recovery.

Use Cases: Uber

Since the microservice architecture is a distributed system, where all the units are deployed independently, it is very useful for e-commerce. For instance, if you are running the online store, and the payment system requires the update then you can change only that part, without touching the rest of the system.

A few years ago, nobody even knew about microservices, but now many big companies benefit from it, and Uber isn’t an exception.

In the beginning, Uber started as a monolithic architecture. It was enough for the small enterprise, located in one city. With the worldwide growth, the program needed to be scaled, new features had been added, and it became quite a problem to maintain all of that as a monolith.

To avoid risks and hardships while updating and fixing bugs, Uber decided to build the microservice architecture.

Image Source: DZone

As you can see, each process has a separate unit in the system. Drivers and passengers are connected through the API Gateway, the service dependencies were broken, and each unit can be scaled independently.

Conclusion

As you may have understood, there is no one great solution for all of the companies. Choose the traditional monolithic structure for the small enterprise, keep the microservices for big boys with many operations. Keep in mind, that monolith requires a constant rebuild of the whole code base, whereas microservice units can be scaled independently.

You may also be interested in: 10 Ways to Reduce your AWS Bill

Original article:https://www.romexsoft.com/blog/what-are-microservices/

5 Ways to Reduce Downtime with IT Proactive Maintenance

Anna Boyko — Tue, 01 Dec 2020 14:53:26 +0000

If you happen to be up in the middle of the night, and you decide to pay your bills or check your bank balance, chances are you have run into a snag. You may receive a message stating that your banking services are not available because of backup or scheduled maintenance activity. Every night, the bank backs up all of its data from the day, so that nothing will be lost. And every so often, on a scheduled basis, it performs IT maintenance and housekeeping tasks on its systems, so that it does not experience downtime.

All of this mainly occurs automatically with no need for human hands on the activity. And, except for very unusual circumstances, the companies do not experience downtime during most common customer usage times. With certain exceptions though.

The Downtime and Its Cost for Businesses

Downtime can be defined as any stoppage in operations that is unplanned. It can be the result of many things, including poor maintenance. Planned downtime, such as that of the bank example above, is known as proactive IT maintenance and does not fall into this downtime meaning, because it is scheduled and controlled.

How much does unplanned downtime cost? First, the cost can be a loss in production time, delays in order fulfillment, and even overtime for employees. In dollars, there are estimates that downtime may cost collective billions among enterprises every year and between $301,000 and $400,000 for every hour that an IT system is down.

After an IT failure in 2017, thousands for British Airways passengers were affected. The company’s CEO further estimated that this downtime has cost the company £80 million ($102.88 million) indirect losses. Such outrages also cast a negative effect on your brand reputation and customer loyalty, further trimming your potential profits.

Given this liability, it only makes sense to determine how to reduce downtime and then put measures in place that will accomplish that reduction. It doesn’t matter whether your business is product or service-related. You have an IT infrastructure in place – hardware and software – that performs many of the operational functions of your company. All of your systems run with the help of technical support from an IT department. And there may even be 24/7 IT infrastructure monitoring in place. But if that department is reactive rather than proactive, then “breakdowns” will still result in unplanned downtime.

The solution, of course, is for companies to adopt a proactive IT maintenance function – one that is built into their overall IT operations and that will serve to reduce unexpected downtimes. Here are five ways to do just that.

1. Send Your IT Operations to the Cloud

The obvious benefit in terms of IT maintenance is that you no longer have to rely on on-premises hardware. While you certainly want to maintain some of your data centers, when critical operations are housed in a cloud server, such as AWS, then some of your downtime risks are reduced. And you still have security and 24/7 IT support, especially since all of your functions can be accessed from any device by authorized remote support members. You also retain round-the-clock access to your software and data – that's how cloud infrastructure works.

You can also set up automatic maintenance functions and alerts when something is amiss. Your only decision really is whether you want a dedicated, a public, or a shared cloud server. Part of this decision, of course, will be the need to stay on budget. An expert support team can help you line up the best “candidates” for migration to the cloud to unlock the most benefits and cost-savings.

2. Set a Regular Schedule of Maintenance – Patch, Update, and Upgrade

If you have developed your own software for your operations, then your IT department “knows the drill.” There are always “holes” that can make that software vulnerable to hackers or bugs that are discovered after that software is in operation.

And, if you are using purchased software, then the same issues can apply. Developers of that purchased software are continually adding patches to reduce vulnerability, providing updates to a current version, or offering upgrades to a new version. They do these things on a regular basis. And except for a new upgrade, the patches and updates are based on either regularly scheduled maintenance or the reporting of an issue by a user. Microsoft, for example, has a Patch Tuesday every other month. Updates and patches are usually automatically delivered, or, at the very least, you are alerted to download them.

If you set up a regular schedule of maintenance on your proprietary software, you can ensure that any issues that have been reported since the last maintenance date are fixed and that you are addressing new vulnerabilities that you have learned of and can “patch” any holes that may leave you vulnerable.

Any schedule of maintenance must have flexibility, however. If anyone in the organization reports a serious issue that is impacting performance or productivity, then that issue must be addressed and not put off until the next scheduled date.

3. Conduct a Risk Audit

This is another factor in taking a proactive approach to reducing downtime. In fact, it is one of the most effective measures you can take.

Basically, a risk audit looks into the future and predicts obsolescence of both hardware and software, identifying at what points they will probably result in productivity and performance issues, including unplanned downtime.

A regular replacement/upgrade schedule, based on the risk audit, will keep your IT infrastructure up-to-date and can be built into a budget, avoiding unplanned expenditures. A good analogy is the types of replacements and upgrades that can be planned for a house. Roofs last about 20 years; major appliances perhaps 15; mattresses about 8 years, and so on. The same applies to software/hardware.

4. Train and Listen to Your Employees

The biggest part of training employees relative to downtime reduction is to drive home the importance of reporting any issue they may have with your IT functions, no matter how small it seems. For example, if someone in the customer department is experiencing a slowdown in load time of customer history, it can be a problem with the software, that individual PC, or a potential breach. These must be reported as soon as they are experienced.

The other aspect of this is ensuring that tech support is always available and that someone will listen when issues are reported and then respond to them quickly, no matter how small they may seem at the time. Creating a designated team in-house may be troublesome though as it means the additional workload on your IT staff. So consider the benefits of switching to a managed IT support provider.

5. Partner with an Outsourced Technical Support Partner

You may have a range of vendors, and you may not have the IT staff to develop the stages of intimate knowledge required for maintenance and troubleshooting all the issues. Instead of working on your core business goals, your staff will be “siloed” with day-to-day maintenance chores, slowing down your pace for product development.

Outsourcing DevOps support to an experienced service provider means that your teams no longer need to deal with system orchestration, and can focus on innovations instead. You, in turn, have greater peace of mind, knowing that your infrastructure is monitored 24/7/365, and no issue will fly under the radar. While this comes with a price tag, you have to weigh that against the impact of downtime on your bottom line.

Reducing downtime should be the goal of any organization. There are many reasons for unplanned downtime but neither of them should come as a result of failed maintenance schedule and forgotten updates to your IT infrastructure. Get to know how Romexsoft team can help you get a better grip of your AWS environment and support your background operations, while you focus on your business growth. Get in touch today to schedule a quick discovery session with our specialists.

Written by Romexsoft on January 2, 2019

DevOps Outsourcing: All You Need to Know

Anna Boyko — Wed, 30 Sep 2020 15:03:59 +0000

DevOps Outsourcing is a service provided by a team of experts who work for the result and control all the processes related to the project, its automation, resistance to falls and dangerous situations for business.
By ordering DevOps Outsourcing services, you gain access to a wide range of talented engineers working on the projects all around the world.

The process of recruitment to an internal team can take several months, while most companies almost always need implementation of DevOps tasks “for yesterday”. However, finding outsourced DevOps can take just a few days, all you need to do is to choose an outsourcing agency and make an agreement with it. In particular, our DevOps engineers are focused on achieving business goals and providing solutions that can help you with that.

Choosing a DevOps Outsourcing Partner

To choose the right DevOps outsourcing partner you should understand that DevOps teams can provide services on different platforms, public cloud storage and have different tools for performing DevOps tasks. Everything depends on the platform where your infrastructure is on or what your plans are for building it. For example, one of the most robust platforms for data hosting is the public cloud AWS (Amazon Web Services).

DevOps on AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has its database of partner companies (including our company), which can be trusted to support and build your cloud infrastructure. AWS provides services that help practice DevOps with tools that you can read about in our previous article - AWS DevOps Services and Tools.
AWS Monitoring Tools.
AWS S3 Pricing Work.

To choose the right AWS partner company, take a close look at the following three things:

Is this partner AWS oriented?

The AWS ecosystem is continuously evolving, producing new tools and constantly improving the existing ones. It’s necessary to keep a close eye on changes and new trends. If the partner company focuses on several major cloud platforms, can it be flexible and respond immediately to changes and innovations from AWS. Of course, it’s better to choose a partner whose only focus is on AWS rather than on several major cloud platforms. After all, a partner that is aware of all the improvements and changes, will be able to manage your presence in the cloud according to all best practices.

Team and Certification

Review the competencies and certificates that your potential partner has. Look at the engineering team. What are the professional certifications they possess? Current certificates include: developer, architect, SysOps administrator, solutions architect, and DevOps engineer. Though not all of them are crucial to your initial management needs, this will be one of the benefits in the future.

Projects of the Selected Service Partner

It is worth paying attention to the projects of the selected service partner. The projects must be large-scale and work for many years, which is an indicator of quality and reliability of the service partner.

You can find out more about choosing an AWS partner company in our article - How to Choose the Right AWS Partner to Manage Your Cloud Infrastructure.

Pros and Cons of Outsourcing DevOps

Benefits of a Client’s Business

Access to expertise

The client hires a team of professionals that already have experience in lots of projects and can make reliable and fast automation processes.

Value for money

Recruiting a team for one project will require large financial injections, and once all the automation processes are set up, the team will have few tasks left which could be financially sound. If the team is outsourced, it performs the tasks for many projects and does it reliably and quickly as it takes the experience from one project to another. The customer pays only for the work performed in a fixed deadline.

Project management on the vendor’s side

The client only has to describe the problem or give the task, and the process is controlled by a manager who is responsible for the quality of the tasks performed on the side of the service vendor.

Complex of provided services

By using DevOps outsourcing as a service, you can not only meet the needs of a particular DevOps services, but also gather a full team of performers “under the project”, who will communicate in a coordinated manner. In addition to DevOps, a team can also consist of testers, programmers, analysts, designers, etc. And the outsourcing company will take over all the management and mentoring work on the developers to control the process.

Problems that may occur

Problems in finding a common goal

To gain a better understanding of the business needs of customers and be on the same wavelength, we conduct regular online meetings of our clients or their proxies with our technical specialists and team leads. We help to understand the technical aspects and make the most profitable decisions.

Problems in communicating with different contractors

It’s important to note that we are a company that provides comprehensive services and regularly communicates with programmers and understands all the nuances.

Therefore, it is easier for us to establish communication with the client's team of programmers (if any), because we have experience in it.

Problems in small projects

DevOps Outsourcing will not take short-term projects because it’s not financially profitable for both the client and the service provider.

Security problems

Security issues are controlled by an agreement with a company that represents the DevOps team. It’s also managed by regulations depending on the specialization of the project. We have successful experience in solving security problems in the areas of finance, medicine, media and ecommerce.

If your business needs quality services with AWS DevOps Outsourcing - we know how to help. Our DevOps team works 24\7 and is able not only to perform its tasks well, but also offer the client’s business effective solutions for cost optimization and reliable monitoring.

Bring the software test automation services in your team

Anna Boyko — Fri, 07 Aug 2020 09:58:40 +0000

What is your biggest desire when it comes to creating a mobile application? The answer is simple - to release the flawless product, saving time and money. That’s what software test automation services can help you to accomplish.

Let’s look closer at the benefits of using automation testing.

Saves money

At first, it will look like it doesn’t. Yes, testing is expensive: you have to make a research, find the best team and buy the software. However, it will pay off as soon as hundreds of hours that manual testers could spend are replaced with the software quality assurance testing services doing the job perfectly with zero energy or accuracy losses.

We are coming to the next advantage - time-saving.

Saves time

Having a team is very important, and there is nothing wrong to hire the AI to be an effective part of it. While software quality assurance testing services work on several computers simultaneously, your team can focus on other tasks and get rid of long manual work.

Guarantees good reputation

Users are very picky. They have loads of similar apps at their fingertips, and if your app has bugs like freezing, the user will get rid of it immediately. Automation testing identifies all kinds of bugs thoroughly and quickly, increasing the chances to release a flawless product. If you don’t want the users to notice any issues and tell about them in the comment section, let the automated testing do its job.

As you can see, there are many great advantages. Romexsoft deals with 8 areas, that can be automized and boost your product’s quality.

REGRESSION TESTING

Regression testing is crucial when it comes to checking additional new features of your app. It ensures that previous parts of code are not damaged by the new ones.

It’s more effective to use the automated version than hire manual testers, because the program can be used several times, until the app is completely fixed.

These are the tools used in regression testing software:

Solex
TestComplete
QA Wizard Pro
UNIT TESTING

At the stage of unit testing, the program checks the individual code parts separately. It ensures the smallest units work properly before the whole code is created.

Moreover, unit testing pushes the app developer to work hard on the correctness of the inputs and outputs, as well as defining criteria for the proper work of code parts.

Use the unit testing and don’t waste your time fixing the bug after the whole code is done.

Look closer at these tools:

Jtest
JUnit

LOAD AND PERFORMANCE TESTING

Users won’t wait even 5 seconds for the app to load. The perfect speed of performance can be reached with the software performance testing services. They allow evaluating how the app behaves with hundreds of people using it. The testing goes on different devices at the same time.

Romexsoft team uses the best tools to check and optimize the loading speed:

Jenkins
JMeter
FUNCTIONAL TESTING

Instead of checking individual parts, functional testing examines an overall program. In other words, it compares the expected outputs with the real ones and whether they meet the users’ requirements.

These are some software quality assurance testing services suited for that job:

Selenium WebDriver
Ranorex
SoapUI
GUI FUNCTIONAL TESTING

Any app needs an appealing design. However, if the clickable areas don’t lead where they must to, the user will never use the product. At first sight, the manual testers can check every icon or button. Unfortunately, the number of variations can be up to more than 5000. That is a good reason to let the software test automation services do it for your team.

Some of them are:

Selenium WebDriver
Ranorex
TestComplete
SMOKE TESTING

Imagine that you’re building the house. Will you check the stability of the construction step by step, or do that at the very end? Surely, you may start with examining the base.

The development of the product is similar to building the house. Before creating the whole, it’s crucial to check core features like opening the interface or checking the functionality of the main button.

Smoke testing perfectly deals with that accompanied by such tools:

Selenium WebDriver
Bamboo
Cargo
TestingNG
ACCEPTANCE TESTING

evaluates the work of the software in connection with the criteria, so that customers are satisfied. Besides, it checks the quality of operational processes and claims whether the product is stable, reliable and portable.

To check the user and operational acceptance use these instruments:

Cucumber
FitNesse
Selerium
Ranorex
MOBILE TESTING

The team of app developers create the product in ideal conditions, but nobody knows how the app will behave on certain devices. What resolution, network or screen input methods are suitable for it? What if the app doesn’t allow picking up the call and then return to its previous state? These and ton of other issues are solved by mobile application testing services.

To check all the possible incompatibilities keep an eye on the following tools:

Appium
Ranorex
As you can see, many leakages of time, money and reputation are hiding behind app development. However, with the Romexsoft’s software qa testing services you can be 100% sure in your final product.

Why AWS is the Best Place to Migrate?

Anna Boyko — Fri, 07 Aug 2020 09:39:10 +0000

Before looking at the 10 best cloud application migration services, you need to understand the general terms of this field. We are 99% sure that your company is acknowledged with cloud migration, but it’s never late to explore.

What is Migration Software?

Cloud migration is a similar process to moving from a small apartment to a luxurious suite. It involves relocating data from legacy infrastructure to the cloud. Legacy infrastructures are mainly physical places where the company’s servers are kept. They could be offices, for example. Keeping data that way is not reliable, and if your company is still using that method, experience the cloud platform.

Cloud computing brings many advantages:
Out-of-premises maintenance
Increased productivity
Reduced impact risks
Favourable position among competitors

During migration, data is executed from one environment to another. It’s a long and complicated road, and to make it easier there are various cloud application migration services. One of the best services is AWS managed support system.

Why AWS is the Best Place to Migrate?

Many services could help with cloud migration like Google or Microsoft Azure. However, Amazon Web Service has the best study cases. Big companies such as Coca-Cola, Samsung and Twenty-First Century Fox trust AWS. Besides, this service is open to middle-sized and small businesses. Speaking of numbers, AWS customers comprise 90% small and middle-sized businesses, whereas only 10% comprise large enterprises.

Moreover, AWS has been working since 2006. It all started when cloud migration was an unknown field, which makes AWS a pioneer in that field.

Changes always scare. They mean taking a risk, having a chance to lose and fall behind your competitors. However, with trusted instruments and AWS managed support the successful data transition is guaranteed. Get acquainted with the top AWS tools:

AWS Cloud Adoption Readiness Tool (CART)

TSO Logic
Cloud Endure
BMC Discovery
Turbonomic
New Relic Software Analytics
Dynatrace
Attunity CloudBeam
AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP)
AppDynamics Application Intelligence Platform

Find out more about AWS Cloud Application Services

1. AWS Cloud Adoption Readiness Tool (CART)

To prepare for the exam successfully, a student has to identify their knowledge gaps first. CART is a cloud application migration service that helps companies to check their general readiness before they embark on a cloud migration. AWS provides you with a list of questions and visualizes the cloud adoption readiness with a report, a heatmap and a chart.

To sum up, with a cloud adoption readiness tool your idea of migrating can become a precise knowledge of what gaps you should fill before transferring the data to the cloud.

2. TSO Logic

The next cloud application migration service, which is owned by AWS, is all about finding the most cost-effective solution for your case. TSO Logic estimates how much your present application maintenance costs and what awaits for you in the future after commuting.

This tool is necessary, as it’s impractical to migrate without knowing how much you spend today. TSO Logic provides an analytical report on how to save the budget and what type of cloud is best suited for your company. The automated system collects all the data needed and saves your team from doing it manually.

3. Cloud Endure

Cloud Endure transfers the data from the migration source to the migration target. There aren’t any special requirements for your present storage method. It can be both on-premise or cloud source. This cloud application migration service replicates all the data without performance disruption or any other losses. Its main goal is to make the cloud migration an easy and a smooth process.

Once the data is located in AWS cloud, it’s possible to make any other migrations of your choice. One of the many benefits is that the costs of the operation are maximum reduced, as Cloud Endure is the only tool you need to transfer the data without buying additional software.

4. BMC Discovery

With the help of BMC Discovery, you will be able to analyse the costs, make a plan before migration and manage all the AWS managed support tools. It is the end-to-end tool which provides security testing, optimizes software, improves the speed of the IT processes.

5.Turbonomic

Turbonomic can help you with the maintenance of the application. Its functions include management of the stored data, as well as network and compute resources. It keeps the application’s performance on high level. One of the prominent customers of this cloud application migration service is Carhartt. Using Turbonomic, the company manages to keep its performance afloat during Black Friday without performance losses.

6. New Relic Software Analytics

Once your data has been migrated to the cloud, there is a crucial examination you need to do:

What is the possible churn rate?
How many users are on the website right now?
How many customers are expected to potentially buy your latest product?

Software Analytics collects millions of events from your application activity and forms useful business insights. This information will show the weak places that need to be improved.

7. Dynatrace

Dynatrace is an automated tool that identifies any issues that can occur in performance, cloud infrastructure or user activity. This cloud application migration service involves AIOPs for precise problem root identification. Similarly to New Relic software, Dynatrace analyses user segment.

The AWS managed support gives the metrics and detailed researches on the whole stack, allowing your company to make the user experience better.

8. Attunity CloudBeam

Attunity CloudBeam is one of the AWS managed support services. Its main aim is to transfer Big Data inside the cloud storages of AWS and Microsoft Azure. If the fast loading of data, the replication of information without losses are among your priorities, than Attunity CloudBeam is the right choice. Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift and Amazon Glacier can become the new storages for your data.

9. AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP)

As it was mentioned in the beginning, changes can be scary. Your team may be reluctant to the cloud migration. However, it’s never late to gain competencies. Migration Acceleration Program stands for the best teaching team that helps to migrate with cost reduction and minimum issues.

The MAP is the cloud application migration service that consists of three stages:

Readiness stage
Planning stage
Migration stage

During the Program, your team will gain precious experience and advance their knowledge in cloud migration. The whole process is led by experienced AWS professionals and partners, such as AppDynamics Application Intelligence Platform.

10. AppDynamics Application Intelligence Platform

Romexsoft team is almost 100% sure that at this point you have a positive look at cloud migration. If it’s not true yet, you can still monitor your data in a traditional environment through AppDynamics Application Intelligence Platform. This AWS managed support service expertises in dissolving performance issues, combining IT and business spheres together to achieve success.

The Platform compares pre- and post-migration user activity. You will have a real-time map at your fingertips and decide which sector to improve. Moreover, the cloud application migration service constantly seeks for and eliminates load issues, as well as optimizes ownership costs.

Why the Right Migration Tools Matter
Congratulations! Now you know the right cloud application migration services for smooth migration. These tools will help you to save costs, reach the maximum load speed, keep your data save and make users feel happy. However, the automated softwares can’t work properly without human control.

You can always turn to Romexsoft team that specializes in AWS managed support services. We are ready to lead your company to the higher level and consult in any question.

There is a list of our case studies. Good luck with the migration!

Cost-effective AWS Infrastructure for Test Automation Suite
Cost-effective monitoring solution on AWS
Cost-effective Pilot Light Disaster Recovery Solution on AWS for an on-premise production environment.
Migration from Heroku to AWS Case Study – AVA Touch

Overview of Java Web Application Frameworks in 2020

Anna Boyko — Thu, 02 Jul 2020 09:37:44 +0000

According to the TIOBE programming community, Java remains the most popular programming language in 2020. Given the language’s resilience and the fact that it is equipped with a huge ecosystem, Java-based applications can be one of the best solutions for any domain in web development.

Despite the huge flexibility provided by the Java ecosystem, it isn't uncommon to see projects with the Monolithic Architecture type face issues. Monoliths cause that business logic, various tests, and web resources, including templates, images, etc packed in a single unit and deployed to the server. The main problems of this approach is the complexity of understanding, extending functionality, support, and predicting side effects when modifying the existing code. Nowadays microservices architecture is a popular alternative to monoliths. In this post, we will provide an overview of Java web application frameworks that can be used for micrtoservice architecture, as well as the main benefits of each.

Why is the choice of Java web application frameworks important?

One of the main problems that arises during development projects on migration to the new stack are the choice of framework for the architecture of the project. To build a robust platform and improve efficiency, the technology stack should be standardized.
According to the "Java trends", you can see a list of Java web application frameworks that are the most popular in the development of web applications in 2020. In this article, we will consider the latest and most popular have been implemented using Java.

Most Popular Java Web Application Frameworks in 2020

Spring Boot and Spring Framework

The Spring Framework is an open-source Java application framework with a large ecosystem. Spring focuses on a business logic level, without unnecessary connections to deployment environments. It is based on modern ideas of object-oriented programming, such as dependency injection (DI), inversion of control (IoC) and AOP (aspect-oriented programming). DI is a programming pattern that allows developers to build more decoupled architectures.

This means that Spring understands the distinct Java annotations that mark different classes. In addition, Spring uses reflection for objects that are created, wired together, configured and managed throughout their life cycle, so IoC takes control from the class in the spring container. Spring is a large ecosystem that includes a lot of modules and projects like Integration, Security, Cloud, MVC, DataFlow, etc.

Spring Boot is an IO Execution (Runtime) project. Spring Boot is the next step that simplifies customization and application development. Spring Boot application creation, configuration, packaging, and deployment are drastically simplified. Web applications can leverage the flexibility of usage and configuration of embedded servlet container environments (tomcat, jetty, or undertow). Moreover, CLI applications can leverage all Spring ecosystem features to write sophisticated tasks. Moreover, Spring Boot supports several
build systems like Maven or Gradle.

Spring Boot supports dependency management and can consume artifacts published to the central repository. Dependency management is helpful to avoid version conflicts between dependencies. In practice, Spring Boot uses BOMs to control the version of any dependence. BOM is a special kind of POM which provides a central place to define and update these versions.

The benefits of Spring Boot and Spring Framework:

Supports declarative programming
Supports various configuration methods
Creates standalone applications
Helps directly embed a servlet container (Tomcat, Jetty or Undertow) in an application
Easy setup and management

Micronaut

Micronaut is a modern foundation designed to quickly and easily create microservice programs. It supports popular languages based on the JVM platform (Java, Kotlin, Groovy).
Micronaut contains features similar to the other existing frameworks but has new ideas which can be defined as it's distinctive features. One such feature is a dependency injection (DI) during compilation.

As a result, we get faster program startup time with less memory consumption. Among others framework features on offer are support for reactive programming (Rx Java and Project Reactor) and cloud-native development. Also, support for reactive programming allows you to rapidly set up non-blocking endpoints just by a matter of substituting object types by reactive non-blocking types. In the reactive approach, Netty is the basic server used to handle HTTP requests.

In addition, Micronaut has the ability to create serverless function applications for AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, etc. Micronaut itself provides support to GraalVM and compiles functions or services into native images. To use GraalVM correctly, you should read more in the documentation which contains examples for getting started.

The benefits of Micronaut:

Cloud features are supported by default
Fast startup time
Implemented an efficient compile-time dependency-injection container
Easy unit testing
Reduced memory footprint

Quarkus

Quarkus is a new conceptual framework for cloud-native development. The main goal of this project is to create a Java platform for Kubernetes or serverless environments. Additionally, it combines reactive and imperative programming models in one runtime so that developers can flexibly vary their approach to working with a wide range of distributed application architectures.

Quarcus is based on Vert.x, Netty and a number of extensions used to help the developer.

Since Quarkus is adapted to OpenJDK, HotSpot and GraalVM, it provides an ecosystem that creates a native packaging as native executor with a packaged small VM at build time. Thus, using Java, you can create native binaries and avoid the expenses associated with using a JVM program inside the container.

The benefits of Quarkus:

Improved memory utilization and startup time
Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) Runtime
Live coding “just works” out of the box
Early detection of dependency injection errors
Support for traditional imperative models, reactive models, or both in the same application.

MicroProfile

MicroProfile is a specification that can be implemented by various vendors and has several implementations. The main goal is to define standard APIs for building microservices leveraging different implementations of the MicroProfile runtime environments. To date, there are several popular implementations, among which are Payara Micro, Helidon MP, Eclipse MicroProfile, and enterprise solutions on cloud platforms, which can be read about here.

The benefits of MicroProfile:

А simpler standardized alternative to Jakarta EE
All specifications are community driven, free, and open which has encouraged and resulted in multiple implementations.

Vert.x

Vert.x is a framework that runs on JVM and allows you to write in several programming languages such as Java, JavaScript, Groovy, Ruby, Scala, and Kotlin. It's event-driven architecture results in applications that scale well even with minimal hardware resources. Vert.x provides idiomatic APIs for every supported programming language.

As Vert.x is an event-driven and non-blocking framework, it can handle a lot of concurrency using only a minimal number of threads. Also Vert.x is quite lightweight, with the core framework weighing only about 650 kb. In addition, It has modular architecture that allows you to use only the modules you need so that your app can stay as slick as possible.

The benefits of Vert.x:

Fast, lightweight and modular framework
Allows you to create powerful apps, simply
Ideal choice for creating light-weight, high-performance, microservices
Scales well with minimal hardware.

Summary:

In this article, we looked at the main frameworks used in different domains of web development. To date, we can see how rapidly Java is developing and how many new frameworks are emerging to solve business-oriented problems. Additionally, we considered the benefits of each of the frameworks when used with different architectures. We hope this article will help you easily choose a framework for your project or startup.

How we can help

If you are looking for business applications that can provide you with the needed functionality and a dedicated team of qualified developers who can take your requirements and ideas and convert them into a Java application framework that works, then get in touch with us and you get your free consultation. We have solutions awaiting you. Read more about our Java application development company.

INDUSTRIES:
https://www.romexsoft.com/healthcare-app-development/
https://www.romexsoft.com/fintech/
https://www.romexsoft.com/media-and-entertainment/

Autor: Ihor
Hello! My name is Ihor, Java Software Engineer at Romexsoft. Enthusiast in self-development and like sharing knowledge, so if you have any questions I will be glad to answer them.

Outsourcing Software Development for Startups: Should or Shouldn’t?

Anna Boyko — Fri, 26 Jun 2020 10:46:34 +0000

Every startup hits the wall at some point. They are two-three years into their business, are scaling nicely, and have enough seed funding to move forward with larger goals and plans. It’s an exciting time!

The “wall” that is hit, however, is that the MVP or “elementary” software solutions that served so well during these first years are no longer adequate. It is time to do what so many other successful startups do – acquire bespoke applications that serve their unique needs and help expanding the business further.

There are two options for startups as they scale:

Hire the talent to work in-house and encumber a large chunk of expense, and continually add to that staff as they grow and needs become larger and more complex.
Choose to outsource their software development services, conducting the careful research to find nearshore or offshore IT firms with superior reputations and that come highly recommended by others in their sector.

It will be important for any business considering outsourcing software development to take a very considered approach in exploring the pros and cons of such a move, as opposed to keeping everything in-house. Here’s some research that will help you in making this decision.
Read more about cloud application development and AWS managed services in Ukraine

Why You Should Consider Outsourcing

Last year, Deloitte completed a major study of global outsourcing – a study that took a comprehensive look at what, why, and how companies outsource. Here are some important findings of their survey, which included 70+ questions:

While 85% of respondents were large established companies, many with a global reach, another 15% were small and mid-sized enterprises.
Of the respondents, 78% have successful outsourcing stories to tell and have a positive feeling about the relationships they have with their providers.
72% of the respondents outsource at least some of their IT functions, including software development outsourcing.

When asked for their reasons for outsourcing, most companies named the following ones:

59% claim that outsourcing is more cost-effective.
57% say that, by outsourcing some functions, they are able to focus their resources (financial and human) on the core business goals. This is especially important for startup development in the early years of an enterprise.
47% state that, especially with IT development outsourcing that is cloud-based, their capacity issues are resolved.
31% say that customized IT solutions, in areas such as customer service, enhance revenue and retention. For instance, this would stand to reason then, that startup outsourcing development for unique CRM functions can bring huge benefits.

Are There Downsides to IT Application Development Outsourcing?

Yes, there are, and many of them depend upon the vendor and, more importantly, the relationship between the client and vendor.

If a client is not intimately involved in detailed discussions and solution options and kept in the loop at all times, a disconnect develops that may not be reparable.

Another downside is that many vendors experience a high rate of staff turnover. Obviously, this impacts a team and the efficacy of project work. It would be important to investigate the turnover rate of vendors being considered. There are new tech startups all over the globe that are marketing themselves as software development providers. Don’t ignore them just because they may be newer – they often have great talent. But take caution. Perhaps contract with them for one of the less essential needs you have at the moment and gauge their performance.

A third downside can be the confidentiality reliability of a vendor. This certainly can be mitigated with tight contracts and, again, contracting with a vendor for a project that involves less risk, as a “test” of sorts. And checking reputable references is obviously a must.

How Do You Seek The Right Outsourcers?

Exactly how do enterprises, especially startups, look for good options to outsource web application development? They follow the lead of larger enterprises, that is, they rely on their own research, and RFPs (requests for proposals). In fact, according to the Deloitte survey, 95% of the enterprises surveyed used this method.

Once proposals have been received, of course, there is the checking of references and further conversation relative to details, timelines, etc.

But, according to the Deloitte study, once relationships are established with vendors, 89% of the companies surveyed continue to leverage their relationships with those same vendors.

Cybersecurity as An Ongoing Issue

This is an issue for 64% of the respondents, and it will be important to investigate the security protocols of any vendor with which a company will share confidential information/data.

On the other hand, many companies that outsource with trusted vendors and who have long-term relationships with those vendors, do depend upon those vendors to provide security solutions for them. Custom software development for startups should provide the same security measures, and business owners must ensure that this is so.

At Romexsoft our standard procedures include signing Non-Disclosure/Non-Compete agreements whenever necessary; using the latest security protocols for data transmission and sharing; and of course, coding the solutions using the latest security standards.

The Future of Outsourcing for Startups

Respondents to the Deloitte survey say that they are experiencing far fewer issues with vendors being reactive rather than being proactive. Most companies mentioned experiencing better responsiveness and overall product quality. IT outsourcing specifically is among the top three sectors in which outsourcing is expected to grow the most over the next several years.

Where To Go for Outsourcing?

For many years, India and China have been the “go-to” spots for outsourcing for organizations all over the globe. The talent level has been high and the prices right. Currently, however, this is changing.

Costs in India have been increasing significantly, closely followed by Chinese providers. And many European countries are looking for “nearshore” solutions on their own continent. This is occurring at the same time that wage inflation remains rather low in many European countries, making those providers, if they are of quality, far more cost-attractive, both to the continent and to North America.

So, who are the up and comers in the software development outsourcing sector? Well, according to Tholons, an advisory company for global outsourcing, the picture is changing rapidly. In compiling data to name the 100 best outsourcing locations, there has been a definite shift. Three main regions are picking up steam in the IT outsourcing sector – Eastern Europe, South America, and Southeast Asia.
While Southeast Asia has really focused on serving clients in its region, the other two have expanded their focus to major cities all over the globe. Two factors in this growth include:

Lots of government support and lower rates of a wage increase.
Universities focus on IT programs as places where they are placing their resources. This means a larger labor pool of highly skilled IT professionals. In Ukraine alone, IT outsourcing as a sector of the economy has reached well over $1.5 billion with thousands of new software specialists graduating annually, all of whom also happen to speak English.

Looking at outsourcing to Ukraine specifically, it has been ranked on Gartner’s list of the top 30 outsourcing destinations since 2007 and continues to climb on that list each year. Gartner’s criteria for ranking IT outsourcing destinations include the following:

Infrastructure
Government support
Language
Economic environment
Educational system
Cultural compliance
Costs
Large skill pool
Global maturity
Intellectual and data security and privacy

Additionally, twelve Ukrainian IT companies have made it to The Global Outsourcing 100 rating compiled by IAOP. Other organizations have also ranked Ukraine outsourcing in its top locations for IT services, app development and gaming. Additionally, Ukraine is well-regarded in terms of newer areas of IT expertise, including blockchain development and Data Science services.

Outsourcing for Startups: Should or Shouldn’t?

Only you know whether you have “hit that wall” yet. But if you are scaling, you probably have. You need more sophisticated solutions for logistics, inventory, operations, data storage, finance and accounting, customer service and relationships, and project management that are unique to your enterprise.

Again, you have those two choices – recruit, hire, and onboard full-time employees whose salaries and benefits become a permanent new cost, or take the more cost-effective approach of outsourcing and do the upfront research and discussion to find the right development firm for your needs.

If you are ready to begin the outsourcing exploration process, Romexsoft would love to have a conversation about your needs and how we can meet them!

How To Make Social Networking Website Like Facebook

Anna Boyko — Thu, 25 Jun 2020 13:01:42 +0000

Facemash was launched in October, 2003 by a Harvard college student Mark Zuckerberg, along with a few friends. While it did not last long, Zuckerberg learned an important thing. Students couldn’t resist going to the site, surfing around and connecting with one another. That understanding led ultimately to Facebook as we know it today.

Facebook is the giant of all giants in the social networking world, closely followed by sites like Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Snapchat and Myspace back in the early days. But this does not mean that other smaller social networks are not both popular and profitable. They are, and new websites are being launched every day.

Some will survive and thrive - some will not. If you want to make a custom social networking site like Facebook, your first step is to take an organized approach. Here is a plan that will get you started right.

How to Make a Social Networking Website Like Facebook in 7 Steps

In this guide we’ll break down the answers to the following common questions:

How to create a website like Facebook?
How to create a social network from scratch and monetize it?
How to start a social network like Facebook and not to fail?

Sounds curious? Read on!

Step 1: Develop a Concept Based Upon Value to Users

This will be the most critical piece of your entire journey to start a social network, and you need to think long and hard about your concept. What is the demographic to which you are appealing, and what will be the appeal that will attract them? You have a few options here:

You can decide to begin small with the understanding that you can always expand your base. Two American siblings in high school in 2004 decided to start a social network for their own high school, based upon information in the yearbook. It became hugely popular, and they then expanded. Today that site has expanded internationally and is published in 5 languages.

You can decide to go for a large demographic and a more general focus in the beginning and thus have a larger base to market to from the beginning. Twitter is an example of this strategy and it has been hugely successful.

One point to consider here. If you go after a general-purpose focus and a very large demographic, you will be competing with the giants, and there are and used to be giants in many countries (e.g., Bebo in the UK, Hi5 in China, and Orkut in Brazil). Unless you have some uniqueness, growth will be much tougher.

Another point to consider is this: Are there other social networks already out there that claim the same niche that you want? You will need to do some research on the competition, just as you would when starting any business. Your own social network is not just for fun and games – it is for profit.

Step 2: Social Network Development – Initial Considerations

Clear Conveyance of Audience and Purpose to Your Developers

If you have refined your purpose and your audience profile correctly, you have a clear picture of the “what, who, and why.” This is what you will have to convey clearly to the developers who will be working on your site.

The Money

Development will next be all about the money, which can easily run as high as $300,000 for a site similar to Instagram and up to $500.000 to make a social media website of the Facebook size.

If you are looking for a smaller niche audience, however, you will be looking at less complex features, and you can whittle that cost down to somewhere between $25,000 - $125,000. Just be realistic with how much does it cost to develop social networking site.

The Platform

The next decision is that of platform. Are you going for a website or a mobile app? Both of these platforms are highly successful today, and, actually, Instagram began as a mobile app and then scaled.

If you go for a mobile app, then do you want iPhone, Android or both? If your audience is in North America, Western Europe and Oceania, the iPhone is your choice. The rest of the world prefers Android. Again, you can choose a platform for your MVP based upon initial target audience and scale later.

Traffic Estimation

This is a tough one. While you may have dreams of being the “high roller” in your niche, focus on the next one-two years. How many users can you reasonably expect within that time period?

If you’ve done some good market research, you should be able to give a rough estimate to your developers. This will determine your database and your cost. Here are the options:

You can begin with something like MySQL or PostgreSQL for your structured data.
You can begin with a NoSQL database, such as MongoDB if you want quick, high-load that will support high traffic surges, if you think that will happen soon.

You have to think about whether you want an MVP product that can scale later (less expensive) or the high-load for huge traffic (more expensive, obviously). This you need to discuss with your social networking web development team. What you don’t want is a database built cheaply that can’t scale.

Step 3: Social Networking Website Development 2.0. – The Features/UX Design

At a minimum, a social network site should include the following elements:

Profiles
Multiple methods to connect
Interactive news/content feed/messaging/content sharing
Search functions
Some unique features that are cool and that make your site more appealing – this one’s on you to devise. But you might want something like anonymous messaging or photo filters.
Database encryption (pretty costly)
Admin panel – talk with your developers about analytics and other functions you might want – this can have an expensive pricing too
Billing – may or may not need be needed

Read more about
And here’s where UX design is most critical. Your site has to be easy to use and provide an enjoyable experience. A good development team will keep this in mind as all features are designed, so that layouts, architecture, and overall design standards are consistent and logical. They are built into the wireframing process and/or into each feature.

Be aware that some developers will charge for UX and UI on a per-screen basis or provide an overall cost for wireframing, architecture, and visual design.

To create a social network website, which delights the user, you’ll need to heavily invest into decent app architecture and run by numerous user stories.

Step 4: Development 3.0 – The Team

Every feature requires back- and front-end coding and real pros. An online social networking site will usually involve the following team members:

Senior/Middle UX developer
Senior/Middle UI designer
Junior UI to provide assistance and redundancy
2 Senior/Middle Front-End developers
Senior and Middle Back-end developers to code all the functionality
DevOps to establish building, testing and releasing environment (read more about DevOps production support)
2 QA’s to ensure high quality and fluent workflow (read more about web app testing services)
Project Manager to oversee whole project

Now you are at the crossroads: Do you hire all of this in-house or do you contract with a site development firm? Here are the numbers:

Look at the average annual salary (+ benefits) of developers. If you don’t know, check Payscale. Add additional cost for screening, interviews and initial onboarding. Depending on your locale, you could be talking over $250,000 a year.
Compare that cost with a total project cost quote from a professional and reputable development firm like Romexsoft.

Really, there is just “no contest” here. Outsourcing is far cheaper, so long as you have a firm that is responsive, professional, has a great reputation, and keeps you in the loop all along the way. And you want to look for a firm that will provide continued support for maintenance and scaling – this is critical.

Step 5: Marketing/Promoting Your Site

This will be the place where the “rubber meets the road.” There is a line in an old movie that says, “If you build it, they will come.” Anyone involved in Internet marketing and promotion will tell you this is completely wrong.

A social networking site must be promoted and marketed just like any other business, and, again, you have options:

If your new venture is all that you are doing right now, you may be able to develop marketing expertise. Certainly, there are tutorials and tools that will help you.
SEO is just as important for a social networking site as it is for an e-commerce site. If you are not comfortable with, then find someone you can trust who is. The more exposure you get, the more attention you will get from potential advertisers.
Take the lead from LinkedIn. Every time you get a new member, make sure to dig deep and set the systems in place to court that member’s contacts and friends. This is the one thing that pushed WAYN into the black and resulted in the big infusion of venture capital. Rather than ask your followers to invite their friends and expect them to do this manually, have an automatic system set up that invites members of their email lists, and that shares their membership on all of their other social media accounts.

Step 6: Monetizing Your Site

You did not get into this social networking site “business” just for fun and games. You got into it because you want to make some money. You have made a huge investment, and it is time for it to pay off. How do the “big boys” do that? You know how – it’s all about paid advertising. As anyone with a popular website, app, or blog will tell you, this takes time, and you have to have the wherewithal to wait it out while your popularity increases and advertisers see value in paying to market on your site. Here are a few tips:

Look Into Any Initial Partnership Opportunities

If your site niche is camping, what retailers might be interested in advertising? Even offering some free advertising initially will lend credibility to your site. If followers see name brand ad placements, they will get the impression that this may be a popular place to be and join.

Go After Potential Advertisers

You cannot do this overtly at first. You can, however, develop relationships with potential advertisers by mentioning their products or services on your site, by following their content postings, adding comments with links to your site, and publishing content on your own site that demonstrates your expertise in the niche area. All of these things are done by content marketers for businesses, and you have to think of your social networking platform as a business. If you do not have the time for this, then you will need to employ a marketing/promotion specialists or use a reputable firm to provide this for you.

Only Reputable Advertisers

Make sure that the advertisers you allow on your site are reputable and that the value and benefits they bring to your audience are authentic and genuine. Being disrupted by irrelevant advertising or, worse, being burned by an advertiser on your site is about the worst thing you can do. Every advertiser is also a reflection on you. Choose carefully.

Step 7: Site Maintenance and Scaling

If you are staffed in-house, then you have this aspect covered. If you have outsourced your development, however, you need to be certain that the firm you use offers continued maintenance and support solutions, as well as scaling, as the need arises. Again, using a firm that is well established, that has a team approach to development and maintenance, that takes initiative in making recommendations, and that is available for consultation on a moment’s notice is a critical factor in your success.

The Bottom Line – Romexsoft Has Your Answers

All of this is probably looking pretty overwhelming to you right now. But it doesn’t have to be. Romexsoft has the expertise to take you through the entire development journey and remain with you to provide continuous support, maintenance, and scaling, when the need arises.

From the initial consultation on, you will understand why Romexsoft is a leader in the development industry. We will listen; we will ask the right questions. And we will put together the perfect team of developers/designers for your project.

Will you be the next Facebook? Maybe. Can you develop and run a great social media site that is valuable to your niche market, that will grow, and that can bring in great profit?

Yes, you can. And we are ready is ready to take you there!

Original article: How To Make Social Networking Website Like Facebook
Written by Romexsoft on August 11, 2016

Tips For Preparation For ISTQB (Foundational Level)

Anna Boyko — Tue, 26 May 2020 13:12:43 +0000

There are 3 levels: foundation, advanced and expert. At the end you can be an expert in Test Management, Improving the test process, Test Automation, Security Testing. More information you can find on the official site. I will share all the useful links in the article. Based on my preparation for Foundation level ISTQB, I can select few key tips that, in my opinion, led me to successful exam passing.

First of all I made a decision “I want to pass this exam”. The reasons were: to improve theoretical knowledge about testing; it is my personal challenge; it is cool to be certified.
I found a quality assurance software testing company and got support from my management. I even inspired two QAs from our company to start preparation. The process was the following: We had a meeting two times per week where we discussed a chapter from books, resolved mock tests and cleared up the ambiguities. For each meeting, one of us was a moderator. Also, this collective preparation was one of the motivators – it was unpleasant to admit that you are not ready for a meeting.
We selected two free resources: Syllabus from ISTQB site, and “Foundation of software testing”. I read at least one page of the book and passed mock tests on my Android per day. Sometimes I made a break for a few days. Also, I found one paid video course on Udemy site. It was very useful for structuring all knowledge at the end of the preparation.
When I finished reading these two books (syllabus for 2 times) and had a rest for a week or two, I decided to pass the exam at the end of the current month. I chose a day, paid for the exam on-site, and scheduled preparation for each day before the exam. I had a plan to spend 2-3 days for each chapter and around a week for reviewing all courses. But as it usually happens, only 1 or 2 days were left for review.

During the whole preparation, I invented some encouragement and punishment for myself. It was something like “I can read a new chapter of my favorite book after one chapter of Foundation”, or if I switched from preparation to some more pleasant activities, I stopped myself with words “You can fail exam just because you are so lazy, or because you spent time on a very stupid movie – it will be a huge shame”. The strongest motivation is to pay for an exam. There is no way out afterward. It really worked for me.

When I read some parts of the chapter that weren’t clear even after reading for the fifth time, I asked for help from the people around. Together we always found answers to all my questions.

About Exam. I paid for an exam about three weeks before, by using Prometric service (find the link at the end of the article). On the day of the exam, I came to the Certification Centre, filled out some paper documentation and headed to the exam room. The computer was already switched on, the exam program was opened, and on the table, I found a plastic (at least it felt like one) sheet of paper and a pen (especially for ISTQB). There were 40 questions, 4 variants of answers, only 1 was correct. I had 1 hour at my disposal. If you are not sure about some answers, you can mark the question and then go back to it. I did so for a few questions.

About questions. There were no questions that I came across in mock tests. There were some questions (maybe 3), which triggered only one thought: “WHAT? WHAT DO YOU MEAN?”. So some questions were randomly answered. It took me about 45 minutes to pass the exam. I saw the result right away. I was given some paper with a Prometric stamp. It said that I had passed the exam. And the very certificate arrived three weeks after the exam by post.

So I spent for preparation 5 months including breaks. I read Foundation and Syllabus twice. I watched online courses before passing the exam. I passed hundreds of mock exams. There are a lot of them on the Internet. Also, I’ve installed a Test Competence application for my Android – a really useful one.

And my ambitious plan is the next level or ISTQB.

Web application testing
Mobile app testing services
Performance testing services

Written by Romexsoft on March 27, 2015

Security and Privacy Solutions in EHR Development

Anna Boyko — Fri, 03 Apr 2020 19:07:10 +0000

Healthcare data breaches cost hospitals over $3.6 billion in 2017 and almost 90% of hospitals have reported a data breach in the past two years according to the latest IBM Security report. Their team has also estimated that 27.7% of the organizations surveyed for the report can experience a material data breach within the next 24 months.

These staggering numbers can be largely attributed to the fact that most healthcare providers still use outdated legacy systems – think 10+ years old software that has never been updated by developers to resist modern cyber threats.

For many healthcare providers planning to undertake an EMR/EHR development project, system security still remains an afterthought. After all, those budgets could be spent elsewhere, right?

But think about the breach numbers again.

Single breach results in a $3.7 million loss in direct revenues for the provider and over $500,000 loss in brand value, not to mention the fines imposed by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Obviously, implementing comprehensive EHR security solutions early on will cost you less.

This post outlines the current EHR/EMR security vulnerabilities and the respective tech best practices to implement.

The Main EHR Security Threats To Account For

In 2016, data breaches in healthcare have doubled reaching a whopping one data breach per day and affecting over 27 million patient records in the US alone.

Source: Protenus, Inc. & DataBreaches.net

In most cases, however, these breaches can be attributed to a handful of vulnerabilities that could be easily “patched”. According to the same IBM study, most of the breaches occur due to either of the next reasons:

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine offers a more detailed categorization of all the electronic health records security and privacy concerns:

Threat 1: Insiders who make a “mistake” that leads to accidental disclosures. Arguably, this is the most common reason for breached privacy as it can occur in a million of ways – misaddressed emails, misclassified data, sensitive data visible on the computer screen and so on.

Threat 2: Insiders abusing the granted access privileges. A common example is one curious lab technician, who violates the trusts associated with their access permission and browses all available data out of mere curiosity. For instance, to inquire about a friend's or co-worker's well-being or get some health care data about the admitted celebrity patients such as local politicians, athletes and so on.

Threat 3: Insiders who access the information for profit or for spite. An attacker has a certain level of authorization to the system, but decided to hamper the system further and receives unauthorized access to additional data. For instance, that could be someone from a billing department gaining access to the patient's full medical history and disclosing all the information to a 3rd party. Stolen EHR charts were reported to be sold for $50 a pop on the black market. Selling some celebrity healthcare data to some yellow press can net the criminals a much larger sum though.

Threat 4: Unauthorized physical intrusion. The intruder in this case, merely walks in the hospital in a lab coat and with a fake badge and gains physical access to a workstation or asks other employees to disclose health information.

Threat 5: Former/current employees and outsiders, who plan attacks to gain access to health information, damage the system, and disrupt operations. This is a purely technical threat to the EHR systems. Particularly, they are targeting the records available via an external network and stored in the cloud.

So why cyber-criminals are after the patient data? According to Don Jackson, director of threat intelligence at PhishLabs, stolen health records can go for $10 each, which is 10 to 20 times the value of a U.S. credit card number. These records are later used to create fake IDs for buying prescription-only medicine and/or medical equipment and re-sell it on the black market. Other use cases include filling up fake insurance claims and receiving compensation or fraudulently bill hospitals.

Additionally, this threat level includes the so-called “denial of service” attacks. These can include distributing system viruses that will encrypt or delete critical data files. In 2016, 72% of all malware attacks on medical institutions were ransomware – a nasty virus extorting payment for accessing your data.

In fact, EHR privacy and security issues cost hospitals a lot. The average cost of a healthcare data breach is $225 per record. Additionally, after a ransomware attack, healthcare institutions are obliged to call in auditors to determine the scale of compromised information. The audit can hamper the operations for months and cost the hospital $610,000 and upward.

Next, it’s also important to account for the time required to identify and contain the breach. The average time to identify the breach was 191 days, and it took an additional 66 days to contain it for most hospitals as IBM indicates. Such a prolonged timeline is largely attributed to the considerable complexity of the IT security architecture. The modern providers now need to account for the cloud-based applications, mobile apps security, and BYOD policies. Hence, you will need to clearly define the required set of custom EHR security features worth implementing in the first place.

Security Solutions in EHR Development

By implementing the next EHR security measures your healthcare institution can drastically reduce the number of breaches and unauthorized data accesses.
HIPAA/HITECH Compliance: Being compliant isn’t optional, especially when it comes to the official standards for privacy and security. Previously, we have shared an extensive HIPAA compliance checklist that lists all the provisions you should follow during an EMR software development project. It enlists the key security standards to adhere to.

IT Outsourcing 2020 Overview & Trends

Anna Boyko — Thu, 26 Mar 2020 11:03:29 +0000

In today's world of ever-changing requirements, fleeting markets and the incredibly fast pace of life, everybody naturally wants to optimize everything. In the present conditions, companies who want to be innovative are methodically searching for ways how to optimize costs, human hours, and operations. A lot of them choose IT outsourcing services as they provide operational flexibility, generous cost savings and access to specific skills. Remote IT outsourcing has changed the way businesses operate today.

Today the fundamental shift in outsourcing of IT has been made from low-risk functions towards business activities and strategic directions, such as idea generation. IT outsourcing providers are expected to deliver not only solutions to present problems but to help companies differentiate themselves in the world market, create new opportunities, and obtain competitive opportunities.

Companies expect IT outsourcing to ensure:
-High-quality solutions
-Cost efficiency
-Excellent performance
-Cutting-edge technologies
-Customer-centricity
-Strong partnerships
-Multitalented pool
-Affordable resources
-Overhead reduction

Over time organizations grow naturally and stand more complex. For companies who want to survive the automation-first approach is becoming a strategic peremptory. The evolution of AI will remain exponential, the synthetical intuition is the way to go, and the leaders should leverage the expertise of IT outsourcing companies for the development of a digital transformation strategy

Let’s dive into the most anticipated trends in IT outsourcing for the 2020:
IT Outsourcing
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) provide a practical and real opportunity to automate processes and delegate them to machines. The combination of these technologies has progressed into Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which is an innovative form of business process automation technology.
Read More: https://www.romexsoft.com/blog/it-outsourcing-trends/