Developing mobile applications is not yet a pain-free process for IT shops. Red Hat Summit session speakers and attendees sound off on some of the challenges.
Speakers and attendees at last week’s Red Hat Summit addressed some of those challenges. Here is what they had to say about designing apps with the user experience in mind, getting ROI from mobility and more.
“App development is being driven by mobile; modern application development is mobile.”
Steve O’Keefe, product line director, Red Hat
Today, mobility and the app development process go hand in hand. A modern application now means agile apps that translate seamlessly from desktops to smartphones and tablets, O’Keefe said.
IT shops delving into mobile application development have options — from shifting legacy desktop apps to the cloud or building native in-house apps. But no matter the method, developers have to keep the mobile user experience in mind.
“There is no way you can be doing modern app development without considering the screen real estate for smartphones and tablets,” O’Keefe said.
“Mobile apps can take off or totally flop.”
Chad Holmes, senior mobile solutions architect, Red Hat
For organizations that are trying to modernize apps for employees or customers, there are costs to consider — from mobile app development to deployment and lifecycle management.
These costs can be difficult to measure and are often retrospective, but “get more accurate over time,” Holmes said in a session on the ROI of enterprise mobility.
Chief components of mobile ROI include increased productivity and time to market. Companies looking to save money on the mobile application development process would do better launching a set of the five or six business apps the workforce needs versus one big, “killer app,” Holmes said. Otherwise, it can be expensive to build in-house and not worth the time and effort.
“There is no easy answer,” Holmes said.
“Mobile has created a demand for streamlining.”
Joe Stanganelli, enterprise technology consultant, attorney and writer
The advent of mobility has fueled the user’s need for instant gratification. Due to this expectation, “data needs to be more instantaneously and ubiquitously accessible,” Stanganelli said.
Another need that has arisen in the mobile age is enterprise adoption of flexible software to help meet user demands. To keep up with user demand, IT admins must push out apps and their updates more quickly. Because of this, some organizations are beginning to adopt a more continuous delivery model, Stanganelli said.
One thing that can stymie app developers, on the other hand, is if they get hammered with bad reviews in the app store, for instance, he added.
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Crowd With Hands On Their Shoulders and Social Network.
The explosion of mobile devices and apps has completely disrupted .NET development. While desktop and web applications remain popular in enterprises, the same developers have had to adapt their applications for mobile devices or develop entirely new mobile apps. Syncfusion was an early supporter of Xamarin that continued to enhance its offerings as Xamarin matured and was more deeply integrated with Microsoft products post-acquisition. Syncfusion has also changed its revenue model from per-seat licensing to flat-fee, which is great news for enterprise developers in any size organization.
“The rapid expansion of mobile space was somewhat of a shock for C# developers because up until that time, everything was Microsoft-centric,” said Daniel Jebaraj, vice president at Syncfusion. “A number of them had to figure out how to get their critical applications onto iOS and Android devices, which was challenging because they had to learn Java, Objective-C or Swift, or hire the talent.”
Some developers side-stepped the problem by building mobile websites or mobile applications that were really wrappers around a website, but the user experience wasn’t the same as a native application. The Xamarin platform was an attractive option, and it’s a lot more attractive now that Xamarin dovetails well with the .NET stack.
Reuse Code
One of Xamarin’s main features is its ability to reuse code. However, developers also want best-of-breed functionality. Syncfusion’s Xamarin controls that are similar to the ones it built for desktop and web environments. Now, Syncfusion offers more than 90 Xamarin controls which include chart and grid controls, a calendar control, a Kanban control, a treemap, an Excel-like spreadsheet, gauges, and reporting packages for Excel, PDF and PowerPoint – all in one package.
“Our controls are well-integrated with the Visual Studio environment so you can work with them just as you work with Microsoft’s native controls,” said Jebaraj. “They behave the same way as Microsoft controls and they are designed for optimal performance. If you’re maintaining an application on a XAML platform such as WPF, then a lot of that code will simply carry over.”
Syncfusion provides about 80 percent of the standard building blocks enterprise application developers need to build app so they can focus on innovation rather than reinventing controls that are available off-the-shelf.
Get Everything You Need, And More
Syncfusion’s unlimited license gives developers access to more than 800 components and ready-to-use platforms for Big Data, data integration, dashboards and reports – everything developers need to build stunning applications for desktop, web, and mobile users plus the tools they need for data, analytics and reporting.
“We’ve spent a lot of time and effort building our finished platform products because we see customers building things like dashboards and reports over and over again,” said Jebaraj. “They’re fairly complex products to build and support, and fairly expensive to license from other vendors.”
Syncfusion has spent several years building its dashboarding and reporting products, both of which rival some the most popular data visualization and reporting packages available today. Users get access to all the functionality they need to build highly aesthetic, high performance decision-making tools on which today’s businesses rely.
“We license those products along with our controls so the same team using our controls can benefit from pre-packaged products and deploy them as these as they stay fit,” said Jebaraj.
“You can also customize them and embed them in an application using our SDK.”
Get a Flat-fee License
Syncfusion now offers annual flat-fee licenses so the number of developers using the product is now irrelevant. In addition, its licensing model has flexibility built in so customers can buy licenses scoped to a project, a department, or a line of business.
“We used to license by the seat, but it was challenging for us and our customers,” said Jebaraj.
“We don’t want to be a position where we’re counting heads, we don’t want to put our customers in a position where they’re counting heads, so we came up with the idea of a flat license which is a flat fee paid every year.”
For example, an organization with $100 million annual revenue would pay just $4,000 for a global license, which is what Syncfusion used to charge for two seats. The new revenue model has been popular among existing customers and it has also attracted many new customers who have discovered that the flat fee is more affordable than competitive options.
“Any company that is doing a lot of development in house can potentially save a lot of money on licensing costs,” said Jebaraj. “We find the new model to be better for our customers and better for us.”
Another thing that distinguishes Syncfusion from its competitors is its heavy investment in R&D. That strategy has enabled Syncfusion and its customers to continually deliver greater value.
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Software developing company Coding Sans has just released a 2017 report, the State of Software Development, in order to take a look at the trends, challenges and tactics that the modern software developer is facing today. Here’s a quick summation of key points from the report, which polled over 120 workers within the industry.
Javascript Is the Biggest Primary Language
Over half of those surveyed (52.38 percent) named Javascript as their primary coding language, while Java and Python came in second and third, respectively.
74 Percent Allow Remote Work
One oft-discussed element of tech startups, remote work, featured in the survey: 74.6 percent allow it already, and of the remaining 25.4 percent, another 15.62 percent plan to allow it within another year.
That’s a great sign, given the recent statistic that a full 98 percent of remote workers believe flexible work options help out their productivity.
Most Important Hiring Criteria: Work Experience
Better brush up on your resume.
“Not surprisingly,” the report explains, “68.50 percent of startups consider work experience as one of the most important hiring criteria, following cultural fit (59.84 percent) and test project (31.5 percent) and side projects (30.71 percent).”
The Biggest Challenge: Hiring Talent
The report showed that 35.48 percent of respondents agree: The biggest challenge today’s startups face is hiring talent. Other concerns include prioritizing development and managing human capacity for the project. Here’s how most software developers are solving their talent issue:
“The most popular way to overcome this challenge is to hire a head hunter or agency and also to use professional connections to get talent on board. Another way is to allocate more time for hiring and posting job offers on job websites.”
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The world of software development is a fast paced and ever changing landscape.
Developers want to work on exciting things. New tools, languages, frameworks and innovations are constantly emerging and revolutionizing the industry.
So, are you taking advantage of these software development trends that will help you ship great software applications with greater speed, efficiency and accuracy?
The rise of ChatOps to automate manual tasks
The extraordinary growth of Slack, shook up the chat application industry and gave it a whole new lease of life. This has led to more and more companies adopting team chat applications to assist in conducting key business operations, including the building and shipping software applications.
Interacting with your team members using a chat application is only scratching the surface of what these tools can do for fast paced organizations. Automated bots, powerful integrations and workflow tools, all help teams ship software with greater ease and efficiency.
Bots have turned traditional automation via scripting on its head (e.g. a system administrator with a deployment script) – and moved this to a shared command / control infrastructure.
People don’t need access to production environments directly if it is managed through a centralized bot. If the bot has the necessary permissions, anyone on the team can deploy their code using the right commands. New team members can be up and running within minutes rather than hours and user permissions become encapsulated by the bot itself.
Ultimately, bots can create common and consistent workflows. They are reliable servants to your team’s commands and reduce the overheads and complexities human involvement can bring.
Things such as build status, deployment status, commits and merges in source control can all be given visibility to everyone on your team instantly.
Constant visibility within your team ensures there is no confusion as to the status of any particular task along the software development production line. Even real time error notifications can be made visible right within your team chat.
No longer will you be exposed to human error, but you’ll also not need to employ a human’s time to move things forward. You can essentially put an end to error-prone hand-typed SQL statements or automate tests around repeated commands.
Managers that see chat applications as a productivity killer, likely don’t know the range of productivity benefits they can bring to developer teams.
Using software intelligence to find problems before users do
The world’s most innovative software companies are now adopting software intelligence tools to focus on resolving issues that are affecting their customers directly.
Rather than simply monitoring their software team’s dashboards for effects on high level trends, teams are starting to realize they can take advantage of a deeper level of insights into their software’s faults.
Traditional application performance monitoring tools (APM) are commonplace in enterprise level organizations. The next generation of monitoring tools are allowing teams to dig even deeper into the true experience of end users.
Software intelligence gives you the ability to automatically detect when a user’s experience was poor and how you can improve it, with full diagnostic details being provided for every individual user error, crash or performance issue.
Consolidating all of your monitoring into one software intelligence platform allows you to merge things like performance data with error and crash reporting data to figure out where problems are stemming from, or view a full user session and what actions were taken before an error occurred.
Because data is combined, rather than siloed between products and teams, the level of insight you can obtain into your applications is truly ground-breaking.
Teams are now offered the power to resolve issues with greater speed and accuracy, creating perfect software experiences for their customers and replicating any software bugs or crashes they have experienced with ease.
This not only creates healthier software, the ROI for this level of tooling is profound, with teams able to spend less time digging through logs for answers and more time shipping new features.
Software intelligence allows you to pinpoint the root causes of issues that are affecting your customers, gaining deeper insights into software health than you ever had before.
Thanks to software intelligence, application monitoring has reached a new level, and your customers will thank you for it.
Safely deploying your code multiple times per day
Long gone are the days of the ‘big bang’ release. Even tech giants such as Microsoft have ditched gigantic release cycles and opted for smaller, consistent streams of updates to the core Windows OS.
Continuous deployment aims to minimize the time between writing new code and getting it into the hands of your users in production environments. This is largely done using infrastructure that automates the various steps leading up to releasing software into the wild.
When these tests are successful, the live application that users are interacting with is updated with the new code changes. If tests fail, human intervention can be made to fix the issue promptly or roll back to previous versions.
Using these tools, teams now have the ability to ship consistently and safely multiple times per day. Amazon has successfully removed the bottleneck for manual deployments and manages to release code every few seconds.
If your team are working towards big scary release days and deadlines, without a full view of the impacts over releases, perhaps it’s time you considered moving your model over to continuous deployment.
Continuous deployment isn’t hard if you have the right people, processes and tools in place.
Every change made to your code that passes automated tests can be deployed to production automatically. All without the fear that end users are going to encounter broken features and functionality.
With a multitude of tools now available, moving to a continuous deployment model has never been easier.
Over to you
So how did you score? Which of these trends have your development team already implemented within your own organization? What software development trends do you think will take off over the next few years?
The low barrier to entry for all of these tools and processes means developers are unshackling themselves from long and complex workflows and becoming increasingly efficient. The biggest barrier to adopting new innovations is the change in mindset and systems that have already been put in place.
For those that adopt these industry innovations, they look set to provide better ROI for their managers, enjoy faster release cycles and higher quality software than their counterparts.
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DevSecOps, the key ingredient for serving up new software
DevSecOps — it’s a mouthful, but also a buzzword that makes a clear point: Security now must become the central ingredient, the filling if you will, in the DevOps sandwich. Without security, DevOps may make software development faster. But in the end, all that effort will likely prove fruitless: What’s the point, after all, of releasing new software that’s loaded up with security vulnerabilities?In the past, security was too often an afterthought in the software development lifecycle, and the security team was sometimes even seen as a roadblock to the launch of new software. Implementing DevSecOps means getting both the development and operations teams thinking about security all the time and employing security tools and processes to prevent flaws from happening in the first place. This handbook on DevSecOps explains in depth why IT professionals need to consider security a key ingredient in software creation and how to fit security into their development process.There are several key steps any corporate team involved in software development needs to know about how to turn DevOps into DevSecOps.
This includes meeting with other teams (risk managers are important to consult, for instance), training, logging, defining duties and understanding what already installed security tools can do — and what others might be needed.
We hope that, by studying this guide to DevSecOps, you’ll come away with a deeper understanding of how and why security should not be considered optional when it comes to the software development process and what exactly you need to do now to construct efficient and effective DevSecOps for your company.
Security is now an essential, not optional, ingredient in software development. Learn how best to work it into the process.
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IT Service and Consultant Company Appworks acquired Software development startup BigDrop for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition had made to boost the IT services of Appworks.
The financial details of the acquisition have not been disclosed. Post acquisition, Appworks will be using the capabilities of BigDrop engineers to enhance their talents in the company.
About the startup:
AppWorks is an IT servicing and consulting company, started in 2008 by Ashish Bhata. AppWorks has strong capability of building IT solutions and mobile applications. The startup offers advanced internet infrastructure software to help companies match the demand for faster web experiences. The company claims Target, eBay, Bravura and Fidelity to be their clients.
BigDrop is a Gurgaon based Startup, founded in the year 2016 by Engineering Graduates Sherjil Ozair and Naved Khan. It is a creative digital agency providing expert design and development solutions to brands. They work on software complexity providing solutions on Python, Django, Node, Angular, React, Xamarin, Android, IOS and others. They offer custom-made software development services to Startups, SME’s and corporates.
Commenting on the deal, Ashsih Bhata said, “We started with a typical IT Service organisation but we never intended to remain one. We’ve always strived to do more and to do important stuff going beyond the resources we have. Appworks is now becoming a collection of LOBs – BigDrop, OrganIQ, UpSkill, plus a host of Start-ups. Soon with the launch of the Startup Accelerator ‘India Accelerator’, things are becoming even more interesting. Bringing the talent of BigDrop in-house enables us to accelerate our growth”.
As being an IT service company, Appworks will use the all the sources and talents of BigDrop in order to elevate their services and enhance their Software solutions.
Mr Naved Khan, Co-founder, BigDrop said, “Big Drop has always been about delivering high quality, modern, smart technology solutions to our clients. Our merger with App Works helps us get closer to this goal, leveraging their vast reach, and gaining from the experience of the excellent management team and building solutions that impact and solve real life problems.
All the 14 employees of BigDrop will now work for AppWorks and shift their clients towards the new company. Read more about Indian Startups.
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Albert Einstein said “If you cannot explain it simply, you didn’t get it yourself.” This quote on simplicity can be applied to everyday life regardless of what work you do, from CFO to content director to software developer.
At my company, we rely on simplicity for all tasks — the simpler you can make things, the easier your workflow. But the most vital task for simplicity is during storyboarding for software design. You can also think of storyboarding as storytelling, and of course, the process of storyboarding for most developers is through whiteboarding. Most rely on the classic whiteboard, but there is also great software out there just for storyboarding software development.
The storyboarding process was derived by Walt Disney Productions in the 1930s to pre-visualize animated films. Seven decades later, it has many uses, including all forms of development across many businesses.
Storyboarding is used throughout many principles of software development, including a few processes my team relies on daily (the Agile process and User Experience Design).
During the Agile process, the concept of user stories exist, which help define the basic requirements of a functioning platform. To create the best software experience, the team storyboards the most basic user functionality. In user experience design, storytelling is more elaborate and more human-like, providing a rich context of events from basic functionality through all steps and possible side steps along the way.
In short, storyboarding provides a step-by-step process of development that helps simplify workflow. The following are four tactics of why and how storyboarding hastens the software development process.
Externalize Mental Notes
Most learning comes through visualization. Although some developers may have the concept in their minds, they will be able to further elaborate on it once it’s storyboarded, which brings the visual concept to the surface
Storyboarding externalizes all mental notes, allowing the development stages to not only be visual for the developer completing the storyboarding, but also for anyone on his or her team. This streamlines all processes and provides quicker resolution to the proverbial moving parts as developers think of new ideas and reject other thoughts.
A few of our developers admit that they can’t fully understand a development project until their mental notes are externalized, and the quickest route towards this externalization is through storyboarding.
Storyboarding Forces Developer Collaboration
By nature, storyboarding forces collaboration and speeds up the agreement process. This type of collaboration forces developers to agree on every foundation of the process before moving ahead.
Storyboarding also creates quick reference points that may need revisiting during the iterative phases of the development process, especially when refining the product before completion. Our developers keep many photo files of whiteboard storyboarding sessions, allowing them to visually revisit a previous edition of the development.
Keeps Real-World Context In The Forefront
Storyboarding forces developers to look at the product from a real-world context — not just as another coding project. This brings the human factor into the intent of the software, helping to strengthen not only the intended outcome of the product but also the overall functionality.
The use of storyboarding also prompts unexpected findings, such as the overall flow of the product’s intent. When working with one of our energy clients, we discovered through storyboarding a few unexpected paths for user intentions that smoothened the eventual client experience. Using storyboarding keeps the human experience always in the forefront.
Also, when deep in the developing stages, the overall development flow sometimes gets distorted by technical needs such as coding issues. When this occurs, the main focus of the end need — ultimately how the user will respond — can get lost.
Allows Further Customer Research
The closer you are to a customer, the easier it is to develop truly engaging software that provides solutions. During storyboarding, questions will naturally surface that ask things that are specific to customers, like what direction a user will take when reaching “X” on the software’s intended purpose. This will keep you in constant contact with the customer, creating stronger relationships while easing development.
Encourage storyboarding as a standard practice for your software development teams. It will provide the benefits of the four tactics above, which all result in one huge thing: simplification of processes that naturally hastens workflow. The simpler the mindset, the simpler your flow of work, which results in quicker progress. Storyboarding is an essential element to true progress of any type of software development.
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Hyderabad: ORBCOMM Inc., a global provider of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) and Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, has moved its India operations to a new technology centre of excellence for software application development and Tier One customer care in Hyderabad.
Telangana’s Information Technology Secretary Jayesh Ranjan and ORBCOMM’s Executive Vice President of Product Development Craig Malone inaugurated the new office on Wednesday.
It is the company’s largest software development site and houses web and mobile application developers and customer service representatives, who are part of the company’s global team of technical experts focused on the delivery of its IoT products, services and solutions, the company said in a statement.
In addition to supporting ORBCOMM’s continued technological innovation, the office will supplement the company’s North America-based customer care team, which provides 24×7 customer service throughout the full solution delivery lifecycle for over 1.72 million end-user IoT devices on its global satellite and cellular networks.
“We opened our new state-of-the-art facility in Hyderabad, India to accommodate the continued growth and expansion of ORBCOMM’s business in the global industrial IoT market,” said Craig Malone.
“This office will serve as ORBCOMM’s centre of excellence for software development and customer care to support our broad portfolio of IoT solutions and deliver the highest level of service to our global customers. We also look forward to collaborating with local technology partners and integrators to deliver ORBCOMM’s advanced technology solutions to government and commercial customers throughout India,” he added.
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A subsidiary of Vencore has joined Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program to develop software that can help DARPA perform collective tasking functions for computing platforms.
Vencore Labs has received a four-year, $10.3 million contract to build software for DARPA to implement in algorithms and protocol stacks as part of the agency’s Dispersed Computing program.
DARPA announced a four-year, $9.8 million contract to Raytheon’s BBN Technologies subsidiary last week for that business’ participation in the program.
The agency’s goals for Dispersed Computing include the movement of code and data between users and management of heterogeneous computing platforms. Those platforms should also operate in environments with variable and degraded network connections, according to DARPA.
DARPA received 42 offers for the program via an open broad agency announcement.
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At Facebook’s annual developer conference in San Jose, Instagram announces the Android app will be getting offline capabilities that will allow you to continue scrolling and browsing, even when you find yourself outside of a serviceable area. Instagram’s Stories got some attention late last week as the app’s user count has officially surpassed that of Snapchat’s. The irony is real here.
Anyway, as Instagram’s amount of monthly active users rises, it has also decided to go the same route as the official Facebook app and offer a proper offline mode. When using Instagram offline, you’ll be able to see content previously downloaded in your feed, you can leave comments, like and save posts, even unfollow other users; all this according to Instagram engineer, Hendri.
Once your device connects back to the server, everything you did will be executed in the background. Profiles you’ve previously visited will also be visible offline, as well as cached versions of your Explore tab and profile page.
There was no mention of Instagram’s Stories working offline, but we’d imagine that Instagram implements this soon as its ‘Stories’ inspiration (A.K.A. Snapchat) already supports this.
A development like this could help Instagram users in developing countries where a stable internet connection is harder to come by. Maybe Instagram should come out with a ‘Lite’ version of the app, though given that Instagram is such a data-hungry social app, it may not happen.
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