Some Best Qualities of Custom Application Development Services

One of the toughest calls for business owners is to choose between ready-made off the shelf solutions and custom application development services. The dilemma of whether to buy or build IT solutions has always been a difficult one. It’s not just the cost of devoting resources to do so or the cost benefit of buying a ready solution that one has to consider. These days digital transformation is all about empowering businesses with the right tools to help them position themselves in the market and perform equally well. So before you take a pick on the kind of solutions that you should invest in, consider the following:

Key Features to Look for
Businesses usually apply the 80/20 rule to eliminate options while evaluating them. The same guideline can be implemented in this case too. Evaluate the various off-the-shelf solutions to see whether they fulfill at least 80% of your requirements. If the solution does not fulfill this golden rule, it is best to go for custom business application development as you would be able to create tailor made solutions for organization. When using the 80/20 rule remember to also assess the priority of the various requirements.

Degree of Customization
Ready-made solutions can be customized/ tweaked to fulfill your requirements in a better manner. However, one has to be cautious as the degree to which you can customize these solutions is pivotal to its successful implementation. Not every ‘off-the-shelf’ solution is as scalable or flexible as you would expect it to be. Weigh the cost of having to customize it to the cost and benefits of building one right from the scratch.

Value for Money
Ready-made solutions are designed to cater to a huge spectrum of target audience and hence are loaded with a wide variety of features. Half of these features might not be suited to your organization. Hence, you end-up paying for a whole batch of features you are never going to use. Besides paying for it, you would also have to take up training and process workarounds for the same. It would be best to evaluate these costs vs. cost benefits of custom application development.

Adaptability and Scalability
Software solutions are a good investment if they are future-proof and can be adapted to grow as the company grows. Whether you opt for Commercial Off-The-Shelf solutions or go for custom application development solutions, you’ll have to ensure that they are scalable to suit the growing requirements of your organization. Otherwise, you would have to invest in another software solution in just a couple of years.

Ongoing Expense vs. Initial Expenses
Both custom solutions and off-the-shelf have different costs associated with it. There is a common misconception that Custom solutions are expensive. This is because ongoing expenses such as licenses and downtime for upgrades in the case of ready-made solutions are often overlooked.

Choosing between either solutions is not an easy task. You need to assess the various features carefully before settling in for one. Gateway TechnoLabs, top custom application development company has been providing software solutions to businesses across various industry verticals. We would be able to help you evaluate the benefits of the various solutions and provide the one best suited to your requirements.

How to run Mobile Application Testing for bug Free Products

Mobile application testing is an important part of the product development lifecycle; unfortunately, it is often overlooked due to time constraints. Turning out applications that have not been rigorously tested would only backfire when users start complaining and eventually stop using the app all together. There have been cases where applications have been released into the market before extensive testing in order to meet quick deadlines. However, if you carry out testing activities, right from the beginning, even before the codes have been written, you would be able to keep pace with the developers and contribute to delivering applications within short development timelines.

Let’s take a look at how you can efficiently tackle mobile application testing: -

Manual Testing
Manually mobile application testing services are most suited for evaluation and analysis. It is a user centric approach that focuses on verifying whether the app meets all the user requirements. The best scenario to deploy manual testing is for evaluating the user experience and user interface of an application. Ideally, this should account for just around 20% of your testing, the rest should be automated.

Automated testings
Automated testing should be set up for as many scenarios as possible. Automation is the most important testing activity. You can set a schedule to configure entire libraries or series of tests as and when required. They work seamlessly with your continuous integration system. In case you don’t have such a system a competent set of automated tests will prevent relapses and keep your application robust. The various test cases that should be automated are: -

• Frequent test cases
• Cases that can be easily automated
• Cases where the result can be predicted
• Manual cases that are tedious
• Cases that are impossible to manually perform
• Cases that require several different configurations, software platforms and hardware
• Cases that have frequently used functionalities

Here are a few strategies to test your mobile application:

Performance Test Automation
Automation for performance testing can be started out with all the information gathered during functional testing. These test cases can be modified for scalability and concurrency.

Performance Unit Tests
Performance unit tests can be designed way before the actual coding. Essentially, performance test driven development (TDD) is an approach that mobile application testing experts follow, wherein performance expectations and tests for a module is created before writing the code. Identify specific code areas that could end up as bottlenecks and device tests that assess their scalability.

A Modular Approach
When you create performance unit tests, you wind up having several different units that can be clubbed to make a modular library of test series that can be easily adapted and scaled to suit different test scenarios. These simple units can be arranged to create complex interactions that thoroughly test complicated test instances.

Synthetic Users
The system would consider a synthetic user as a regular user and respond as it would to a user. Whereas, in reality, they are a set of instructions that are programmed to execute a specific transaction path within a live environment just as a user would do. These instructions are marked up and fully instrumental enabling us to analyze the metrics reported.

Leverage Cloud
Performing load tests on the cloud makes mobile application testing realistic as the unit you are testing would have to go through the very same network layers, firewalls and load balancers that then actual user would have to go through. Cloud also enables you to spread the load sources over different geographies to achieve realistic testing scenarios. You would be able to scale up or down, as well as, test specific functionality easily this way.

Mobile application testing is a combined effort, it requires the attention of everyone involved with the application to contribute positively to turning out a bug-free application. It helps to share test results with those involved to help better understand the various scenarios and work accordingly. We at Gateway TechnoLabs, have dedicated mobile application security testing experts, who have a rich experience of delivering error free applications. Over the years, we have built and developed various testing modules making it easy for us to put together a comprehensive set of test cases.