Benefits of IT Outsourcing Software Development — Charter Global

IT Outsourcing Software Development can provide many opportunities to enhance and supplement your internal team. Hiring an outside expert ensures your team is better allocating their time to what they know and work on best. Often, internal team members simply don’t have the time or experience to provide an efficient applicable solution to the software development you require. An outsourced firm will be able to provide a structured timeline and strategy, as well as save your business money in the long run.

People sometimes think that there are limited things a business can or should outsource — typically accounting, administrative tasks, and customer service. However, the benefits of IT outsourcing software development has now become a mainstream decision for things like programming, security, development support, software design, and more. From start to finish of your software development services, there will be an outsourcing option you will be able to implement based on your needs.

As a Charter Global Company focused around providing the optimal solutions for our clients, we can ensure your software development is being outsourced with the right skills and the right people. With over 1000 consultants across the country and expert offshore teams, choosing an outsourcing professional has never been easier. Let us help you with your software development projects today — whether you have just started or have been in business for 80 years!

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Benefits of IT Outsourcing Software Development - Charter Global

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Understanding the nature of DevOps, its benefits, and 15 key tools | Charter Global

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a set of practices that automates the processes between software development services and IT teams, in order that they can build, test, and release software faster and more reliably – using the proper devops tools. This process acceleration enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market. It has been proven to increase the speed, efficiency, and quality of software delivery. The goal of DevOps process is to change and improve the relationship by advocating better communication and collaboration between these two business units. In order to have effective DevOps practices, the proper tools must be identified. Outlined below is a basic description of how DevOps works, along with the top 15 tools used in the software development life cycle.

Benefits of DevOps:

DevOps enables continuous software delivery with less complex problems to fix and faster resolution of problems. DevOps tools are used to make a seamless platform for this continuous delivery. It has certainly helped organizations such as Etsy, Netflix, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and Google by improving their performance levels significantly.

1. Leverage cloud architecture to control costs
2. Reduced complexity and increased scalability
3. Development and operations teams share access and insight in the development cycle
4. Store and correlate data from different applications and devices
5. Provides a consistent environment from development to production
6. Cloud-based management tools (cloud computing) simplify access and analysis updated in real-time
7. Identify and diagnose issues quickly

Top 15 DevOps Tools:

1. Jenkins:

Jenkins is a DevOps tool for monitoring execution of repeated jobs. This extensible automation engine enables DevOps teams to integrate project changes more easily and access outputs for quickly identifying problems.

2. Chef:

Chef is a DevOps tools for achieving speed, scale, and consistency. Chef turns infrastructure into code so that users easily and quickly can adapt to changing business needs.

3. Puppet:

Puppet strives to build an environment where the software powering everything around us is always available, up-to-date, and accessible from anywhere.

4. SaltStack:

SaltStack is software for data-driven orchestration and configuration management at scale. This DevOps tools is the solution for intelligent orchestration for the software-defined data center.

5. Docker:

Docker is a tool that allows users to quickly assemble apps from components and work collaboratively. This open platform for distributed applications is appropriate for managing containers of an app as a single group and clustering an app’s containers to optimize resources and provide high availability.

6. Ansible:

Ansible is a DevOps tool for automating your entire application life cycle. Ansible is designed for collaboration and makes it much easier for DevOps teams to scale automation, manage complex deployments, and speed productivity.

7. Juju:

Juju is a python based orchestration tool developed by canonical. It has a great UI for orchestrating your applications in your cloud environments. You can also use their command line interface to do all the orchestration tasks. You can configure, deploy and scale applications using Juju.

8. Vagrant:

Vagrant is a great tool for configuring virtual machines for a development environment. Vagrant runs on top of VM solutions like VirtualBox, VMware, and Hyper-V etc. It uses a configuration file called Vagrantfile, which contains all the configurations needed for the VM.

Learn More: https://www.charterglobal.com/do-more-with-devops-top-15-devops-tools/

Charter Global offers a full range of technology services and solutions, including DevOps Services, microservices, and Continuous Delivery. Our Open Source Center of Excellence provides a foundation for continuous innovation.

User Experience and User Interface Defined | Charter Global

User Interface Development is defined as the development of websites, web applications, mobile applications, and software. The User Interface plays a key role in the software development life cycle [SDLC]. Most people assume UI development services is all about creating websites and writing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but user interface goes far beyond these technical terms. The goal of the user interface is to make the user’s interaction as simple and efficient as possible, in terms of accomplishing user goals.

Think about it this way: The user experiences only front end interactions, such as the look and feel of the website/application. More often than not, they don’t concern themselves with the back end – like app design, coding elements, or methodologies employed in content layout. What’s more, users need to feel engaged and at ease when they visit your website. That’s where UI engineers come into the picture – to fulfill this task.

Cultivating a User Interface can be divided into two phases in website or application or software development services:

1. Research + Design
2. Development

Research and Design:

Research and analysis are all about interviewing users & project stakeholders and gathering their input to create a requirements document that includes personas, user scenarios, user behavior, and user experience evaluation metrics. During this phase, it is also important to understand the target audience so as to better cultivate a user experience design.

Business analysts and a user experience team usually lead the research phase. Both teams collect all information and inputs from users and project stakeholders in order to discuss technical terms with developers and project managers. Lastly, they prepare final documentation.

With the help of documentation, UX teams start the design process. They first create the wire frames to bring a rough idea to the project stakeholders and users. Wireframes are presented as a comprehensive screen layout consisting of black and white sketches of every screen in the application. At this point, the visual and graphic design processes dictating the visual appeal have not yet begun.

Wire-frame Example:

Next, developers must focus on creating prototypes that will simulate the real application. A prototype can contain one or more features, but it actually does nothing. It merely simulates the behavior of a real application, and users can see color combinations and minimal functionality in real time. Wire frames/Sketches and Prototypes are done by UX designers.

Tools to create Wireframes and Prototypes:

• Balsamiq Mockups
• Axure
• Gliffy
• iPhone mockup
• InDesign
• Photoshop
• Fireworks
• Dream weaver

UX Designer Role and Responsibilities:

1. Strong conceptualization ability, strong visual communication ability, drawing skills and sketchbook technique.
2. Strong working knowledge of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Fireworks and associated design tools.
3. Strong working knowledge of HTML, CSS, JavaScript/JQuery.
4. Experience with user interface design patterns and standard UCD methodologies.
5. Excellent verbal and written communication skills, especially the ability to clearly articulate design decisions with stakeholders and development teams.
6. Understanding of common software development practices.
7. Solid understanding of user-centered design principles, careful attention to detail, and ability to grasp complex, nuanced product requirements.
8. Collaborating on user experience planning and researching interaction design trends.
9. Researching technology trends.

Note: Responsibilities would be based on company and project requirements.

Read More: A few examples of UI Developer technologies

Reference Links:

https://www.charterglobal.com/user-interface-development/

https://www.charterglobal.com/technology-solutions/application-development/

https://www.charterglobal.com/technology-solutions/mobile-apps/

Usability Guidelines and Website Design Standards | Charter Global

Usability is a crucial part of the application development process: So what exactly is “usability” with respect to software and application development services? Usability means making products, systems, websites and web applications easier to use, matching them more closely to user needs and requirements. A website very often serves as the first impression to your customers – and you need to ensure it is a good one to keep them coming back. Good usability and user experience should capture the best possible human-computer interaction.

 

The primary benefits to users are that they can achieve their tasks easily and efficiently. This sounds simple, but the feeling of achievement that people get when they use a computer system without frustration should not be unpredictability is a crucial part of the application development process.

 

Usability means making products, systems, websites and End-to-End Application Development Services easier to use, matching them more closely to user needs and requirements. A website very often serves as the first impression to your customers – and you need to ensure it is a good one to keep them coming back. Good usability and user experience should capture the best possible human-computer interaction.

 

A highly usable system doesn’t just offer benefits to the users, but to your business as well.

 

Components of Usability:

 

1. Effective – Effectiveness is the completeness and accuracy with which users achieve specified goals.
2. Efficient – Efficiency can be described as the speed in which users can complete the tasks for which they use the product.
3. Error – The ultimate goal is a system which has no errors.
4. Easy to Learn – How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter the design?
5. Satisfaction – How pleasant is it to use the design?

     

How to Improve Usability:

 

There are many methods for usability, but the most basic and useful is user testing.

 

User testing is different from focus groups, which are a poor way of evaluating design usability. Focus groups have a place in market research, but to evaluate interaction designs you must closely observe individual users as they perform tasks with the user interface. Listening to what people say is misleading: you have to watch what they actually do.

 

Usability’s Role in the Design Process:

 

Usability plays a role in each stage of the design process.

 

1. Before starting the new design, test the old design to identify the good parts that you should keep or emphasize and the bad parts that give users trouble.
2. Conduct a field study to see how users behave in their natural habitat.
3. Make paper prototypes of one or more new design ideas and test them. The less time you invest in these design ideas the better because you’ll need to change them all based on the test results.
4. Refine the design ideas that test best through multiple iterations, gradually moving from low-fidelity prototyping to high-fidelity representations that run on the computer. Test each iteration.
5. Once you decide on and implement the final design, test it again. Subtle usability problems always creep in during implementation.

 

Usability Guidelines and Standards:

 

Usability guidelines and standards can be useful to provide ideas about usability issues, but they must be assessed to determine whether they are relevant to the users and context. Read More

 

Software development continues to develop and change each year. By researching the latest trends and keeping your process relevant, your business has a greater chance at success. If you are looking to build a scalable digital solution for your business, you should approach a software development company that works on the latest technology trends and implements the above technology stack. 

 

Get in touch with our team to discuss IT staffing and software development solutions that can supersede your existing solutions on mobile and web applications.

Three Types of Mobile Apps: Native, Hybrid, and Web - Charter Global

A breakdown of the 3 types of apps and a list of the best cross platforms to use in mobile app development -

 

Smartphones have become an inseparable part of our daily lives. Activities like waking up with a morning alarm, checking Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter; listening to music, reading news, watching YouTube videos; adjusting the thermostat and lighting, updating project status; and the list goes on. All of these mutually exclusive applications run independently on main operating platforms; seamlessly bringing our smartphones to life – all in real time.

 

We see hundreds of new apps in the market every year, and the demand for mobile application development continues to increase. Although we’re familiar with operating systems (i.e. iOS and Android), chances are, we’re not clued-in on the specific technology platforms software developers use throughout the design and development process in building apps. We hope that after reading this blog, you will better different types of mobile applications and cross platforms, including a few you’ve never heard of – in your journey to understand progressive web development. 

 

Native mobile apps:

 

Native mobile apps are designed to be “native” to one platform, whether it’s Apple iOS, Google’s Android, or Windows Phone. The native platform can be advantageous because it tends to optimize the user experience. Because it was developed specifically for the platform, it can operate more quickly and intuitively.

 

  Hybrid mobile apps:

 

These apps can be installed on devices just like native apps, but they run through web browsers. All hybrid apps are developed through the HTML5 programming language. Though hybrid apps are not as fast or reliable as native apps, they have a greater capacity for streamlining the development process. Because you don’t have to build and maintain mobile apps for separate platforms, your business can save on time and resources. It’s ideal for apps that primarily deliver content.

 

Web apps:

 

Responsive websites switch to a different design when they are accessed from a mobile device. Adaptive web application, on the other hand, scale to fit the different screen sizes of mobile devices. For these apps, the design doesn’t change. Web apps are built using the most popular programming languages, but they can’t use hardware on mobile devices or be sold in any app stores.

 

Best Cross Platform Mobile App Development List:

 

Xamarin: 

 

Xamarin delivers native Android, iOS, and Windows apps, using existing skills, teams, and code.

 

Adobe PhoneGap:

 

PhoneGap is a mobile application development framework based on an open source project (Apache Cordova).

 

Appcelerator: 

 

Appcelerator is an enterprise-focused development platform that lets developers write JavaScript with its Alloy MVC framework.

 

Kony: 

 

Kony offers a range of tools as part of its enterprise Mobility Platform to help business create apps from a single codebase.

 

Sencha Touch: 

 

Sencha Touch is the leading cross-platform mobile web application framework based on HTML5 and JavaScript for creating universal mobile apps.

 

 

 

Appery.io: 

 

Appery.io is the best cloud-based mobile app builder platform that the mobile phone application developer can use to create best apps for Android, iOS, and Windows phone, and includes Apache Cordova with access to its built-in components.

 

Charter Global leverages its experience across multiple, proven application development services and ecommerce cloud-based platforms:  SAP Fiori, SAP HANA, SAP Business One, Magento, PCI DSS, Spring MVC (Framework), Magnolia CMS/ Blossom module, HTML5, CSS3, JQuery, Struts. Charter Global is also the only Oracle partner that offers native pre-configured customizable mobile apps for JD Edwards users.

 

Read More: https://www.charterglobal.com/mobile-app-development/

 

Software development continues to develop and change each year. By researching the latest trends and keeping your process relevant, your business has a greater chance at success. If you are looking to build a scalable digital solution for your business, you should approach a software development company that works on the latest technology trends and implements the above technology stack. 

 

Get in touch with our team to discuss IT staffing and software development solutions that can supersede your existing solutions on mobile and web applications.

 

Requirements Gathering Best Practices for Software Development | Charter Global

The initial phase of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is called “Requirement Analysis,” also referred to as “Requirement Gathering.” This is perhaps the most vital phase within the SDLC, because it lays the foundation for how the rest of the software project will take place. Who will give these requirements and how, you ask? There are several approaches. It should be noted that this phase is also the most common for making mistakes within the project. By using the following techniques and methodologies, you can avoid getting de-railed by these mistakes.  

Here are the various requirement analyzing techniques that can be used as per the Software Development process:  

• Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) 
• UML Use Cases 
• Flow Chart 
• Data Flow Diagrams
• Role Activity Diagrams
• Work Flow Technique
• GAP Analysis 

Business Process Modeling Notation

This technique is similar to creating process flowcharts, although BPMN has it’s own symbols and elements. Business process modeling and notation is used to create graphs for the business process. These graphs simplify understanding the business process and end to end business flow. BPMN is widely popular as a process improvement methodology.

UML (Unified Model Language)

UML consists of an integrated set of diagrams that are created to specify, visualize, construct and document the artefacts of a software system. UML is a useful technique while creating object-oriented software and working with the software development process.  In UML, graphical notations are used to represent the design of a software project.  UML also help in validating the architectural design of the software.

Flow Chart

A flowchart depicts the sequential flow and control logic of a set of activities that are related. Flowcharts are in different formats such as linear, cross-functional, and top-down.  The flowchart can represent system interactions, data flows, etc. Flow charts are easy to understand and can be used by both the technical and non-technical team members. Flowchart technique helps in showcasing the critical attributes of a process.

Data Flow Diagrams

This technique is used to visually represent systems and processes that are complex and difficult to describe in text. Data flow diagrams represent the flow of information through a process or a system. It also includes the data inputs and outputs, data stores, and the various sub process through which the data moves. DFD describes various entities and their relationships with the help of standardized notations and symbols.  By visualizing all the elements of the system it is easier to identify any shortcomings. These shortcomings are then eliminated in a bid to create a robust solution.

Role Activity Diagrams

Role-activity diagram (RAD) is a role-oriented process model that represents role-activity diagrams.  Role activity diagrams are a high-level view that captures the dynamics and role structure of an organization. Roles are used to grouping together activities into units of responsibilities. Activities are the basic parts of a role. An activity may be either carried out in isolation or it may require coordination with other activities within the role.

GAP Analysis

Gap analysis is a technique which helps to analyses the gaps in performance of a software application to determine whether the business requirements are met or not. It also involves the steps that are to be taken to ensure that all the business requirements are met successfully. Gap denotes the difference between the present state and the target state. Gap analysis is also known as need analysis, need assessment or need-gap analysis.

For More Information, Please visit our website:

https://www.charterglobal.com/best-practices-for-requirements-analysis-gathering/ 

Get in touch with our team to discuss IT staffing and software development solutions that can supersede your existing solutions on mobile and web applications.