Articles in category Development

With the exponential pace of technological advancement, businesses strive to get the best out of it and to ensure their web app runs smoothly on all browsers and platforms. As an end user’s attention span continues to shorten, so will he or she not hesitate to press the back button on their browser if a site seems faulty. So, what’s the solution? Make web apps and sites work flawlessly on every browser, device, and platform. It sounds like a simple and straightforward goal, right? If a business doesn’t wish to lose customers due to less than optimal UX, cross-browser compatibility and cross-browser testing must be considered.  So, what is cross-browser testing and what should we know about it to assure the quality of our websites? Cross-browser testing is the practice of making sure that the websites and web apps created work across an acceptable number of web browsers.

Why SWR? Recently, we had the opportunity at SDH to develop a project using React with support from Redux/Toolkit. Thing is, though data was kept and fetched in the store, there was no caching mechanism implemented in the app.  And holding dozens of responses in the state is not my idea of a cool idea. Whatever the case, it soon got a little too easy to get lost in all those state slices, despite the use of Toolkit.    What’s more, it had zero influence on the backend at that point. With those iceberg-sized chunks of data drifting about, some requests took an eternity to resolve.  And since the UI’s application consisted of long item lists with few CRUD operations,  it soon became clear that some form of cache would come in pretty handy just about then. So the choice fell to SWR - a library made by the developers of Vercel (also of Next.js fame).

There are many factors that determine the success of a project and one of these is the establishment of a sound project plan in that project’s preliminary stages. Which is why more and more team members are getting involved earlier on. And it’s not just analysts, but developers and QA Engineers too. Indeed, with every team member having a unique mindset informed by different competences and experiences, this will bring varying and valuable perspectives to any given business requirement. The appropriate time for involving QA in the project depends on the client and the software development methodology that is adopted. In Agile methodology, a tester’s work will begin at a certain point in the software life-cycle and elsewhere in the waterfall methodology. Much depends on the client's decision and budget, and though QA’s initial involvement is associated with additional costs, there are still several reasons why it can prove profitable.