In one of my previous postings, I wrote about some benefits test automation may bring to software development. Automating testing processes is among software development best practices that allow for shortening release cycles, achieving better efficiency, and lowering costs. So today, I’m going to say a couple of words about common challenges test automation faces.

• Test automation is a time- and resource-consuming process. Though it helps shorten software development lifecycle in a long term, on the initial stage it will take time and require the work of a team of engineers to write necessary test scripts, sound and bug free.
• If we speak about tools for test automation, their introduction into company’s testing processes will also require a certain period of time. The time is needed for the evaluation and selection of necessary tools, whether it is Selenium, JUnit, Cucumber, or HP Mercury Load Runner. Furthermore, the solutions are often marketed as simple tools that record and repeat certain actions, but real-life automation involves much more than that, which requires the knowledge of scripts.
• Test automation doesn’t mean that there will be no need for manual testers at all anymore. There are some areas where only manual testing can help. Software development best practices are to combine both automated and manual testing applying them in the areas where they are most effective.

So, the recommendation is to combine automated and manual testing to get better testing results. Thus, quality assurance best practices recommend automating repetitive tasks humans are not very good at, as they may get tired or distracted when there is a need for repeating the same thing multiple times.

However, when it comes to investigative work, no tool can replace a human, as people are much better at noticing something strange, being suspicious, getting a funny sense about something and looking into it further. That’s why software development best practices, in terms of testing, are in taking what people do well, taking what machines do well, mixing those things together, and making overall testing incredibly powerful.

Today, Ruby on Rails gains extreme popularity. According to Gartner, there’re about a million Ruby developers these days, and the amount will be close to four million by 2013. The success of Web 2.0 applications, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and the American Yellow Pages, has proven Ruby on Rails to be a mature technology for creation of highly interactive and scalable applications. Being easy to use and at the same time very productive, Rails may compete with PHP, Java, and other widely used technologies. Ruby is willingly adopted across both US and Europe, with latter becoming one of the hottest destinations for Ruby on Rails outsourcing.

I’ve already mentioned that Ruby on Rails is a great solution for highly interactive Web projects. Applying Rails development, a company may get its apps done faster, which is one of the conditions to become successful on the market. All this is thanks to the iterative nature of Ruby on Rails and the fact that it supports and encourages test-driven development, meaning that developers are forced to test everything they write, and the code can be re-factored quickly without changing its functionality. In addition to better speed and quality, this reduces the cost of maintaining applications.

However, companies that choose Ruby on Rails outsourcing to shorten development cycles and improve return on investment (ROI) should be ready to face and cope with certain challenges. There are a couple of recommendations on how to ensure that Ruby on Rails outsourcing will not turn to a headache for both a customer and a provider:

• Get to choosing an outsourcing provider seriously. Benchmarking is required to provide a baseline of costs and service levels. A company can use it to compare results delivered by the outsourcer against the same or similar results throughout the market of Ruby on Rails outsourcing in the region.
• hink Agile. Being a dynamic programming environment, Rails may become more efficient if Agile or Scrum methodologies are applied to Ruby on Rails outsourcing project. Such iterative development methodologies allow for more frequent communication between a client and the team, as well as between QA department and developers. This helps detect and fix bugs, for example, on the early stages of product development, as well as it is easier to implement changes in case of changed requirements.
• Communicate and control. Project managers from both sides should elaborate a communication plan and follow it. (Yes, Agile requires communication.)
• Don’t encourage over-engineering. It is wise to encourage the outsourcer’s innovative ideas, but make sure Ruby developers do not fight against the framework, trying to change or re-write something in it to provide functionality Ruby is capable to provide itself. Over-engineering often increase amount of bugs, so fixing them will cost you additional time and resources.

So, Ruby on Rails can be a great choice for developing Web applications by virtue of its flexibility, power, and simplicity. Though Ruby on Rails outsourcing may significantly accelerate Web development “a priori,” the company still should choose the right development methodology to ensure the success of the project, while paying attention to requirements, measuring efficiency across all development stages, and establishing effective communication.

Today, as the complexity of the software increases, the complexity of software testing increases, as well. Underestimating this fact is quite unwise. Manual testing is no more enough; moreover, it often slows down the software development life-cycle.  Test automation is one of the software development best practices that help cope with software testing complexities. It allows for reliable, repeatable, reusable, programmable, and comprehensive tests, faster and more accurate.

Test automation has both, pros and cons, and today, I’ll start with the pros:

• Repeated. Testing, in fact, is a repetitive activity. Test automation is one of the software development best practices that help significantly reduce testing time and release human personnel from monotonous, samely, and thus error-prone work. The machine speed and accuracy allow for executing more repetitive tests in less time with fewer resources.
• Programmable and comprehensive. Test automation allows for programming and scheduling testing tasks. This helps verify all the requirements of the software being tested in less time, as testing may be performed regardless of the time of the day (which is impossible with manual testing, as there are periods when human personnel is unavailable). This fact plays in favour of shortening software development lifecycle.
• Reusable. Automated tests can be reused on different versions of applications and different target platforms to ensure that applications are run correctly in different environments.
• Reported. Automated testing tools are able to make reports, measuring tests status and results, thus allowing more accurate analysis of performed tests.

Testing is a significant part of software development life-cycle. The consequences of the lack of testing may vary from rare cases of software product’s incorrect behavior to critical mistakes that may doom the software to complete failure. Software development best practices include test automation, as one of the means to shorten software development life-cycle and provide the quality and correct work of software products.

When it comes to the development of rich Internet applications, Flex outsourcing is a great way to significantly reduce the development costs, and benefit from the profound experience and technical expertise a good Flex outsourcing provider may offer. However, when developing AIR applications, Flex/ Adobe AIR developers often forget about provisions for cross-platform operability, which may cost customer a significant sum.

The danger is, when building an application, that an Adobe AIR developer may be devoted to a particular platform, and may not be fully aware of the other platforms peculiarities. This may result in application’s strange behavior, when run on other platforms.This strange behavior includes:

• Wrong displaying of some elements, of the application (like menus or other modules);
• Some of the functionality may work incorrectly, or be at all unavailable;
• Application may experience different glitches, etc.

It’s good when your Flex outsourcing provider reminds the clients about possible issues that may occur, due to the lack of cross-platform operability, and provides for them. However, the client should ensure the provider takes all the necessary cross-platform provisions. Below are several recommendations on how to avoid interoperability issues:

• State the demand for application’s cross-platform operability in the requirements;
• Enable good communication between your and outsourcer’s managers, responsible for the project, and make sure outsourced team of Flex developers clearly understand the requirements;
• Ensure QA and testing on each stage of the development process. By the way, this may help detect issues and bugs as soon as they occur, and fix them or find a solution.

Thus, speak out you requirements for interoperability, ensure they are understood, and don’t forget that there can’t be too much testing.

Recently, I’ve stumbled upon an article by Joe McKendrick (an information technology analyst) at ZDNet.com dwelling on “big software glitches” and their consequences we observe today. There were mentioned the latest Toyota’s troubles, the failed attempt of TD Bank to integrate two IT systems after a merge, and more. Joe also pointed out that QA tools or security middleware can help.

The sad picture shown made me again convinced that IT best practices may be get ignored even by big enterprises. In fact, large enterprises, mid-sized and small software companies are pressed today to “do more with less”. Unfortunately, this “less” sometimes means not using quality assurance best practices, which results in software failure at the wrong time. And the consequences of those failures may range from just unpleasant to horrible. With big enterprises the situation is even worse, as we speak about huge amount of information they deal with, or loads of customers using their products, etc.

The solution, however, is really simple. Implementation and use of quality assurance best practices, including unit testing, stress testing, re-testing after fixes or modifications, and test automation, which provides more accurate testing in a shorter period of time. Good management, focused on utilization of IT best practices, may help avoid the occurrence of software failures like described above, and ensure software stability in the longer term.

In software development outsourcing management is a driver of sound, productive relationship. Good management of an outsourced project can help find out and solve any issues as soon as they evolve, talk over with the outsourcer the ways and possibilities of improvements, etc.

However, it’s very often a situation (and I’m speaking not only about software development outsourcing, but about any outsourced activity) when once established way of management doesn’t get changed during all the time the relations last. And this is a mistake, because the longer get the relations, the more attention should by paid to management of the outsourced project.

When software development outsourcing is in the initial stage, both, the customer and the vendor are doing their best to impress each other. However, in a certain period of time the productivity level declines, which may lead to bad results. So, management and encouragement for innovation and better performance should be a constant process.

Managing outsourcer’s performance is crucial for software development outsourcing, as companies often outsource their business critical part of activities. Thus it’s important to state what is to be regarded a success metrics, and be ready to look for the space for improvement. However, customers often make the opposite mistake and try to manage everything, thus showing no trust in the outsourcer, but what is worse, having not enough resources for good management of all of the metrics that they have created.

Thus, a good management balance should be found to ensure sound customer-outsourcer relations, and to take the most of software development outsourcing.

I’ve written about some of the misconceptions about Flex development in one of my previous postings. However, I seem to forget about, probably, the most common misconception – confusing Flex and Flash. Though they are both Adobe technologies, and are pretty similar, in fact, the way the applications are done is different.

Thus Flash development offers great possibility for detailed animation and sound controls, and it’s rather a technology for designers. While Flex development supposes the real development of complex software, allowing connection to different data, mainframes, xml files, database, legacy systems, etc. Flex development is for rich client side applications and business logic.

In fact, Flash is capable for those things that Flex development supposes, however, the development process, in this case, is much harder and error-prone. The same is for Flex. Thus, the best way to create highly interactive client-side applications that run over the Internet talking to remote servers, is to combine both, Flash and Flex development.

You can do anything in flash you can do in Flex, but its often harder, you can also do anything in flex without flash, but it can be harder (detailed animation for example), but Flex, using graphics and animations and audio done in flash, give you the best applications that can be viewed in any browser with the flash player installed.

Today, I’d like to continue an overview of issues with outsourced software development.  Many companies often underestimate the importance of incentives. However, they may become a catalyst for the increase efficiency of outsourced software development, and probably, for innovation.

The thing is that when software development outsourcing is of a transactional kind, there’s no place for improvement. It’s often that a customer doesn’t reward the somehow outsourcer for initiative or efficiency improvement. Thus they lose an opportunity, as an outsourcer, having rich experience in outsourced software development and technical expertise could, could bring more value to the development process and the software product, when encouraged and, of course, rewarded.

However, a system of incentives has its reverse leading to counter productivity, instead of increased work efficiency of the provider of outsourced software development. Incentives may provoke an outsourcing vendor into achieving small improvements in order to get the incentives, instead of providing a certain overall level of performance.

Thus both, the customer and the provider of outsourced software development should work out a system of incentives that would fit customer’s goals, and encourage outsourcer’s great performance.

In a software development lifecycle testing is a critical part, on which the success of the software product depends greatly. Software development best practices recommend implementation of quality assurance as early as possible. There is a difference between finding a bug right as it appears and discovering it just before the release. And this difference costs a lot, so the sooner bugs are found, the better.

If you outsource software development, you’ve got at least three ways of applying quality assurance. You may outsource development to a third party, and test the product in-house. You may outsource the development to one provider, and testing to another. Or you may outsource the entire software development lifecycle, including testing.

The first variant, though it may seem to provide better control over the software product, makes sense only if you have elaborated quality assurance best practices and experienced testing and quality assurance experts in-house.

The second variant supposes that you outsourcing provider has software development best practices implemented, technical expertise that your product require, etc., but you want independent quality assurance done by a provider that specializes in quality assurance exclusively. This may be a wise decision to ensure the quality of outsourced software; however it may be time-consuming, because productive communicating will need to be established between you and two independent providers.

The third variant may shorten software development lifecycles to a great extent, as the processes of development and testing are interrelated. This allows test the parts of software as much as possible as early as possible, thus lessening the possibility of overlooked bugs. This variant supposes the company-outsourcer utilizes well-elaborated software development best practices and quality assurance best practices together, have already established workflows between developers and testers, etc.

You may find more about how to integrate QA testing from this software testing white paper.

Flex is one of the powerful technologies for rich internet applications development and web development; however, it’s often misconceived as something for those flash-banners, videos, and annoying pop-ups and pop-unders.

If you are about to outsource development of rich internet applications and are in two minds in terms of technology choice, it’s wise to find out whether this or that technology fits your aims and goals, and is able to provide needed functionality. Whether or not to choose Flex development is mostly depends on those goals.

But let’s turn to some of the misconceptions about Flex development, and try to find out the truth.

It’s quite often a thought that a special server is needed for Flex applications, however in the reality Flex is compatible with any web servers, application servers, or database servers. This provides a variety of options of connecting Flex to your infrastructure. So Flex development doesn’t require provisions for servers compatibility.

Flex is great for the development of convenient, user-friendly, and attractive application interfaces, the thing that some other technologies are unable to provide. Combining Flex development with other technologies allows to create powerful and user-friendly applications, taking the best out of each technology.

Why use Flex, if we can do the same with other technology? Well, it may seem so, while there is a difference. Flex is very good for developing interactive, media, and data-centric applications. So if the aim is to create such an application, then you can benefit from Flex development.