A few years ago, the concept of the Internet of Things was seen as some weird concept from a sci-fi flick. But things changed. Though IoT is still in its infancy, it garnered a lot of attention lately and is now seen as a revolutionary technology that will transform and disrupt various industries. There’s great interest in building IoT devices and IoT software development today.

As a matter of fact, many organizations are competing to make various components available in the market in order to promote the already trending development of IoT solutions. However, some of those platforms ran out of steam.

Among those platforms that came complemented IoT is .NET – one of the most popular microsoft technologies. Corporate behemoths like Amazon, Accenture, Dell etc. has been leveraging .NET for years due to its versatility and impressive performance. Coincidentally, these two traits are what IoT app development demands today.

That said, let’s explore the merits of using .NET for IoT projects.
 

Windows 10 IoT Core compatibility

 
Windows 10 IoT Core is a free, optimized version of the popular Windows 10 OS from Microsoft, designed to work with low-power devices such as Dragonboard 410c, Raspberry Pi 2 & 3 etc. The OS features an impressive toolkit and a plethora of integration options.

But the icing on the cake is that .NET is fully compatible with Windows 10 IoT Core. Combining both these contributions from Microsoft enables developers to build great IoT apps with a decent UX.
 

The rich toolset of ASP.NET Core

 
A popular, widely-used open-source web framework, ASP.NET Core allows developers to create visually appealing web applications including IoT apps. Combined with the Windows 10 IoT Core, one can also use ASP.NET Core to build services that can run on the background of IoT devices.

The highlight however is ASP.NET Core’s toolset. The framework supports a number of popular programming languages like Visual Basic, C# etc. and facilitates faster deployment, excellent performance, and easier cloud integration. With ASP.NET Core, the devs are also free to choose the cloud platform for their applications – be it AWS, Google Cloud IoT, or Microsoft Azure. It’s no wonder why the ASP.NET development services industry is still one of the fastest growing tech industries in the world.
 

Ready-made solutions

 
.NET encourages developers to use its ready-made solutions to save time. But this also has another advantage. When using .NET’s ready-made solutions, the developers are less likely to encounter a coding issue that hasn’t been rectified or resolved by the community.

If the devs use ready-made .NET solutions for IoT and comes across some obstacle, chances are someone already encountered and resolved it and was generous enough to publish the code on GitHub. The reusable code generated by the .NET community can speed up IoT app development considerably.
 

Supportive community

 
The best thing developers can have is a supportive community backing a technology they are extensively working with. .NET has such a community. Thousands of experienced developers in the community can help thousands of amateur developers trying to figure out IoT development. They normally hang out on GitHub and StackOverflow publishing unique pre-written code pieces and relieving amateur developers of their coding headaches.
 

Conclusion

 
.NET has been around for a while and consistently retains its position in the market countering advancements from potential replacements. In fact, it’s only become more popular with its rich toolset, open source persona, and strong community support. All of these traits combined makes IoT app development a fun activity with .NET.

For an organization to become successful by selling their products or services, they’d need to ensure that their products/services are of great quality. Enterprises are keen on observing trends that help them improve the quality and speed of their products/services. This is why they need great QA and software testing strategies.

However, for these strategies to grant benefits to an organization, they should be aligned with the organization’s business goals which is easier said than done.

The first step is to develop an actionable QA strategy itself.
 

Developing the strategy

 
The concept is similar to what the marketing and finance department does in an organization. They always find a way to devise appropriate strategies that tie to the organization’s larger business goals. A QA strategy can be developed the same way. However, the software development team should be involved as well to understand the actionable potential of the strategy better.
 

Why align QA strategy with business goals

 
Many organizations do not take QA strategies into account when planning to determine an optimal approach to achieving the business goals. The QA process itself might not be given the priority it deserves. To improve the product quality, simply facilitating QA and testing aren’t enough. The team involved with the product should be able to understand the tangible value in investing the organization’s resources in QA. This would help the team define QA goals that correlate with the business goals.
 

Figuring out the right goals

 
Not all organizations have established or at least transparent business goals. If the QA team is to align their goals with the business goals, they will need to get input from the various stakeholders across the organization. This also helps the QA team understand how product quality impacts the success of the business. The key is to understand the high-level goals. The QA team can then work backwards to devise a strategy that aligns with the high level goals.
 

Challenges to know about

 
Tying QA strategy to business goals isn’t going to be easy. Even the nature of the people involved can give the QA team a hard time. Another major challenge for the team is to ensure that the QA goals are quantifiable. The company should decide which metrics are linked to their business’ success, and the QA goals are created based on these chosen success metrics.
 

Conclusion

 
The software development company should be willing to invest time and resources into creating a QA plan that would contribute to the success of the company by improving product/service quality. This is the only effective way to benefit from QA. If the company is simply not willing to invest in a good QA plan, they will start running out of steam in the long run.

Image Designed by Dooder

It’s blatantly obvious that slow loading times and awkward interactions in a web application deter users forcing them to seek a better alternative. For years, developers relied on powerful microsoft technologies to develop high performance, interactive web applications. But not all developers always manage to build websites and web apps with the best performance.

That said, this blog will serve as a guide to many web development beginners on improving the performance of a website.

Before attempting to improve the performance of a website, it’s wise to collect a baseline of the web application’s performance. This is to see how the changes to the site are impacting its performance. Sometimes, the changes may do more harm than good reducing the performance. But performance tuning is still recommended as a holistic exercise that will impart deep insights on developers.

The following tips are recommended by our team with years of experience in delivering top-notch ASP.NET development services. The effectiveness of some tips may vary from website to website, and also depends on the nature and scale of the website. So, do take this with a grain of salt.
 

Reduce HTTP requests

 
Did you know that a browser pays a tax to open connection to a server?

It does. And the tax is what you call a TCP/IP connection overhead. When there is high latency, it takes quite a long time for the browser to establish new connections. In addition, browsers may also come with a limit on the number of requests they will make to one server at a time. The significance of these connection requests makes it evident that reducing the number of HTTP requests is a great performance optimization tactic.
 

CSS content should be loaded first

 
It’s better to load the CSS content of the website first. To understand why, it’s important to understand the nature of browsers – what it is that gives them great speed when downloading web pages.

When downloading pages, browsers attempt to render the application as soon as it has content. This is pretty much a wild guess by the browser as it won’t know what content on the page would go against the guesses it made while downloading the page. If the browser discovers that it has made a wrong guess on the rendering of  the page, it will start over again discarding all the work it has done till then. A stylesheet can trigger such a scenario which is why it’d better to avoid having styles that modifies elements that have already been rendered by the browser. This is why loading CSS files first is important.
 

Image compression

 
A website without images would be bland and without substance. Experienced web developers often use inline-SVG or CSS tricks to make vector images for web pages. This is because such images tend to be smaller than raster images. Not all developers can make this happen. They can compress the image instead or in their words ‘shrink the image’. Developers can make use of a number of services or plugins for JavaScript build tool to perform image shrinking.
 

Conclusion

 
Unlike software development, developing web applications require developers to take a lot of other factors into account including web browsers. Tuning the performance of web apps is much diverse than that of software. The end goal, however, is to satisfy users. Web performance optimization promises a better experience for end-users and better opportunities for the brand itself owing to the impressed app users.

There is now statistical evidence for the fact that more number of software development teams are deploying software faster, as of 2018. The increasing pace of deployment owes a lot to technological advancements and best practices, which sped up everything from design to quality assurance and testing. Bugs are found and fixed faster now, and the feedback loop shortened. When it comes to testing, the prime factor that contributed to such growth in testing speed and efficiency is test automation.

Many major forecasts indicate that the test automation market will be soaring high in the coming years, hitting close to US $110 billion by 2025.

It’s not that automation simply makes testing hassle-free. It demands a lot of investment and great care in its implementation. This is why many organizations are reluctant to automate their software testing processes. Many others simply can’t ensure ROI if they go ahead with test automation initiatives.

The success of test automation depends on how the organization implements it, and a few other factors. However, test automation initiatives that become successful do have a few things in common. They could very well be the key to ensuring that test automation is implemented the right way for desired results.

Here are a few such factors that influence the success of test automation.
 

Make sure testing is aligned with business goals

 
Typically, the business goals of the software would be defined before the development itself begins. Once the functional and non-functional requirements of the software are addressed and discussed with the development team, a testing should be developed which aligns with the software’s business goals. Testers should come with a design that ensures thorough and detailed test coverage of the codes that implement the requirements of the product under development.
 

‘What to test’ is as important as ‘how to test’

 
Test automation is likely to fail if the organization simply focuses on achieving 100% automation. The success of automation also depends on where it’s applied. Testers should identify the right candidates for automation first. The common way to start is to identify repetitive tests in the cycle and validate the functionalities across the development environment.
 

Utilize QA assets wisely

 
Important QA assets include test cases, test data, the infrastructure etc. in addition to the testers themselves, the automation engineers, and even the product owners. When organizations decide to implement test automation, they tend to get a wrong idea that manual testers will no longer be relevant in such environments. Test automation doesn’t solve everything and cannot automate every tests there is.

Automated scripts have limitations when it comes to understanding issues and patterns at a contextual level. It can hasten certain testing processes but not all. Certain tests can only be done by humans. The point is that organizations shouldn’t simply consider a QA asset irrelevant just because they are confident that their automated testing strategy would succeed. Each asset can come of use depending on the context. The key to successful test automation is to pay attention to and utilize each of these assets wisely.
 

Integration with development

 
Test automation is meant to primarily hasten development and deployment, increase code coverage, and keep timeline overruns under control. But testing, be it automated or not, cannot achieve this in a conventional waterfall model. Testing delivers the best results when it is at the core of project development. This ensures that the final product meets the expectations and is delivered on time.
 

Conclusion

 
As more and more software development companies make the shift to a DevOps and Agile culture, it’s important to think ahead, devise, and implement an efficient test automation strategy before the development begins. Ultimately it’s up to the testing team to coordinate and support the implementation of automation without compromising the testing code’s integrity and quality which can adversely affect the outcome of the automation initiative.

Enterprise DevOps adoption seems to be increasing consistently. Many enterprises have seen how a DevOps culture is important to becoming successful faster. Practicing a DevOps culture isn’t hassle-free however, and comes with its own fair share of challenges. A DevOps ecosystem requires Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, test feedback etc. to be faster. A poorly thought out automation strategy here could be detrimental to the test automation efforts.

A well thought-out automation strategy on the other hand would also consider every important aspect rather than focusing all efforts on ensuring that the application is ready to ship. API testing is one such important aspect every testing strategy should take into account.

Thanks to a plethora of tools available in the market today, it’s not that difficult to perform API testing provided the strategy allocates a slot for API testing in the project’s lifecycle. And a few of the most effective of those tools are open source technologies.

The following are 3 great open source tools any tester should check out for API testing.
 

SoapUI

 
SoapUI is not a new tool. It’s been contributing to QA & testing for a while now, and is ideal in API testing environments where there are mostly QA engineers instead of developers. The open source test tool is designed for effective API testing, and even allows users to create custom workflows or functionalities (if necessary) by coding up the solution in SoapUI using Groovy.
 

REST-Assured

 
If Java is what the team’s using for the project, REST-Assured is what they need for API automation. The tool has a large following, and is recommended by many experienced testers for API testing.

REST-Assured is basically a Java library generally used to test HTTP-based REST services. It can integrate with every existing Java-based automation framework and comes with a number of functionalities that testers usually have to code in. The bonus is that the tester need not be an expert in HTTP to use the tool. As validating REST services is comparatively harder in Java as opposed to Ruby and Groovy, REST-Assured can be a great asset since it allows testers to bring dynamic languages like Ruby and Groovy into the Java domain.
 

Fiddler

 
Another open source tool, Fiddler is not exactly known for its API testing capabilities. It’s mainly used to monitor, manipulate, and reuse HTTP requests. It has many extensions that allow you to perform even more tasks – from debugging websites to API testing itself, making it invaluable for certain mid-scale software development projects.

API testing is possible with the APITest extension. The extension allows the tool to test and validate web APIs. However, it may not be ideal for extensive testing. For that purpose, an API testing infrastructure should be built with the FiddlerCore.NET Class Library. Fiddler is a preferable option for teams using .NET languages for their projects.
 

Conclusion

 
The use of a tool should be based on the requirements of the test strategy and the nature of the testing subject itself. There are many API test tools, including proprietary ones, with features that would prove very useful when testing APIs. The ones above are popular open source alternatives that many experienced testers recommend. If you are a tester who likes to explore and experiment, do give each of these tools a shot.