Mobility is just as important for businesses as it is for people. According to UN’s International Telecommunications Union, there are more active mobile devices on the planet today than the total human population. Though mobility is consumer-driven in general, it’s fundamentally different for enterprises.

Though businesses have to leverage the potential of mobile technologies to move ahead of competitors in this age, many are still hesitant to do just that. They do use a number of apps however but rely a lot on legacy systems to run their core processes.

One reason for their indifference to enterprise mobility is the thought that they will need to invest a lot in building a fully functional mobile app that can deliver the same results as the apps running on their legacy systems. This can take months or even years. Many misconceptions about mobile application development and enterprise mobility also attribute to deterring businesses from going the mobile way.

Let’s explore a few such popular myths and the truth behind them.

#1. Optimizing a desktop app to work on mobile devices will work

Many businesses have the wrong notion that the best approach to adopting mobility is to have their existing desktop apps transformed to work on mobile devices at a low investment. This is mostly seen as a first step to mobility. Such a transformation won’t be worthwhile as most legacy desktop apps would only be able to run on smaller mobile screens while being incapable of utilizing mobile hardware to make operations easier and faster. In addition, they will also lack many mobile-friendly functionalities that a business will need.

Users will have to spend more time pinching and zooming to access the app’s functions, and scroll a lot for navigating too. This would eventually force them to find a different, more convenient solution.

#2. In-house mobile app development is the best bet

Some enterprises do find success with their in-house development teams. But there are potentially hundreds of apps that have been shelved or is taking too long to enter the market. Mobile app development is a challenging process that takes a lot of time. Additionally, mobile apps require more time and cost for maintenance and upgrades compared to other technologies.

With technologies evolving dynamically and becoming harder to keep track of, it may not always be possible for the in-house team to customize the mobile solution accordingly unless the enterprise is willing to spend vast resources on achieving mobility. Ultimately, the cost and the requirements would be challenging to meet for a growing enterprise.

A professional mobile application development company can do justice in such a situation, and build the app much faster at a much lower cost.

#3. Businesses and its operations can keep going without mobility

Many businesses that haven’t adopted mobility can give many reasons for why they don’t need a mobile app to keep moving forward. The truth is that those enterprises failed to see the revolution that’s been happening around them. Mobile devices have become personal for people, providing businesses with new, innovative opportunities to reach their consumers on their own personal devices anywhere across the globe.

The BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) trend is gaining more momentum every day, with many businesses adopting it. Smart businesses have found that it’s statistically feasible to take ways that beget more productivity from users rather than keeping their focus on user preferences. High performance, mobile-ready business processes are being introduced every day. All these facts are a testament to the fact that enterprise mobility can indeed turn the tides for a business, facilitating a more accelerated growth.
 

Conclusion

 
If a business is still not convinced that mobility is the gamechanger, they would just fall behind competitors very soon. The investment has proved worthy for businesses across various domains. Mobility is changing the way businesses operate, especially when technologies like IoT and the cloud keep growing at incredible pace. Enterprise mobility is now or never.

Software development can never deliver the desired results if the product isn’t tested properly. Software testing have always been as important as development itself, but have been neglected by many organizations for years. There are many reasons why software testing was neglected, and one of them attributes to the many misconceptions surrounding the concept.

One common issue is when even software testers believe certain misconceptions that consequently impact the quality of testing as well as the time spent on testing. That said, here are the top 3 common myths associated with software testing that one should be aware of.
 

#1. Testing raises costs

 
This is probably the most common misunderstanding about software testing, that even executives from different domains tend to believe. The misconception is that testing is a cost center. As like every business, their primary goal would be to reduce costs as much as possible.

On the contrary, software QA and testing can actually deliver great financial benefits both directly and indirectly provided they are done right. IBM’s Systems Sciences Institute’s research shed light on the fact that a software development company would have to at least 4 times more when addressing a software bug post the product’s release than they would had they identified the same bug during the development stage itself.

We should also consider the costs that’d be incurred due to the potential damage a defective software can cause. The failure may in turn tarnish the reputation of software testing companies as well. Software testing, when done right with the right set of quality testing tools can save the company from financial setbacks.
 

#2. Legacy tools should be enough

 
Even when Agile methodology is being widely adopted by companies, the practice of using legacy tools for testing still seems to exist. A lot of businesses left the waterfall methodology behind, but not all of them replaced it with Agile. This means, many such companies are still neglecting the potential of agile software testing tools.

The legacy tools they resort to using now will possibly not be able to integrate with the Agile workflows. This can make things more complicated, leading to inefficient testing. Using the tools without adopting Agile would only result in low-quality testing in the present age. It’ll be hard for them to meet modern quality standards.

The optimal approach to testing today is to develop an Agile ecosystem, and use Agile development and testing tools. The team will then be able to focus more on the results, and deliver high-quality software in the end.
 

#3. Testing is not that difficult

 
Software testers in general are not too fond of this particular misconception. The dominance of Agile led many enterprises to embrace the notion that everyone is a tester. This further wrongly suggested that the job of a tester has become less critical, and is seen more as a small part of a collective effort.

The fact of the matter is that in an Agile ecosystem, testers are just as important as developers. Though developers also get to contribute to testing, the heavy-lifting is still done by testers. Software testing today demands testers to make value judgments and critical decisions. They get to see the bigger picture from the beginning itself, and are expected to guide the Agile team towards the objective.
 

Conclusion

 
New technologies keep showing up out of the blue these days. Some bring new software testing tools and strategies along with them. This means testers will have to augment their skillsets to prepare for even more advanced testing, while organizations build teams and the ecosystem to facilitate effective development and testing. Testers will nevertheless play a bigger role than ever before in software development, with more responsibilities.

One of open source’s biggest contributions, Python, now powers countless technologies from robust websites to enterprise applications and even desktop utilities. With popular projects like OpenStack, OpenShot, and even the original BitTorrent using Python, it’s no wonder why the technology is ranked high up when it comes to open source development services.

Python is also one of the few languages that’s both easy to get started for software development beginners and a powerful tool for experts working on real-world projects. Most developers who work on large-scale projects with sophisticated code bases often use a combination of Python and its many useful IDEs.

That said, here are a few popular cross-platform Python IDEs that developers would find very useful.
 

Eclipse with PyDev

 
Possibly one of the most popular open source IDEs out there, Eclipse is backed by a large developer community and a plethora of customizable plugins. However, it still has some demerits according to many. Its performance in systems with low hardware specs is often criticized, and many others claim Eclipse is quite bloated.

Nevertheless, Eclipse is still the go-to IDE for developers who shifted from a different language, like Java. Eclipse can be augmented using PyDev, which adds a lot more features to the already useful IDE. PyDev can handle code completion, and can effectively integrate Python debugging.

PyDev is particularly useful for those involved with Django Python web framework, as it facilitates creation of new Django projects, and execute Django actions via hotkeys. It even enables the use of a separate run config for Django. Both PyDev and Eclipse are made available under the Eclipse Public License.
 

PyCharm

 
PyCharm is a popular commercial Python editor. Its makers also offer a free edition of PyCharm which is open source under the Apache 2.0 license. What makes it popular is the fact that it features everything expected from an IDE – code inspection, integrated code testing and version control, code refactoring, project navigational aspects, and even automated completion.

But not everything is good about this IDE as well. Its open core model is considered by many to be one of its flaws. The fact that many of its advanced features are not available under open source license can be a deal-breaker for many devs. Even without the advanced features, PyCharm is still considered as a great, lightweight Python editor.
 

Eric

 
A great alternative to PyCharm, Eric itself is written in Python using the Qt framework and is made available under the GPL version 3. The source code editing component of Eric is Scintilla which is also used in various other IDEs and editors.

The IDE packs many features similar to its counterparts including code completion, integrated testing, brace matching etc. Devs involved in Qt GUI development for applications will find Eric quite useful as it features a Qt form preview function. Eric’s massive documentation can be quite annoying, as most devs prefer not to go through the entire PDF. However, learning Eric inside out would give them a totally different perspective on the IDE. It’s still one of the best lightweight, full-featured programming environments available.
 

Conclusion

 
The list doesn’t include every best Python IDE there is. These are just our top picks that contribute to leveraging open source technologies effectively. There are still many more useful IDEs that could’ve made it to the list including BlueFish and Spyder. However, these IDEs and Editors can certainly be an asset to people using Python.

Search engine optimizers have access to large amounts of data and information, most of which remain underutilized. Though not all that data benefits the SEO work, some can certainly grant good leverage. However, it also presents a different challenge for the optimizer – information overload.

Data has always been at the core of good SEO, and for search engine optimization, trackability is key. Though many SEOs measure this data and track their efforts, many others tend to get overwhelmed while some others mostly don’t measure at all and make do with best practices to get through the day.

The focus here should be on what we want to track and why we should track it. This is where it gets confusing.
 

Knowledge & Information

 
Marketers often confuse information with knowledge. The more information they collect, the more knowledge they uncover. Though this is true to an extent, a 2017 report from CMO Council paints a different picture. A good amount of marketers, according to the report, collect great amounts of information but not all of them find the knowledge they seek.

Information is the raw data they are collecting. Knowledge is something derived from the data after thorough analysis that gives insights on about what’s happening on and around a specific SEO account(s). Information on its own isn’t valuable. It’s what the information holds that’s off value. The point is that utilizing a lot of resources to collect information for SEO benefits isn’t what a marketer should be focusing on. Collecting the right data to unearth valuable knowledge is the key.
 

The Wiser Way

 
Every SEO campaign comes with its own share of challenges. For companies relying on a reputed SEO consultant, there aren’t a lot to be concerned about. But for those in-house marketers who try to make sense of a plethora of data to boost the success rate of a campaign, the focus should be on something else.

To improve a campaign’s effectiveness, the marketer should have a clear goal. This goal dictates what they should track, why they should track it, and how they should track it. This way they would be able to figure out how to extract actionable insights (knowledge) that matter from all that data. There’s still a chance for them to go off-course and dive head-first into information overload.

But there are ways to keep yourself in check; search engine marketing hacks from a number of experts in the industry.

• Collect and analyze data that are on a need-to-know basis i.e. only the most relevant data should matter.
• Make sure the data collected and about to be analyzed are high quality. The quantity doesn’t matter. You are not doing big data analysis here.
• Focus only on the task at hand, be it analysis, technical optimization, off-page SEO etc.

Conclusion

 
Marketers, back in the day, never had the means to extract such insights from the data. Data wasn’t as important then as it is now. Many of them found the data overwhelming, and found it easier to just stick to the best SEO practices to get results. Now things are more efficient, but demands a different approach to SEO. The data-driven approach can give results, if the marketer doesn’t let himself get overwhelmed by the data and focus on just what’s important.

It’s 2018 now – a year where the cloud, open source, and artificial intelligence are rising in power. Microsoft, having always been a pioneer in offering dynamic and flexible technologies, is still at it providing compliant, integrated frameworks, servers, languages and more.

One of Microsoft’s greatest contributions to developers is ASP.NET. Microsoft’s been looking out for it all these years, evident from its feature-rich present release. It’s been making developers happy for so long, and ASP.NET development services are now being looked up to for its role in Microsoft’s mobile-first and cloud-first strategy.

Out of all Microsoft technologies we’ve had till now, ASP.NET is one of the most competent technologies that facilitate development and implementation of complex enterprise applications. With the release of ASP.NET MVC, the future of ASP.NET is looking brighter.
 

ASP.NET MVC – A more modern approach

 
ASP.NET MVC brought with it a new, flexible approach to app development compared to the traditional style. The fresh framework from Microsoft is already popular for its scalability, simplicity, performance, testability, and quick rendering capabilities, and is now a top contender in the market when it comes to developing high-performance enterprise apps with intuitive user experience.

The highlights of ASP.NET MVC include:

• The MVC framework: This is what segregates the Business, Presentation, and Data layers making things much easier for developers.
• Focus on TDD: This capability of ASP.NET MVC makes it ideal for Agile environments where collaboration between testing and development is vital. The MVC’s focus on Test-Driven Development (TDD) synchronizes testing and development by facilitating project testing during the development itself. This also ensures good quality and timely delivery of the final deliverable.
• Control over HTML: ASP.NET MVC provides a higher availability over the modern changes of user interface, and more control on the rendered HTML. This makes front-end modifications much faster and more efficient.
• Easy JavaScript integration: With the MVC framework, developers are saved from strenuous hard-coding. JavaScript integration is much simplified now.
• Cross-platform compatibility: If it isn’t cross-platform compatible, it isn’t the latest tech. This is how it is nowadays. ASP.NET MVC allows developers to independently operate on various platforms without being concerned about the application’s execution on multiple platforms. The developed application would be compatible with any platform.
• Improved cloud support: The modular architecture of ASP.NET MVC and its flexible structure supports the cloud deployment model. Apps developed with the technology can run on the cloud.
• It’s open source: The essence of open source technology is embedded into ASP.NET MVC. Its code is accessible to anyone, and experienced developers can even create ViewEngine. They are also able to append additional libraries and frameworks depending on the requirements.

Conclusion

 
Many software development companies still use ASP.NET to deliver powerful solutions to enterprises, after all these years. The many benefits of ASP.NET MVC and its capabilities are testament to the potential of ASP.NET even in today’s cloud age. With Microsoft’s support for open source and their strategy focusing on the cloud and mobile, ASP.NET will indeed be subject to further evolutions in the coming years. The technology so far hasn’t disappointed, and will hopefully continue to remain the developer’s delight for years to come.