Forem: Akshaypai

Tips For Testing A Progressive Web Application

Akshaypai — Fri, 26 Apr 2019 09:56:01 +0000

The advancements in technology have paved the path for better user experiences. A staggering 2.5 billion people use smartphones today. The apps built for these smartphones are capable of providing sophisticated and tailored user experiences by making the best use of the device hardware and the visual real estate present on the screen. Until recently, it seemed that building a mobile app for an online business is a must. We are now observing a paradigm shift, thanks to the successful implementation of progressive web apps.

What are Progressive Web Apps?

A term that originated in 2015 from within the heart of Google, Progressive Web Apps (PWA) are a set of design principles. Modern browsers are capable of providing features that are usually utilized by native applications on various operating systems. The design principles that guide the developers to best use the provisional capabilities of the browser encompasses the PWA.

Among all the various attributes of a PWA, Google has narrowed it down to the below-mentioned three primary characteristics.

1. Reliability

The modern browsers have a feature called the service workers. Regular websites need the network connection to be working correctly to load the page and provide service. However, a service worker can load the webpage instantly with some stored content irrespective of the network condition.

This improves reliability as all the user would be able to see some of the page components loaded immediately and with some data as well. The pre-caching of information will allow the web application to provide functionalities even with the absence of a network connection.

2. Speed

Speed is a significant performance metric for a Progressive Web App. When we say speed, it implies how fast the web page will load and provide information that the user is trying to find. A study by Google on website performance found out that a mobile user will navigate away from the website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.

To make sure users aren’t lost due to the long loading time, PWAs follow the principles of building simple, light components that are faster to load and design the page such that there aren’t any clunky scrolling required to get the right information.

3. Engaging Experience

Mobile phone users are always drawn to engaging experiences and PWAs can now achieve things that weren’t possible before.

A PWA can be installed on the home screen of the smartphone. A behaviour that was only featured by mobile apps.
The PWA can provide full-screen experiences like apps without the browser tabs taking away some space that the web page can utilize.
The Browser’s feature called the web app manifest allows the PWAs to be designed in a way where the web page can load and look in certain ways that make it appear to behave like the other apps.

The acceptance of PWAs

On paper, the concept of a Progressive Web App seems promising. But 3 years after the name was coined, is it being adopted?

The answer is yes. The befits and improvements in business performance metrics because of PWAs has lead to its widespread acceptance and implementation.

An independent study that was conducted to evaluate the growth of PWAs concluded with some fascinating results.

As of today, around 87% of web strategists or web-experience makers adopt progressive web apps.

Serving web pages over Https is one of the key requirements for a PWA. The number of websites that are served over https has increased from 25% to 75%.

The same study also discovered that most of the websites they analyzed had a high SEO score of 85% and the top 1% of these high-scoring websites also had high PWA score. This meant that PWA is being adopted even by large organizations.

Testing Progressive Web Applications

Just like any other web applications, it is imperative to test the PWAs as well. However, testing a PWA is much different from testing traditional web applications.

In traditional web applications, one would test for the features provided by the application. Newer types of testing include checks to see if they render appropriately on various mobile devices and to ensure that the behaviour is predictable and consistent. But now with progressive web applications, the methodology in performing cross browser testing is much different. Here’s why.

Apart from just testing the features or functionality of the application, a PWA must adhere to the guidelines that determine its characteristics. This involves a combination of manual and software-based testing on a lot of different browsers and devices. Let’s look into the process of testing a progressive web app.

1. Testing for reliability

PWA reliability depends on the ability to serve pages over https. Using a tool such as Lighthouse will allow you to ensure all the web pages are served over https.

As we see in the further sections, Lighthouse can be used for more than just testing the reliability of the website.

2. Manual testing for native-like behaviour

This type of testing requires manual testing on various different browsers and devices. LambdaTest provides real-time cross-browser testing for over 1000 varieties of mobile devices and PCs.

One of the primary behaviour is the capability to add the PWA to the home screen like any other apps. With the web app being added to the home screen, it should start to behave like an app and not like a website. This includes the way it launches, and it’s ability to have some content even when there is no network connection.

With LambdaTest, you will be able to test these functions on a variety of devices. Here’s an example of adding a PWA to the home screen and testing it without any network connection (in airplane mode).

3. Software-based testing for native-like behaviour

Manual testing is recommended for the most common browsers on some of the most common devices. However, since it’s impossible to test on all browsers and all devices, you can use the tool Lighthouse to evaluate some of the native-like features.

For example, The presence of offline functionality and loading of pages for offline mode can be tested using Lighthouse. The software examines these features by looking for the metadata that lets browsers know what to do when the PWA is launched in offline mode.

Lighthouse will also test the loading capabilities of all the web pages in offline mode. It does so by testing if each of the URLs gives a 200 status code as the response when called.

4. Making the best use of URLs

A progressive web app as we have seen can look and behave like an app. However, one must remember that it’s still a website. For this reason, all pages must have a URL which is shareable on social media. All pages having URLs also ensures that the search engine crawlers index the entire website correctly.

There might be some content which might have very similar URLs. Such cases often occur in a PWA and add a canonical tag in the head of the page. This would be a sign to inform the search engines that the content on both the pages is the same. These are called as Canonical URLs.

5. Cross browser testing

PWA heavily relies on the features of modern browsers as we have seen earlier. This makes it extremely important to ensure that the site loads and behaves as expected on all the different types of browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc.

Some of the older browsers such as internet explorer 8.0 and earlier will not support PWAs. It is thus crucial to check how it behaves when loaded on such older browsers.

Browsers are also implemented differently. This means that each browser can handle a particular scenario in its own way. To ensure uniformity, you would have to manually check the loading and rendering of the website on various mobile and desktop devices, along with test on multiple browsers.

Here again, LambdaTest with its vast array of mobile emulators and simulators will help you quickly test your PWA and evaluate its behaviour on all different types of devices.

Cross browser testing has been prevalent for a long time. However, its prominence has significantly grown due to the lack of standards and uniformity in browsers and devices across the world. With billions of devices, most of them running different versions or types of OS and leads to different browsers, makes it unpredictable for the developers to know if a web app would behave as expected or not. Considering the heavy dependency of PWA on modern browsers, cross browser testing of PWA apps holds a major importance in today’s mobile first world. With tools like LambdaTest, it is possible to reduce the risk of unaccounted behaviour significantly.

Conclusion

The growth of PWAs has had a notable impact on many organization’s online growth. It has helped boost user engagement and in some cases assisted in developing trust in the brand.

We have navigated through some of the fundamental testing techniques that are required for assuring that the progressive web app adheres to the standards and specifications. However, some finer details can further improve the experience of using a PWA. Features such as Search Engine Optimization, load time tuning, and fast load techniques can be tested using popular tools.

As we have seen, most part of the PWA testing workflow mostly relies on manual cross-browser testing. With the help of a few tools, the overhead of conducting these tests manually can be significantly reduced.

Progressive web apps have opened a doorway to new ways users interact with websites and allowed online businesses to engage and retain more customers. Testing a PWA is as important as building it, and this is the time to take advantage of this opportunity and open your doors to PWA.

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Progressive Enhancement and Cross Browser Compatibility

Akshaypai — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 12:38:00 +0000

With more data and statistics publically available to developers and designers, we must focus on utilizing that to our benefit when it comes building a functional website. Progressive Enhancement rests on this premise which enables the developers to prioritize on concepts and features that matter the most to the end-users.

We can consider the Progressive Enhancement strategy similar to product implementation. It starts with building a minimum viable product which is robust and has the essential core features of the product. With the MVP complete, we then progressively build on top of it to add more features and perform a thorough analysis of its capabilities.

But why is this truly necessary?

The answer to this stems from the lack of standards in web browsers. Most of the newer websites are motivated to use the capabilities of modern browsers. However, to assume that all your customers and future potential leads were to use the modern web browsers would be a fair miscalculation! A visitor can land on your website from legacy browsers too, and this is why cross browser compatibility issues are necessary to be dealt with.

Progressive Enhancement strategy steps in here for delivering cross-browser compatibility. It makes sure that the core elements of the web-page are accessible to everyone despite the browser they use. We can build websites keeping in mind the issues that might arise and develop in a way that minimizes these issues.

In this article, we will look into how Progressive Enhancement works and how it can be used to solve the major issues websites face today of compatibility across browsers.

What is Progressive Enhancement?

Progressive Enhancement is a technique of creating cross browser compatible web design wherein the highest priority while developing is keeping the core web page content, while the other complex add-ons and features remain secondary.

Consider that you are into building decorative walls. The most basic requirement in all cases would be first to build the wall and whitewash it.

Now you can add the foundation paint to give it some color. Once the color is complete, you would ideally discuss ideas with your client and paint designs on the wall. Finally, you would add wall hangings to enhance its grace.

From this analogy, you can easily deduce the building of the wall or the base as using HTML. CSS comes in as the painting on the wall. Discussions with the client, choosing the wall hanging and other decorative items as a finishing touch would be the job forJavascript.

While using a progressive enhancement technique for cross browser compatible web design, the main focus is kept on building a website using minimal web design technologies to deliver a functionally strong result.

Once it is ensured that the website is strong enough to work with high functional accuracy, then, other addon features are taken into account.

Progressive Enhancement technique lays more emphasis on robustness and functionality of the website above anything else. And thus the development process starts from a simple design and gradually gears up to a more complex one with added features and enhancements.

This ensures the core functionality of the website is accessible across different web browsers, minimizing cross-browser compatibility issues, mainly its effects on functionalities. Therefore, it is important for a better cross-browser compatibility.

How Is Progressive Enhancement Different From Graceful Degradation?

Another web development technique is Graceful degradation. In this web design technique, the website is designed in full scale with advanced UI (User Interface), features and enhancements as per the latest version of the web browser.

Then it slowly steps down with each step, only keeping the core functionality by the end. This way the direction of layers remains opposite for Progressive Enhancement and Graceful Degradation.

While the main idea behind the two methodologies is to establish a cross browser compatibility, where the functionality of the website remains intact on different browsers. The Progressive Enhancement methodology is implemented keeping the basic versions of the browsers in mind, on the other hand, Graceful Degradation focuses more on the advanced versions of web browser and slowly drops down enhancements to be compatible with the lower versions.

Also, since Progressive Enhancement methodology retains the core content in all the versions, it delivers good results for SEO(Search Engine Optimization) of the website, where the keywords could be detected in all the versions. This makes Progressive Enhancement a preferred technique in web development.

What Are The Different Layers Of Progressive Enhancement?

As we have seen in the previous sections, that Progressive Enhancement is a multi-layered web design methodology, wherein the add-ons and features are added with each step as we move from the basic to the advanced versions of the web browsers in order to avoid cross browser compatibility issues.

Let us now discuss these different layers of Progressive Enhancement to have a deeper understanding of how this methodology efficiently deals with the cross browser compatibility issues.

1. Content Layer: Rich Semantic HTML Markup

This is the layer which focuses on the core content of the web page by using rich semantic HTML markup. Rich Semantic HTML markup tags ensure a properly structured content which conveys required meaning and idea to the end user.

HTML tags such as nav, footer, article, aside etc. are used to ensure a well defined structure of the content. These tags are used to replace the common generic block div and inline tag span in order to achieve a clean web page with the evolving HTML5 standards of web design.

Even the previously used object tag is replaced by the newly introduced and tags for a rich semantic HTML markup.

The main aim of a Rich Semantic HTML markup is to allow text-based, speech-based, antiquated and robotic user agents to be able to navigate the content of the website diligently.

2. Presentation Layer: Styling Website With CSS

With the evolution of HTML5 with Semantic HTML markup, website styling have also seen an evolution in the face of CSS3. HTML5 and CSS3 blend together very well allowing the web page to become more attractive with colors, images, backgrounds, gradients, shadowing, text effects and lot many elements to enhance the overall User Experience.

While at times the web browsers might have their own different set of elements and media types defined in a specific way for their use at different instances.

The idea behind the second layer i.e. presentation is to enable the visuals based user agents to be able to display or alter the visual representation of the website’s content. Also, this layer plays a major role in enhancing the User Experience (UX) by many folds.

3. Scripting Behaviors Layer: JavaScript

This layer accumulates the above layers together to build up a strategically smart web page. It focuses more on the performance of the web design, using unobtrusive JavaScript or jQuery.

JavaScript enables the robustness of the features by maintaining them as separate modules. This allows the features to be independently available despite a few scripts not been able to run successfully due to browser compatibility issues.

This layer does not restrict the accessibility of the content instead it enriches the availability of content for a wider range of users.

JavaScript enables the user agents that are already capable of using it to provide the end users with maximum usability and an optimum user experience.

The above-explained 3 layers for website development using Progressive Enhancement technique will certainly help in achieving cross-browser compatibility. As Progressive Enhancement focuses on providing the bare minimum high-quality functionality to the end user with the addon enhancements for the users with higher versions of web browsers.

Using Progressive Enhancement as an approach for web development not only helps you in serving the purpose of the website by catering higher functionality to the end user, but also helps in SEO of the website by laying emphasis on the core content.

Cross Browser Testing A Common Ground for Progressive Enhancement & Graceful Degradation

Irrespective of your pick out of Graceful Degradation and Progressive Enhancement there lies a common objective for adapting any of these 2 web development approaches i.e Cross Browser Compatibility.

In order to achieve the common goal a detailed Cross Browser Testing is vital to ensure that your website or web app runs seamless across modern as well as legacy browsers before making the website go live.

LambaTest provides the right cross browser testing solutions for free, wherein you can check the cross browser compatibility of your website or web application across a fleet of 2000+ desktop and mobile browsers available. LambdaTest offers multiple features to hasten the cross browser testing process.

Real Time Test – You can perform live interactive testing across all major browsers and their assorted versions inside a VM hosted on their cloud servers. You can record your testing sessions, capture screenshot inside the running VM and can even push it to various bug tracking tools using LambdaTest Integrations.
Automated Screenshot Testing – To capture bulk screenshots across various browsers in a single go.
Responsive Testing – To test your RWD(Responsive Web Design) across various devices and screen sizes.
Lambda Tunnel – To securely test you locally hosted websites with the help of an SSH connection.

There are many more features and integrations that are added constantly to their platform. Their freemium plan offers you a lifetime access to all their premium features with limited amount of monthly usage. All you need to do is sign up and start cross browser testing!

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Monitoring Network Traffic With Automation Scripts

Akshaypai — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 12:06:35 +0000

According to Wikipedia, “A test script in software testing is a set of instructions that will be performed on the system under test to test that the system functions as expected.” However, what purpose do these test scripts solve?

These test scripts, or in simple terms, a short program (written either using functional GUI test tools or in programming languages) are focused on testing functionalities of a software system. Moreover, this testing can either be executed manually or using an automated pattern. Also, since we live in an era where machines are taking over manual labour, automation seems like the better option.

What is automation testing?

A simplified process of developing a program to test software, automation testing reduces human effort. An automation testing program or script, written by developer uses test data. The data is automatically entered to generate output. This further creates an analysis of the entire data, measuring the efficiency of the program.

But Why do we need to automate the testing process?

As the name itself implies, automating specific tasks can profoundly reduce the effort required in addition to the investment of time and money. Automating a process means, no more human interaction for long hours to verify the working. It slashes the scope of human error, increases efficiency, and the scope of work.

Today we’ll discuss how automation scripts can help you to check network traffic.

What is network traffic?

Network traffic, in simple terminology, is the amount of data travelling through a network. Precisely put, the network traffic includes the entire exchange of data between a browser and a server. For instance, when opening a website, downloading images, text and any other templates are included in the network traffic.

Traffic inspection for a web application

Now that we know what traffic is, let’s understand why it is necessary to monitor the traffic. For any web, application efficiency is the most critical factor. Also, one would like to keep a check on network usage and any possible data drain. Analyzing the traffics gives us such insights, making it easier to find solutions.

The process of inspecting traffic is simple. Once all the requests have been triggered on a web page, it is easy to collect the responses which in turn help the user find out the shortcomings (if any). This will help measure all the functioning and create reports to analyze the statistics.

What should be looked for?

Whenever traffic monitoring is done, several parameters need special attention to get maximum accuracy.

HTTP Requests: HTTP requests are packets of information communicated between the browser and the server. The higher the number of applications, the lower is the experience of the user. Browser caching is one technique which can bring down the number.
HTTP Response: The time taken for the packet communication of the response needs to be reported precisely.
Load Time: This includes the entire set of resources which have to be loaded for the webpage to open. This includes text, media, and other plugins.
Failed Requests: There might be errors in the application or there might be some network issues. This leads to failed requests. Status Code of a Response will indicate if the request failed or succeeded. For example, a status code of 400 indicates that the request made was incorrect, or a status code of 500 indicates that the application had issues processing the request. A lot of failed requests might indicate some serious issues in the application.
IP Address: requests from IP addresses need to be monitored. unusually high number of requests from the same IP address could mean that someone might be trying to attack your website with a DoS(Denial of Service) Attack. This will also allow you to discover what is the typical number of requests made per IP address per session.
Location: Though it might not be possible to determine the originating location of all traffic, a majority of it can be monitored. This will help you in analyzing the various regions from which your website is getting traffic and you can apply your business intelligence to determine if there are anomalies or a potential market opportunity.

How to Capture Network Traffic

Capturing network traffic requires specialized tools that monitor the network in which it is deployed. These tools aggregate, segregate, apply user-provided rules and visualize various aspects related to network traffic. Here are some of the most popular tools used for this purpose.

1. Wireshark

Wireshark is one of the most widely used network monitoring tools today. A free and an open source tool, Wireshark equips you with a packet analyzer that can go to microscopic levels of networking monitoring.

It has some powerful features such as a feature-rich GUI for monitoring, a pluggable interface to monitor a new type of protocol, live data connection to ports, multi-protocol scalable dissectors, and more. You can learn more about Wireshark through their official video guides.

2. Microsoft Network Monitor

If you are on a windows machine, you can use the inbuilt network monitoring tool to capture and analyze your network traffic. Apart from the broader capabilities of capturing traffic through the adapters or even the subnets, this tool can be used for much finer operations.

Performing detailed tasks such as frame filtering and frame analysis can be easily performed via this tool and it provides a summary of each frame that eases the user’s work. Microsoft’s Technet guide on the monitoring tool will help you set it up and learn more about the capabilities and restrictions of this wonderful tool.

3. Observium Community

When the goal of traffic monitoring is to have an eye on the health of the network, it becomes imperative to monitor each device state and the communication that occurs within the network. For such purposes, this multi-OS network monitoring tool Observium performs extremely well.

Observium will help you to improve visibility within your network. With features such as device auto-discovery, health checks of existing devices and reporting features makes it one of the most sought-after tools for discovery and status check use cases.

Integration of Automation and Traffic Monitoring

Now that you have the required parameters and the resources to fetch the data and get results, traffic monitoring seems simple, right? Well, it might. However, would it be as good as an automated process? Let’s have a look!

With an automated traffic monitoring model, the automation script enables sample data to be pitched in to generate situation based results.

Moreover, the use of automation scripts and tools can reduce the expenses involved as well as manual effort. An automated script not only reduces cost but also cuts down on the scope of human error. This consists of the simulation of bandwidth and latency whenever required. Its benefit being filtration of specific URL patterns in an attempt to get maximum data for analysis. Traffic monitoring with the help of automation scripts also helps gain insights in real time.

A very common saying goes by as,” Prevention is better than cure.” Also, that is precisely what automation enables the user to do. Before shipping out the actual product, any potential problem will be reported. For any organization looking to grow with an efficient system of working and satisfied employees as well, automation is the key to an unbeaten run.

It goes without a doubt that automating the monitoring process is one more step towards delivering a more successful product.

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9 Fundamentals To A Successful Microservice Design

Akshaypai — Fri, 01 Mar 2019 12:25:06 +0000

The human body is a combination of different systems most of which are independent yet, working together as one. Each system has a specific functionality of its own. All the organs with a multitude of other supporting frameworks form a fully functioning body. Now, if applied to software systems, this is the concept of a microservice architecture.

In technical terms, a microservice system allows development of single function modules. This trend of developing single function modules has increased agility, performance and cost efficiency for organizations both large and small while enabling continuous testing and early delivery. But, before we delve deeper into the fundamentals of microservice design let us have a look at its advantages.

Advantages Of Microservice Architecture

With monolithic architectures, developers often faced challenges of limited reusability and scalability. But, with a microservice design, this single unit can be broken down into different modules making development, deployment, and maintenance easy. So let’s have a look at some major advantages of microservice architecture:

Technological Flexibility

While monolithic architecture always left the developers looking for the ‘right tool for the job’, a microservice architecture offers coexistence of multiple technologies under one cover. Different decoupled services can be written in multiple programming languages. Not only does this enable developers to experiment but also scale their product by adding additional features and functionalities.

Increased Efficiency

Microservice architecture speeds up the entire process of creation. Unlike a single unit, teams can work simultaneously on multiple components of a software system. This, in addition to increasing productivity, makes it easier to locate specific components and focus on them. Malfunctioning of a single component will not affect the entire system. Instead, this also eases error location and maintenance.

Products Not Projects

According to Martin Fowler, microservice architecture helps businesses create ‘products instead of projects’. In simpler terms, the use of microservice architecture allows teams to come together and create functionality for business rather than a simple code. The entire team comes together to contribute to different functionalities. These can further be used for different lines of business if applicable. In addition, it also creates an autonomous, cross-functional team.

Fundamentals to a successful microservice design

Now we know the advantages of a microservice architecture, but, how do we achieve the perfection? Are we aware of the microservice design principles? What are the best practices to design a microservice architecture? Let us answer these questions and look at some fundamentals to a successful microservice design.

1. The Scope Of Functionality

With the simultaneous implementation of development & deployment by different teams to establish or support a respectively unique functionality with a product, defining the scope of a microservice become s a very important task. While many people hold the concern of creating ‘too many’ tiny micro-services, it is usually more commonly seen that these microservices are overloaded.

When we talk about the scope of a microservice, we are referring to the features of an independent software module. The ability of microservices to perform as a nearly-stateless system allows it to be developed independently. It thus becomes imperative to identify functionalities that a microservice will implement. This helps to understand what a microservice is responsible for? To realize the intended functionality that each microservice should serve. Not only to prevent overload but to serve different scenarios as well. For example, a piece of code is called multiple times in a monolithic setup, creating a microservice will make it easier to access and use. Minimizing the amount of code will only improve efficiency and avoid bloated services.

The question comes as to how one can go about defining the scope of a microservice. Though there isn’t a well-defined set of rules to achieve this, there are a few sets of guidelines or best practices if you may to define a scope. Following are some of the steps that you can take to define your microservice.

The first step is to identify the pieces of code that are replicated under various modules. How often do you see them repeat? and how much effort goes into getting them setup each time in different modules? If the answer to all of these are high, then the scope of the microservice would be to handle just the repeating pieces of code.
Another step that you can take is to check if a module is not dependent on other modules or in simpler terms, check if it’s possible that a module is loosely coupled with the rest of the services. If so, then the scope of the microservice will be the scope of the entire module.
Another very important metric to consider while defining the scope is to check if the features would be used with a heavy load. This would check if the microservice would have to be scaled up in the near future.If it does, then it’s a good idea to define the scalable bits as the scope of a microservice rather than combine it with other features.

2. High Cohesion Combined With Loose Coupling

The main motive of any microservice is to have services independent of each other. This means one can edit, update or deploy a new service without hampering any other services present. This is possible if interdependence is low. A loosely coupled system is the one where one service knows too less or nothing about others.

When breaking down a monolithic architecture into smaller services or components, it is important to combine similar functionalities. This combination of related logic into a single unit is known cohesion. The higher the cohesion, the better is the microservice architecture. A low cohesion would indicate too much communication between different services leading to a poor system performance.

3. Unique Source Of Identification

Following the fundamentals of microservice design, it is important for any service to be the unique source of identification for the rest of the system. Let us take an example to understand this scenario.

After an order is placed on an e-commerce website, the user is provided with an order ID. This order ID once generated contains all the information regarding the order. As a microservice, the order ID is the only source for any information regarding the order service. So, if any other service seeks information regarding the order service, the order ID acts as the source of information rather than its actual attributes.

4. API Integration

Breaking down the monolithic design into multiple services means these service will coordinate and work together to form the system. But, how do these services communicate? Imagine using multiple technologies to create different services. How do they relate to each other?

Well, the simple answer would be the use of an API (Application Programming Interface). The fundamental of microservice design is using the correct API. This is crucial to maintaining communication between the service and the client calls. Easy transition and execution are important for proper functioning.

Another important thing to note while creating an API is the domain of the business. This definition of the domain will ease out the process of differentiating the functionality. There are several clients which are external to the system. These clients could be other applications or users. Whenever a business logic is called, it is handled by an adapter (a message gateway or web controller) which returns the request and makes changes to the database.

5. Data Storage Segregation

Any data stored for a specific service should be made private to that specific service. This means any access to the data should be owned by the service. This data can be shared with any other service only through an API. This is very important to maintain limited access to data and avoid ‘service coupling’. Classification of data based on the users is important and can be achieved through the Command and Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS).

6. Traffic Management

Once the APIs have been set and the system is up and running, traffic to different services will vary. The traffic is the calls sent to specific services by the client. In the real world scenario, a service may run slowly, thus, causing calls to take more time. Or a service may be flooded with calls. In both the cases, the performance will be affected even causing a software or hardware crash.

This high traffic demand needs management. A specific way of calling and being called is the answer to a smooth flow of traffic. The services should be able to terminate any such instances which cause delay and affect the performance.

This can also be achieved using a process known as ‘auto-scaling’ which includes constant tracking of services with prompt action whenever required. In some cases, a ‘circuit breaker pattern’ is important to supply whatever incomplete information is available in case of a broken call or an unresponsive service.

7. Automating The Process

Microservices designed independently should be able to function in its own accord. The automation would enable self-deployment and function without the need for any intervention. This process enables the services to be cloud-native in nature and the ability to be deployed in any environment. But to achieve this, it is very important to have a DevOps team constantly working towards the evolution of the services.

8. Minimal Database Tables (Preferably Isolated Tables)

Accessing database tables to fetch data can be a lengthy process. It can take up time and energy. While designing a microservice, the main motive should revolve around the business function rather than the database and its working. To ensure this, even with data entries running into millions, a microservice design should have only a couple of tables. In addition to minimum numbers, focus around the business is key.

9. Constant Monitoring

Imagine breaking down a monolithic architecture into a microservice design. This needs a lot of time and resources. It is not easy to monitor all the changes made with the help of the traditional tools. The insertion of data layers and caching increases performance but makes it difficult to monitor the entire process.

Hence, for designing a microservice architecture, it is important to establish a process for actively monitoring the storage of the data in a central location. This will help reflect the frequent changes without affecting the performance of the system. In a common scenario, the microservice monitoring tools will monitor individual services and later combine the data by storing it in a centralized location. This is a necessary step while following micro-services design principles.

Realizing the crucial part played by an API in a successful microservice architecture. One must also have a process to constantly monitor the API performance. API performance monitoring is crucial to any microservice architecture in order to make sure the functionality stays up to the mark in terms of speed, responsiveness and overall performance of the product.

Limitations Of Microservice Architecture

While microservices are the best way to tone down a monolithic structure. Yet, it comes with its own set of drawbacks. But before getting to any conclusion let’s have a look at some of these.

1. Development Environment Overload

With the growth of the application and its database, there is an expansion in the code base as well. With the code expanding for every microservice present, it overloads the development environment with every application that is loaded. This can cause a major delay in productivity.

2. DevOps Complexity

Development and deployment of single function microservices is not an easy task. Use of multiple technologies and creating APIs to centralize the system is a challenge. This calls for an experienced DevOps team. Procuring such an experienced DevOps team is very crucial to maintain the complexities of a microservice based application.

3. Increase In Resource And Network Usage

With multiple components working together, it is important for them to communicate with each other at some level. This communication will lead to an increased network usage. This demands a high-speed reliable network connection. In addition, expenses increase to run these applications. All services run individually mounting up the costs of operation.

4. Testing

Testing the application can be challenging since there are individual components. Compared to a monolithic application, microservices take longer to test and are more complex in case of any errors. At times, delays can be caused due to testing which eventually affects the entire application.

5. Security

Security is of paramount importance when it comes to web applications. With microservices, achieving this is difficult. When there are clusters of independent modules, each module needs to adhere to the authentication and authorization norms defined for the entire system.

Apart from that, each module might talk to other modules and tracking the flow of data becomes very difficult. Additional measures such as API gateways with load balancing is required to ensure the behaviour is consistent. These additional steps cause overhead on each of the microservice.

6. Application Complexity

As microservices are independent components, very often, each microservice will have a technology stack that best suits its needs. For example, a machine learning module might use the python stack while the metering service might use the Java stack and the UI service might use the MEAN stack. This leads to complexity as the resource pools and the skills required to manage and build newer features will be very high.

7. High Initial Investment

Microservices run independently and they require independent containers or resources to run them. Each project might have a lot of microservices working together and it would require a much higher investment to set up all the clusters that include the microservices, the security containers, load balancers, API gateways, etc.

Is It worth It?

After having read the fundamentals of microservice design, it is clear that there are a certain set of best practices which need to be followed. But, we also observe how the microservice design principles ease the process of creating an application by breaking down the monolithic architecture. But, at the same time, there are certain challenges which need to be overcome when adapting a microservice architecture. These complexities affect the operational processes but in the long term, overcoming these challenges can lead to an optimized and more efficient application.

In addition, it overcomes the delays and flaws while increasing flexibility and performance. Keeping the above mentioned in mind it is safe to say that microservice architecture is necessary for a successful software system.

Many enterprises including names like PayPal, Twitter, LambdaTest and Netflix have backed up the reliability of microservice architecture for deploying a more scalable, functional and robust software.

Original Source: lambdatest.com

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Why API Discovery Is Important For A Tester?

Akshaypai — Thu, 28 Feb 2019 12:09:02 +0000

Technology is advancing with each passing day, making things available at the fingertips, connecting even the remotest regions and services. This has brought up everything together at the table for the customers, where things are just a click away.

With a lot of seamless interconnectivity, it is the APIs (Application Programming Interface) which has been successful in connecting different applications, bringing it together for the user.

It is this connectivity which has made APIs very substantial for modern online connectivity by providing a par-excellent User Experience and an increased reach towards 3rd party applications. Thus, it is an important aspect to be well taken care of while testing.

Before we get deeper into the reasons why API discovery is important and how it concerns a tester, let us first understand what an API discovery is, and how it is performed.

What Is API Discovery?

API Discovery has been doing rounds of discussions in the market, especially among the developers who are developing their software. For those who are looking forward to a seamless connection for different areas of the software, API discovery has been very significant in their pursuit.

If you are a developer developing an internal or an external API, API performance monitoring and API Discovery is vital for you.

Whether a SOAP or a REST API, it is always important to discover API endpoints. These endpoints which are the touchpoints of the application communication are mostly the URLs of a server.

These are the URLs from where the API can fetch the necessary resources, which are required to carry on the operations. Thereby the discovery of API endpoints is crucial for API performance monitoring.

With API performance, you can identify if any of the bottlenecks exist outside the server. Such bottlenecks although do not relate with your application’s performance but can still cause a menace by abrupting the end user’s experience.

Thus, API performance monitoring ensures well-aided back-end business operations, alert operations, and web services for a seamless user experience.

API Discovery is when you look out for different API resources to fill in the gaps of your software application. This makes it very crucial to find the right APIs which serve the purpose optimally to the behest of the application.

There are chances that you might find the right set of API resources within your partners’ circle, but at several occasions, you have to head out for other public API resources such as Google, Github, ProgrammableWeb etc.

API Discovery For Internal and External Programs

Based on whether your program is internal or external, API discovery needs might change. Here’s what API discovery means for internal and external programs respectively:

Internal Programs

For internal programs, API discovery is to support innovation and development efficiency. The main aim of the developers behind developing APIs is to create services which provide access to different applications and cater to various business models.

In order to fulfil this aim, to be able to develop various business capabilities, it is very important for the API to be discoverable, user-friendly and accessible. With these qualities in an API, it would be very beneficial for the developers by helping them build faster and easy to use applications and integrations.

Well-aligned practices for API discovery, would not only help in building up applications and integrations catering to different business models but would also prevent any kind of duplication.

External Programs

If your API is the product and your partners or developers seem to be the end user. In such a situation, API discovery for external programs comes into the play. Here, the API discovery not only focuses on the accessibility, user-friendliness and being discoverable, but also looks forward to providing an overall digital storefront.

API discovery of the external programs also focus on aspects like what you have to offer the end users, the value they would get upon using your API (product), ways to get started etc. apart from those offered for the internal programs.

API Discovery: Manual vs Automated

With most of the business operations going online, the scale of the operations has massively increased with time. Catering to such a huge scale manually is not feasible, given the expected processing time is also decreasing day by day.

This is where the Automation comes into the picture, supporting scalability of operations. APIs have helped to automate processes to increase the scale by many folds than manual processing.

For an increasing demand in the market, where scalability has become the key, API discovery is important to cater to the requirements. API discovery has helped businesses leverage the power of automation to scale their operations using high performing APIs.

How To Make Your API Discoverable?

Leveraging API discovery practices, you can make your APIs discoverable in order to cater to different business models. Here are some of the ways in which you can make your API discoverable:

1. Create API definition documents

To use your API, it is important that your API has to be very well defined with proper documentation for the developers and end users to be able to understand and access it.

For this purpose, you can opt for API specification formats such as OpenAI Specification. With a well-defined API, you can easily generate SDKs and code libraries to widen the scope of potential use cases catering to the developers base.

2. Make API machine readable leveraging API discovery formats

A machine-readable API is always more accessible making the API discovery easier. You could make a standardized machine-readable API by leveraging platforms like APIs.guru which provides standard API definitions which can be automatically indexed. This would be helpful in reaching out to potential user communities.

3. Use API directories to profile your API

Growing directories can be very helpful for profiling your API, by providing them with due visibility in the developers’ community. Here are a few directories where you can profile your API:

ProgrammableWeb
APIs.guru
APIs.io
Product Hunt
API for That
Hitch HQ

4. Use proper SEO in developer documents and home page

SEO works miracle when it comes to visibility. Thus to make your API more visible among the developers’ community, it is always recommended to use proper SEO keywords in the developers’ documents and home page.

Why API Discovery is your concern as a tester?

As a tester, while testing a software, testing the API integration is also very crucial to ensure well-performing operations.

As a part of the API integration, API performance monitoring and API discovery must go hand in hand. While the API performance monitoring ensures that the APIs are performing well with no bottlenecks, API discovery helps in getting in details of the API documentation.

API discovery has thus been helping the testers to understand the duplicate and unauthentic APIs amidst the various APIs used to integrate the applications.

Excess of everything can be bad, similar is true in the case of APIs as well, only if they aren’t managed properly. The more APIs you have, the more connectivity you establish to widen you reachability. The wider your network, the higher the noise. API discovery will also help you in reducing the noise that gets generated due to the presence of abundant APIs running for your software.

With this, a tester can ensure a higher performance of the APIs by eliminating the elements causing hindrance and abruptions in the operations.

The bottom line

As the scale of online operations is increasing with a demand for high performance, APIs are very much required to cater this need at scale. This has brought in the requirement of API performance monitoring for a faster performance enabling capabilities for broader business use cases.

With these requirements, finding the right APIs to fill in the gaps within the software has become very substantial. To be able to cater the potential business models, API discovery has to be well taken care of, with proper standardized API documentation and profiling into API directories.

Not only for the developers but even the end users and testers, this API documentation and discovery is crucial to ensure overall seamless operations by eliminating all the bottlenecks and redundancies of the API.

Original Source: lambdatest.com

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17 Skills Of Highly Effective Software Testers

Akshaypai — Wed, 27 Feb 2019 08:40:04 +0000

Software testing is an essential process for developing the perfect app. But, as a software tester, it is essential to have certain skills which in turn will help with testing the applications better.

Many people and organizations still have a tough time finding the right software tester and it is because of the lack of the required skill set. Today we will look at 17 software testing skills which are essential for any leading software tester.

1. Thought Process

Testing is not as easy as it is often presumed to be! It holds great significance to any software development process. For any software tester, a knack for analytics and logical application of concepts is necessary. When testing software, it is imperative to analyze the given situation and accordingly create a solution for the same. The thought process and right mindset will help break down the problem into parts, making it easy to examine the elements of the problem and its relationships.

2. Reporting and Communication

Testing can be a long and tiring process sometimes requiring the tester to sit down for hours and analyze a certain situation. But, after spending these hours it is crucial to have the right communication sent to the higher authorities. This leads to the correct decisions being taken in terms of the release and timelines. A good report along with effective communication is vital to establish healthy transparency & trust of all the stakeholders as it conveys about all the actions taken, the bugs found, the bugs solved and any other issues encountered.

3. Thorough Understanding & Mapping Of Business Situation

An app or software is launched with a well-structured business model. While the tester is looking for technical aspects post-development, one of the most important software testing skills is the ability to emulate real-time business situations. This process of mentally mapping business scenarios is important as it enables visualization of complex problems.

Each project has user stories that are implemented. These stories describe the type of interaction that happens with the system and the outcome that the system delivers. The outcomes to these interactions must be consistent and testers need to identify various scenarios where the consistency might break.

This makes it essential for testers to understand the boundaries of the system and verify that the impact of various processes on the system produces desirable results.

4. The Glocal Approach

As a tester, it is important to understand individual components of the system and how they interact with each other under given circumstances. The presence of multiple stakeholders in modern businesses makes it tough to understand the complete working of these systems. This needs focussed attention on individual components.

A tester can holistically test the application if he has the ability to detach himself from the system and get an outsider’s perspective. This view of the components will give him a better understanding of the component and any errors in its internal working as well. This is what we call the Glocal approach, monitoring global interaction as well as local working.

5. Automating The Process

As a software tester, while it is essential to have expertise in manual testing, there are times when it is good to rely on automation. During the life cycle of a project, a given module undergoes many changes in implementation. Every release cycle demands for a rigorous phase of testing in order to ensure the system stability. As a best practice, even the minor changes would be followed up by regression testing. This would mean that for each new implementation, the same tests need to be run.

This is one such example of a process where repetition occurs. This is also a classic example of where automation can fit in. Automating tests for cases where there is repetition saves a lot of time for the tester to focus on more complex testing scenarios.

6. The Modern Methodology (DevOps and Agile)

As the name suggests, these technologies support agility and flexibility thus removing role rigidity, lack of accessibility and silos. With increasing complexity of the software being developed and deadlines to follow, testers need to adopt DevOps and Agile to promote the collaborative working environment. This speeds up the testing process and helps get the product out in the market sooner than expected. So, DevOps and Agile need to be among the top few in the most essential software testing skills.

7. Understanding The Code

It is an obsolete belief that only developers need knowledge of programming. In the modern day, even testers need to have basic programming knowledge. This will help understand the working of the application and make it easier to test the same. While testers will not need to code like the developers of the application, but understanding the code will give them an edge while identifying and rectifying errors, thus speeding up the testing process and quality of the final product. It also decreases the possibilities of further bugs and inefficiency.

8. Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC)

System lifecycle management is an essential contributor to testing cycle planning. For a software tester, it is important to have knowledge of SDLC. It will not only give them insights into the application development process but also help anticipate common complexities which might give them a tough time in the testing process.

Some common technologies which are essential to an application lifetime process include Scrum, Lean, and Kanban among many others. These should be a part of the important software testing skills for any professional to be able to perform better.

9. Project Management

Software testing skills are a combination of technical and professional aspects. And to manage both it is extremely important for any individual to be able to take ownership of the project. As a software tester, being able to manage a project means delivering the project after a complete testing. Project management is an important skill not only because it leads to better management and delivery of results but also because it promotes a sense of responsibility.

10. Rational Clarity

A tester is often mistaken as someone who is supposed to only test the product. But, there are times when the developer could have missed out on important information. A software tester is supposed to take charge of such situations and point out the lack of information.

Moreover, one of the most important software testing skills includes honesty and rationality. It is the ability to question complexities of the development process and think critically. Supported by logical evidence, a tester can impose his learnings to improve quality of the product delivered.

11. Awareness Of Latest Web and Mobile Technology Trends

This involves understanding the latest trends that have emerged and have become popular. It will give them an understanding of the process, its scalability, and upcoming challenges.

Technology changes rapidly and it is extremely difficult to keep up with them. Adding to this problem is the lack of a single source of information to update oneself on the technology front. There are several ways you can try to keep up to date with technology.

Check for the top trends that well-known publications and online tech news website publish on a regular basis. Searching for trends in technology on a search engine will give you a good start.
Following people who are industry leaders on social platforms. Platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter allows you to follow leaders in the industry who regularly post the latest things on their feed.
Join Tech Communities. With communities on Reddit, Telegram, etc emerging, find the ones where discussions on latest trends occur and join them. People will share the relevant information which you can choose to learn more about those trends.

12. Planning and Documentation

In the arsenal of software testing skills, planning and documentation form the base of the entire testing phase. A good software tester needs to have a well-defined plan of action for the testing phase based on the requirements and timeframe. This helps to allocate resources accordingly.

Moreover, documentation is a skill which many testers tend to ignore but a well-documented test process helps to get a better analysis. This helps the team simplify future solutions for any bug or error occurrence.

13. Cross Browser Testing Skills

Due to the abundant availability of browsers along with multiple device culture and variations in different screen size for mobile devices, the need for browser compatibility testing is more than ever.

It allows testers to test their application across different browsers running upon various OS for different devices. Cross Browser Testing is pivotal to ensure a smooth running post-launch.

14. Front-end Communication

While a tester is supposed to test the application post-production and prior to the release, it is not completely a backend job or it isn’t supposed to be one. An efficient tester will always be a part of the greater good, the team and take charge when needed.

This implies to all the front-end communication that takes place with the client. Testers need to be clear and concise with their communication. All presentations should be well supported with examples and evidence in addition to being short and to the point. Any queries raised by the client should be taken as a feedback and responded to with well-crafted solutions or explanations. This skill makes the tester an integral part of the team and is a well-noted quality of excellence.

15. Constant Learning Process

Learning is an ever going process and is also an essential contributor to career growth. But, rather than limiting ourselves to a specific industry, technology or environment software testing experts should learn and grow with newer technologies. This promotes adaptability and their ability to switch between different environments if his job demands to.

While there are courses and certifications for every upcoming technology, most of them aren’t related or targetted to testers. Moreover, it will be a very expensive affair. Rather, learning to use new technologies practically is more important. Self-driven learning individuals are the leaders in the industry and go a long way.

16. Synergy and Trust Building

With the advent of DevOps and Agile, the work process has become collaborated with everyone including the developers and testers on the same page. Yet, there are times when issues arise due to lack of communication and understanding between the two entities. A very simple solution is to build trust among each other. This will help the testers get into the mindset of the developer and gain insights which might make the testing process easier.

Team collaboration and team building exercises are necessary but there is a difference between team collaboration and interpersonal skills. An occasional lunch or coffee with the developer can be enough to create a good bond. Not only is this an essential software testing skill for testers but also a leadership quality will help in the longer run.

17. Testing Tools and Technologies

As a tester, one needs to be equipped with ample knowledge about the respective testing tools and technologies present in the market, related to their project needs in order to optimize the testing process. Testing tools are less dependent on industries and domains and more on testing. For a tester, there are ample options for different testing processes such as bug tracking tools, automation tools, GUI testing among others.

Also, cross-browser testing is essential in every domain. It is becoming prominent owing to the numerous platforms available. LambdaTest is only of the leading providers of cross-browser testing tools with hundreds of mobile and web browsers. Such tools with their array of devices help testers to debug and find errors efficiently and all at one place.

Conclusion

A software tester will always have individualistic qualities and will vary from person to person. But, in the modern industries while hiring taskforce, a set of technical and non-technical qualities are looked for. We have discussed some of the most essential yet most common qualities but they aren’t everything. Each tester has their unique perspective which helps them to identify critical problems quickly. This is a characteristic that is developed over time with practice and experience.

Original Source: lambdatest.com

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Overcoming The Challenges Faced In Exploratory Testing

Akshaypai — Wed, 27 Feb 2019 07:59:20 +0000

It is pretty evident from the name ‘Exploratory Testing’, that, it is the continuous process of learning through a cycle of trial and error. Unlike scripted testing, exploratory testing does not have test cases which can be executed and compared with the results. Rather, it is an intelligent way of testing which calls for innovation and individual thought process of the tester. This is also a reason why despite automation being the big word in the modern day, exploratory testing is a hot topic.

But like every other technology, some people from the testing fraternity are getting into this practice without weighing in the key pros and cons. This is not because of the lack of information, but due to the lack of implementation.

Planning to empower your team with the ability to explore their options rather sticking to the usual? Well, let’s have a look at some common challenges in Exploratory testing & how you could overcome them. By the end of this article you will also have an idea of the best practices for exploratory testing.

Understanding And Expectations

This point is valid not only for the tester but also the client. It is very important to understand the qualitative benefits of exploratory testing rather than focusing on the quantity and amount of resource utilization. It is a tester’s responsibility to first themselves understand the significance of the art of exploratory testing and then conveying the same to the client. This poses a major challenge in Exploratory testing.

Clear communication and understanding of the process in layman’s terms are very important to maintain realistic expectations about the scope of work and it’s timelines. Unlike scripted testing, exploratory testing cannot deliver complete test coverage most of the time. And this is one of the most common challenges of exploratory testing which professionals face from clients who are looking to get their testing process automated and innovated at the same time. It is simply impossible.

Thus, a key solution to this problem is an insight into the process and to identify how it is different in terms of execution and deliverables.

Documentation (Lack of it)

We know how regular (scripted) testing works. The team prepares a strategy for the testing process, creates a well-documented plan, sends it to the team to obtain the necessary approvals. This document includes the reference terms, the plan of action the strategy, and the test scripts which are to be used. This helps the team map out the timeline involved while initiating the testing process and also keeps the client posted on the project progress. Well, this is the traditional way of testing. But if we look at the exploratory testing method, one does not have such documentation to leverage and map out the entire flow.

In fact, testers adapting the method often mistake the lack of evidence as an excuse to not document their testing process! This is absolutely wrong and should never be done.

You must be thinking about how this impacts the testing process? Productivity is a major concern for any testing project and without proper documentation and timeline definition, one cannot determine if the work is being done with optimum speed.

Additionally, for a well-defined system being tested, the bug reports generated might be less. For an individual tester, it can become difficult to explain his work progress for the time period in such a case. Now that we know this as a another one of common challenges of exploratory testing let us understand how we can minimize its impact on our working.

1. Logging

Like documentation, logging is extremely important. Going by the thumb rule, “Log as you execute” will make things easier for you as a tester. Moreover, logging in any form helps you create evidence for the efforts that have been put in irrespective of the outcome or delay.

2. Progress Update

Communication is key and when working with exploratory testing it can lack. But keeping the team and the client updated about the latest progress will make it easier to execute the work without undue pressure and also display your effort. Updating the team could be as simple as Sharing the logs with them.

The Oracle Problem

According to Wikipedia, “Determining the correct output for a given input (and a set of program/system states) is known as the oracle problem or test oracle problem” . This is a much harder problem than it seems and involves working with problems related to controllability and observability.

The oracle problem is one of the biggest challenges in exploratory testing. An oracle is basically a mechanism which determines the output of a certain test as either true or false. It operates independent of the system and when the test system oracles cannot be used, human intervention is required.

One of the most common best practices for exploratory testing includes human intervention in the oracle problem which has two approaches. It is either quantitative or qualitative. These inputs are supplied by the tester.

A quantitative approach focuses on looking for the right quantity of information which suffices the test results. This information is sufficient for the client to be able to take a call on the release of the software.

Similarly, a qualitative approach will make use of suitable input data with respect to the output from the test system. Usually, these values include realistic data to make sense of the results. A common example is a statistical oracle such as image analysis. In this, the range of certainty is defined and it is an example of a human oracle.

Negative Testing

When we talk about testing, a common misconception about a tester is that testing is intended to ‘identify’ bugs document their behaviours well. But as a tester, it is important to understand that creativity and innovation are essential to a well-designed product, even the testing phase. A tester looks for the broken pieces of the software and works on it. But that particular feature might work just fine for the developer. What do we do then?

Well, an intelligent tester is the one who steps into their user’s shoes and tries using the application. This is when best practices of exploratory testing come into play as it helps the tester find the hidden overlooked bugs and errors. A simple example is leaving a field, which might be important to the client blank or enters an invalid piece of information. These incidents are called edge cases and a software can have multiple edge cases to be reported. The tester is responsible for coming up with as many scenarios as possible.

Timing The Execution

Another common issue while ensuring best practices in exploratory testing is not knowing when to adapt to exploratory testing. In fact, when it comes to exploratory testing it is more important to know when to run it than how to. This is also important because of the lack of test cases.

Exploratory testing is considered more informal than scripted testing thus making it unfit for auditing purposes. This is why not knowing how to time it can have a negative impact on the entire working.

A regulatory approval is only available based on concrete research and result which is something one cannot obtain with this method. Thus, test cases prepared post exploration is considered a validation. But now that we know it’s effect how do we make sure timing doesn’t create challenges for exploratory testing? Well, let’s have a look.

Being informal in nature, exploratory testing is perfect for prompt action. This means it should be used to find out bugs in the program. Once fixed, it can be used to verify the implementation. But when it comes to larger coverage the tester should not use this method. Once finished, a scripted testing process should be run to ensure entire coverage and verify the bug fixes.

Exploratory Testing Best Practices

1. Organize Your Test Cycle With Enough Time Window

Exploratory testing involves venturing into the unknown and trying to find faults that might get missed by scripts and other traditional forms of testing. The benefits that we get is that critical bugs can be caught through this method. However, there is a downside to it and that is the time the testers need to perform several rounds of exploratory testing.

It is very important that the project owners provide the required freedom in terms of time and implementation strategy to the testers. The freedom ensures a thorough check on the application and a higher possibility of critical bugs to be discovered.

2. Add Checkpoints Early on in the Testing Process

Exploratory Testing is a time-consuming process and this might often lead to long spells of no information regarding the testing progress. To avoid multiple teams from waiting on the entire testing process to complete, it is highly recommended that certain checkpoints be set by the testers.

These checkpoints serve two purposes. First is that the other teams like management or developers are aware of when the next communication is going to take place and the testers will have a rough path that will help them to track their process.

It is essential to note that these checkpoints need not be exact and set expectations on the outcomes. They can be rough time estimates and the area of focus in the project.

3. Record The Entire Process with Great Detail

As it is with any kind of exploration, there will not be a fixed path that can be traversed while testing an application. This would make testing an open-ended problem with countless paths to identify bugs and vulnerabilities within the system.

Recording the details will not only ensure that the tester will not repeat the same process again, but it will also help testers and developers in the future to understand what was performed and what the outcome was.

4. Aim To Be A User When Performing Exploratory Testing

Real users of the application don’t usually have a supervised guidance or a manual that gives the best way to use an application. Based on the users’ intuition and experience using other similar applications, they might use the same feature of an application in multiple ways.

Testers are usually equipped with scripts and other automation tools to test the applications. When performing exploratory testing, it’s imperative to not use these automation tools and rather think like a user and try to use the application in ways that the end-users might use them.

5. Define The Scope Of Exploratory Testing With Precision

Unlike the traditional testing methods, the aim of exploratory testing isn’t to test the entire application. Sometimes, the testing is performed to address a specific need. The specific need can be to identify security threats to critical modules of an application or to discover the points of failure in a new module that has been added to the UI.

So, before the exploratory testing begins, define which specific area of the application is being tested.

6. Prioritize And Classify Your Bugs

The bugs encountered while performing Exploratory testing should be appropriately prioritized and classified. Every organization has a process where they classify the most frequently encountered bugs. This classification could be on the basis of various functionality offered by the application. This classification would help with RCA(Root Cause Analysis) later on.

Prioritization is another factor that is critical from a bug management point of view. You can prioritize your bugs depending upon the severity of damage they cause upon the application’s functionality. Is it a minor bug specific to a single web page or Is it a major one that could affect the functionality of related web pages too? Naming conventions for prioritization also vary from one organization to another.

7. Prepare an informative bug report

Bug reporting is an art and one that needs to be performed with caution and concentration. Make sure you provide a unique yet relevant title to the bug for easy identification. It is always recommended as a best practice to provide the steps to reproduce. As a tester you perform a lot of tests in a day, without proper steps to reproduce, there is no guarantee that you can recollect the procedure to reproduce by just looking at the title of the bug. These steps would also ease the time and effort of your developer team. Here is an advanced guide on writing a bug report.

Conclusion

Exploratory testing has its own set of challenges, some of which we discussed above. Yet, it is a revolutionary method of testing which ensures a well-tested and well thought of product leaving a very little scope for common error apart from technical errors which can be taken care of by automation. Thus, it will be ideal to say that despite its challenges, exploratory testing is very important to the testing process. Feel free to share about your experience with exploratory testing in the comment section below. If you have got some questions for us then we will be happy to answer them. Happy testing!

Original Source: lambdatest.com

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Design Patterns For Micro Service Architecture

Akshaypai — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 07:11:08 +0000

Imagine breaking down a single function unit into multiple mini-service units. That is exactly what microservices do to the traditional monolithic architecture. But, there is more to it than meets the eye. Microservices are the go-to solution for all the major software development projects.

But even though it serves a major purpose, there are certain challenges across the way which need to be addressed. And as one design a microservice architecture along the way, one learns several microservice design patterns which can not only improve the performance but also ease the life of the developer. But before we delve deeper into the architecture design patterns, let’s have an abstract recap on the basic fundamental to a successful microservice architecture.

Principles Used To Design Microservice Architecture

High cohesion along with loose coupling.
Seamless API Integration.
A unique source of Identification for every service.
Real-Time Traffic Management
Minimizing data tables to optimize load.
Performing constant monitoring over external and internal APIs.
Isolated data storage for each microservice- This is very important to maintain limited access to data and avoid ‘service coupling’. Classification of data based on the users is important and can be achieved through the Command and Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS).
Decentralization – The first and foremost principle to design microservice architecture is the ability to break down the monolithic architecture into separate individual entities. These entities are known as microservices. These microservices work independent of the other system functions and all users to edit, delete or employ any functionality without affecting the system performance.
Scalability – Microservices are built with an aim in mind: Performance and efficiency. In real-world problem solving, expansion and large-scale systems are crucial to the performance of any microservice ecosystem. Scalability is crucial to design microservice architecture. With the possibility of multiple fragments functioning on multiple technologies, working with larger amounts of data can be a challenge. But, proper implementation and use of Application Controllers can make scalability with microservice architecture possible.
Continuous delivery through DevOps Integration – Those working in DevOps often receive microservice architecture well because of the ease of accessibility and integration of multiple technologies. To design microservice architecture one needs to focus on increasing performance and efficiency of the system. This motivates DevOps to deliver solutions faster. It also offers certain advantages over a traditional monolithic design such as ease of deployability, reliable solutions, scalability, and management. Hence, it forms a major part of the basic principles of design.

But with these principles in mind, there are certain challenges that one needs to overcome to achieve a successful structure of microservice architecture. These hurdles might look tough but with a set of microservice design patterns and their right implementation, achieving the same is possible. Let’s have a look at some of these Microservice design patterns.

Microservice Design Patterns for Effective Collaboration

With so many microservices running simultaneously, collaboration comes as a necessity for running an efficient microservice architecture. Today we will look at the collaboration patterns for designing a microservice.

1. Aggregator Microservice Design Pattern

With multiple services involved, fetching the output and combining it for the end-user is necessary. For a user to combine the data, will require immense internal knowledge of the system. As we design microservice architecture, breaking down the monolith means the division of the sources of output. Hence, to aggregate this data we make use of the aggregator pattern.

The solution can be forwarded to the end-user through two major components. The first one is a composite microservice followed by API gateways. Either of them will aggregate the data and forward it to the user. But, in case business capabilities are used in decomposing the system, composite microservice should be preferred.

2. Branch Microservice Design Pattern

They basically extend Aggregator design patterns. In branch microservice you can simultaneously process the request and response from 2 independent or to be precise 2 mutually exclusive chains of microservices.

This design pattern also offers flexibility to summon separate multiple chains or even a single chain in accordance to your business needs. In case of an eCommerce website or web application we may need to retrieve data from multiple sources belonging to different microservices. This is where Branch Microservice Design Pattern plays an effective role.

3. Backend for Front-End/ API Gateway

Fetching data from every running service is imperative for any application. With the microservice architecture, it is very important to extract the data from individual services. But, fetching user-owned resources from the variety of microservices presented from a single UI can be very tricky. After all, the User Interface captures a lot of information of the end user. API gateway serves as a helpline by generating a single entry point for all interactions that takes place within the architecture. API gateway also helps to establish security by client authorization and exposing relevant APIs with respect to the client. What do we do now?

An API gateway, being a single source of contact can not only act as a proxy server to route requests to microservices but also aggregate results from multiple services and send the output to the user. It can handle multiple protocol requests and convert whenever required. (eg. HTTPS to AMQP and vice versa)

Microservice Design Patterns for Performance Monitoring

Monitoring the performance is an important aspect for a successful microservice architecture. It helps calculate the efficiency and understand any drawbacks which might be slowing the system down. Remember the following patterns related to observability for ensuring a robust microservice architecture design.

1. Log Aggregation

When we refer to a microservice architecture we are referring to a refined yet granular architecture where an application is consisting a number of microservices. These microservices run independently and simultaneously as supporting multiple services as well as their instances across various machines. Every service generates an entry in the logs regarding its execution. How can you keep a track for numerous service related logs? This is where log aggregation steps in. As a best practice to prevent from chaos, you should be having a master logging service. This master logging service should be responsible for aggregating the logs from all the microservice instances. This centralized log should be searchable, making it easier to monitor.

2. Synthetic Monitoring a.k.a Semantic Monitoring

As I explained previously, monitoring is a painful but indispensable task for a successful microservice architecture. With simultaneous execution of hundreds of services it becomes troublesome to pinpoint the root area responsible for the failure in log registry. Synthetic monitoring gives a helping hand. When you perform automated test then synthetic monitoring helps to regularly map the results in comparison to the production environment. User gets alerted if a failure is generated. Using Semantic Monitoring you can aim for 2 things using a single arrow

Monitoring automated test cases.
Detecting Production failures in terms of business requirements.

3. API Health Check

Microservice architecture design promotes services which are independent of each other to avoid any delay in the system. APIs as we know serve as the building blocks of an online connectivity. It is imperative to keep a health check on your APIs on regular basis to realize any roadblock. It is often observed that a microservice is up and running yet incapacitated for handling requests. This can be due to many factors:

Server Loads
User Adoption
Latency
Error Logging
Market Share
Downloads

In order to overcome this scenario we should ensure that every service running must have a specific health check API endpoint. For example: HTTP/health when appended at the end of every service will return the health status for respective service instance. A service registry periodically appeals to the health check API endpoint to perform a health scan. The health check would provide you with the information on the below-mentioned:

A logic that is specific to your application.
Status of the host.
Status of the connections to other infrastructure or connection to any service instance.

Breaking it all down to Business Capability

The process of ‘decomposing’ a monolithic architecture into a microservice needs to follow certain parameters. These parameters have a different basis. Today we will look at the decomposition of the microservice design patterns which leave a lasting impact.

1. Unique Microservice for each Business Capability

A microservice is as successful as its combination of high cohesion and loose coupling. Services need to be loosely coupled while keeping the function of similar interests together. But how do we do it? How do we decompose a software system into smaller independent logical units?
We do so by defining the scope of a microservice to support a specific business capability.

For Example –
In every organization, there are different departments that come together as one. These include technical, marketing, PR, sales, service, and maintenance. To picture a microservice structure these different domains would each be the microservices and the organization will be the system.
So an Inventory management is responsible for all the inventories. Similarly, Shipping management will handle all the shipments and so on.

To maintain efficiency and foresee growth, the best solution is to decompose the systems using business capability. This includes classification into various business domains which are responsible to generate value in their own capabilities.

2. Microservices around similar Business Capability

Despite segregating on the basis of business capabilities, microservices often come up with a greater challenge. What about the common classes among the services? Well, decomposing these classes known as ‘God Classes’ needs intervention. For example, in case of an e-commerce system, the order will be common to several services such as order number, order management, order return, order delivery etc. To solve this issue, we turn to a common microservice design principle known as Domain-Driven Design (DDD).

In Domain-Driven Design, we use subdomains. These subdomain models have defined scope of functionality which is known as bounded context. This bounded context is the parameter used to create each microservice thus overcoming the issues of common classes.

3. Strangler Vine Pattern

While we discuss decomposition of a monolithic architecture, we often miss out the struggle of converting a monolithic system to design microservice architecture. Without hampering the working, converting can be extremely tough. And to solve this problem we have the strangler pattern, based on the vine analogy. Here is what the Strangler patterns mean in Martin Fowler’s words:

“One of the natural wonders of this area [Australia] is the huge strangler vines. They seed in the upper branches of a fig tree and gradually work their way down the tree until they root in the soil. Over many years they grow into fantastic and beautiful shapes, meanwhile strangling and killing the tree that was their host.”

Strangler pattern is extremely helpful in case of a web application where breaking down a service into different domains is possible. Since the calls go back and forth, different services live on different domains. So, these two domains exist on the same URI. Once the service has been reformed, it ‘strangles’ the existing version of the application. This process is followed until the monolith doesn’t exist.

Microservice Design Patterns for Optimizing Database Storage

For a microservice architecture, loose coupling is a basic principle. This enables deployment and scalability of independent services. Multiple services might need to access data not stored in their unit. But due to loose coupling, accessing this data can be a challenge. Mainly because different services have different storage requirements and access to data is limited in microservice design. So, we look at some major database design patterns as per different requirements.

1. Individual Database per Service

Usually applied in Domain Driven Designs, one database per service articulates the entire database to a specific microservice. Due to the challenges and lack of accessibility, a single database per service needs to be designed. This data is accessible only by the microservice. This database has limited access for any outside microservices. The only way for others to access this data is through microservice API gateways.

2. Shared Database per Service

In Domain Driven Design, a separate database per service is feasible, but in an approach where you decompose a monolithic architecture to microservice, using a single database can be tough. So while the process of decomposition goes on, implementing a shared database for a limited number of service is advisable. This number should be limited to 2 or 3 services. This number should stay low to allow deployment, autonomy, and scalability.

3. Event Sourcing Design Pattern

According to Martin Fowler

“Event Sourcing ensures that all changes to application state are stored as a sequence of events. Not just can we query these events, we can also use the event log to reconstruct past states, and as a foundation to automatically adjust the state to cope with retroactive changes.

The problem here lies with reliability. How can you rely on the architecture to make a change or publish a real-time event with respect to the changes in state of the application?
Event sourcing helps to come up from this situation by appending a new event to the list of the events every time a business entity changes its state. Entities like Customer may consist of numerous events. It is thus advised that an application saves a screenshot of the current state of an entity in order to optimize the load.

3. Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS)

In a database-per-service model, the query cannot be implemented because of the limited access to only one database. For a query, the requirements are based on joint database systems. But how do we query then?

Based on the CQRS, to query single databases per service model, the application should be divided into two parts: Command and Query. In this model, command handles all requests related to create, update and delete while queries are taken care of through a materialized view. These views are updated through a stream of events. These events, in turn, are created using an event sourcing pattern which marks any changes in the data. These changes eventually become events.

Microservice Design Patterns for Seamless Deployment

When we implement microservices, there are certain issues which come up during the call of these services. When you design microservice architecture, certain cross-cutting patterns can simplify the working.

1. Service Discovery

The use of containers leads to dynamic allocation of the IP address. This means the address can change at any moment. This causes a service break. In addition to this, the users have to bear the load of remembering every URL for the services, which become tightly coupled.

To solve this problem and give users the location of the request, a registry needs to be used. While initiation, a service instance can register in the registry and de-register while closing. This enables the user to find out the exact location which can be queried. In addition, a health check by the registry will ensure the availability of only working instances. This also improves the system performance.

2. Blue-Green Deployment

In a microservice design pattern, there are multiple microservices. Whenever updates are to be implemented or newer versions deployed, one has to shut down all the services. This leads to a huge downtime thus affecting productivity. To avoid this issue, when you design microservice architecture, you should use the blue-green deployment pattern.

In this pattern, two identical environments run parallelly, known as blue and green. At a time only one of them is live and processing all the production traffic. For example, blue is live and addressing all the traffic. In case of new deployment, one uploads the latest version onto the green environment, switches the router to the same and thus implement the update.

Microservice Design Patterns for Performance Monitoring

Monitoring the performance is an important aspect for a successful microservice architecture. It helps calculate the efficiency and understand any drawbacks which might be slowing the system down. Remember the following patterns related to performance monitoring for ensuring a robust microservice architecture design.

1. Log Aggregation

2. Synthetic Monitoring a.k.a Semantic Monitoring

With the increase in load and microservices, it becomes important to keep a constant check on system performance. This includes any patterns which might be formed or addressing issues that come across. But more importantly, how is the data collected?

The answer lies with the use of a metric service. This metrics service is either in the Push form or the Pull form. As the name suggests, a Push service such as AppDynamics pushes the metrics to the service while a Pull service such as Prometheus pulls the data from the service.

3. Running a Health Check

Microservice architecture design promotes services which are independent of each other to avoid any delay in the system. But, there are times when the system is up and running but it fails to handle transactions due to faulty services. To avoid requests to these faulty services, a load balancing pattern has to be implemented.

To achieve this, we use ‘/health’ at the end of every service. This check is used to find out the health of the service. It includes the status of the host, its connection and the algorithmic logic.

Conclusion

Though not all the design patterns might apply to a given microservice, you can rest assured that most of them will be used everywhere. These design patterns help developers to bring in a standard that is consistent and brings in reliability to the application as a whole.

The evaluation, auditing, and implementation and testing microservices of these design patterns are an ongoing process of microservice architecture. Right from the designing phase of the application to the maintenance phase in production, these patterns will help throughout.

Original Soruce: lambdatest.com

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Top 19 Trends Of Web Design For 2019

Akshaypai — Thu, 21 Feb 2019 15:52:52 +0000

2019 is around the corner with the new year bells having almost started to ring in. With every new year, new trends appear in different walks of our life, especially technology, where evolution always seems to be on the go.

With most of the business operations shifting gear to online mode, web design has become an essential part of the business. Since the websites have slowly become the face value of the businesses’ online operations, there have been emerging trends to let them have the edge in the market.

Let’s see how 2019 is going to unfold and bring in the new trends of web design to the behest of your business:

1. Personalized UX

User Experience (UX) is the key to a large customer base. With the abundance of latest technology around, the modern day user has raised the bar of their expectations. Now wooing them with a generic UX is not the case anymore. That is why businesses hire UX experts to understand and cater to what their end user requires and expects out of their products or services.

With Artificial Intelligence into the picture, User Experience has redefined itself with personalization. Now, using Artificial Intelligence, the key is to make every user a privileged customer by offering them personalized UX.

Emerging Artificial Intelligence has made a Personalized UX a key trend of 2019, which shall help the businesses in customer relationship management and retention of their active client base.

2. Content-Centered UX

As they rightly say Content is the King, with a more technology-aware modern day user, the UX is largely driven by the content. Gone are the days when UX and content worked differently. To provide the user with the right kind of desired experience, the influx of Content and UX is very important.

This has led to the content centered UX, where a UX has more to do with what content is the website catering to the end user.

With more complex requirements, websites are much more than just the visual appeal or operations and have emerged largely as influencers which in a way or other affect the lives of the end user.

Content when teamed up the UX would be able to bring in the right momentum required for the web design. Thereby, making this powerful collaboration an emerging web design trend for 2019.

3. Minimalism And Bold Typography Designs

Minimalistic, clean and edgy websites are largely preferred by the end users these days, due to the ability to focus on the most important thing, rather than getting distracted in insignificant clutter.

With a lot of information already been present everywhere around, the modern day user seeks a clean and to the point information, instead of beating around the bush every time.

While the websites which are stacked with a lot of elements, not just distract the user from reaching the desired information but has also been successful in putting them off. Because looking for what they exactly want would be a task in a website packed with elements, and this would be the main reason in putting them off.

On the other hand, a minimal, clean and edgy website with bold typography, helps the user to reach out to the required information very quickly with putting in deliberate efforts. In this way using the negative space to the behest of the website’s design aesthetics with minimalism.

Here’s a clean and edgy minimalist page from the LambdaTest website, which gives clear information without creating a chaos.

4. Augmented Reality (AR)

Augmented Reality, commonly known as AR, is the modification of real-world environment with augmenting of real-world objects using computer-generated perpetual information. This involves modifying multiple sensory modes such as visual, auditory, haptic etc.

AR helps the user to visualize and feel the creativity of imagination seamlessly. This would enhance the end users’ experience by many folds, enabling them with the power of imagination.

This would be helpful for the businesses which specifically involves imagination and creativity, by enabling them in manifesting their designs and imagination, to the end user seamlessly through their website.

Augmented Reality (AR) is the technology to bridge the gap between creativity and reality.

5. GIFs

Graphics Interchange Format gives an interactive User Interface (UI) to the website, making it lot more attractive for the end user. With the end user using GIFs and emojis in their day to day life, making them a part of the website to explain small step procedures is a good idea for web design.

In a similar case, LambdaTest has used the following GIF in their homepage to illustrate a small multiple step procedure of how LambdaTest performs real-time testing of a given URL.

Due to its ability to engage the user and build up interaction, GIF is one of the coolest trends of Web design in 2019.

6. CSS3 Animations

CSS3 has brought in some cool animations such as rise and decline using rotation, time delay, iterations, motion in given direction etc. These CSS3 animations could make your website look way cooler giving it a futuristic tech-savvy and sci-fi feel.

Such visuals not only attract the user but also gives an edgy modern look to the website. With a more tech-savvy end user, designing a website with such a modern visual appeal makes the website class apart.

If you are looking forward to making a website with a futuristic look to engage your end users, then CSS3 animations is a trend in 2019 you must look up to.

7. Sticky Elements

Sticky Elements remain on the page as it is even upon scrolling. This enables the user to see the vital information all the time within the reach even upon scrolling through different parts of the page.

This helps the user especially when the Navigation bar is a sticky element, helping the user to Navigate at any point of time without scrolling back to the top of the page.

Websites such as LambdaTest already use Sticky Elements for their navigation bar keeping the options at the end user’s proximity.

Undoubtedly, Sticky elements will enable the end user with a seamless and better User Experience bringing options at ease.

8. Chatbots

Chatbots has enabled the user to get an instant assistance from the team, enhancing the User Experience making it seamless. With chatbots in your website, your end user can instantly connect with your team.

Chatbots have been very useful in providing support to existing clients at the same time onboarding new clients and dealing with the queries effectively.

Websites like Product Hunt and LambdaTest have been using chatbots to assist their customers over live chat enhancing the end user’s experience by many folds.

This customer amazement and user friendliness have made chatbots an indispensable part of web designs, specially for SaaS companies.

9. Progress Spectrum

A Progress spectrum shows the progress in the procedure. This helps the user to understand how much of the procedure is yet to be done, giving them an estimate of the required time to complete the process.

Often, used in the e-commerce websites where a multi-step process has to be followed, progress spectrum, guides the user and lets them know where how far they have reached in the process.

It also gives the user a visual status of the procedure they are following, enhancing the end user’s experience by giving clarity on the progression.

For a website in which the end user is entitled to follow a multi-step procedure, progress spectrum is a must-keep element.

10. Asymmetrical Layout

Gone are the days when the Symmetrical layout was considered a highly followed trend in web design. Asymmetrical Layout or a Broken grid, is a web design trend which is a must follow in 2019.

While the grid brings in a more clear and edgy look, asymmetrical layout or broken grid successfully attracts the user and gets their attention.

Due to a higher engagement by standing out, an asymmetrical layout is a definitely to be followed web design trend in 2019, making your website way cool.

11. Single Page Design

With users being busy having very less time to spend browsing the website, a concise single page design is an effective way to say it all. The biggest advantage of a single page design is that it is quick to load, enhancing the user experience by many folds.

At the same time, its brevity helps in getting the desired attention from the user, making it an effective and impactful web design featuring in the top trends to be followed in 2019.

12. Micro Animations

Users love animations! Illustrating via micro animations, not only makes your website look cool but also makes it very user friendly, giving it an edge above the monotonous websites.

This visual treat would help the users to understand the content easily and retain it for a longer time in their memory. Thereby, helping the users to make a brand image of your website in their mind.

At the same time, it helps the user by assisting them, enhancing the overall user experience. Micro animations, instead of using lengthy and stringent texts is one of the top trends of an efficient web design in 2019.

13. Card Layout

Using card layout to describe multiple elements on a page is an efficient way to depict content on a website. It gives the user a wide overview of the elements along with the option to go and expand each one of them to learn more about the elements.

Card layout is an effective way to concisely give a wider perspective of the information at one page, keeping the entire information on the user’s’ fingertips. Thereby making it convenient for the user to browse a lot of information in lesser time.

LambdaTest uses Card Layout to let their users know the fleet of options for integrations that LambdaTest offers to them.

This user friendliness makes Card layout a top trend of web design which should be followed in 2019.

14. Drop Shadows And Depth

Drop shadows and depth to the different elements on a webpage, help the user to instantly focus on it. This has been successful in seeking users’ attention by laying emphasis on the required element or block.

It also provides an edge to the design making it more visually appealing for the end user.

Here’s how LambdaTest uses Drop Shadows and depth for their pricing page to highlight their most popular plan.

Due to this emphasis and visual appeal, giving the user an enhanced User interface, drop shadow and depth has been one of the top 19 trends of web design in 2019.

15. Vibrant Saturated Color Schemes

Vibrant saturated color schemes effortlessly are capable of seeking user’s attention, with a high-end visual appeal. This not only enhances the aesthetics and the visual appeal of the website but also improves the User Interface, letting a better rate of user interaction.

A website in bright hues of vibrant saturated colors would be able to attract more users.

16. Custom Illustrations

Having custom illustrations in your website helps in building up a brand identity which is familiar to the user. By getting custom illustrations, you can let your website stand out among the other competitors in the market with its unique brand identity.

This is how slack uses its custom illustration on their website to make their unique brand identity.

If you are looking for a unique brand identity for your website, then ditch those generic stock images and use custom illustrations.

17. 2D Illustrations

Use 2D illustrations in your website to convey your content in a much effective manner by creating a visual impact on the end user. A 2D illustration is not only a visual treat to your end user but also helps them to retain the information for a longer time, by making it easily understandable.

LambdaTest uses 2D illustrations in different sections of its website to create a better impact on the end user.

Thus, for a visually more appealing website following the 2019 web design trend of 2D illustrations is very beneficial.

18. Colorful White

Keep your web design colorful white to give it a clean and edgy look. This makes the information on the website more legible and understandable for the end user, enhancing the user experience by many folds.

Colorful white websites such as Asana, LambdaTest, Slack, and Intercom, helps the user to easily grasp the information and details on the website and retain it for a longer term in visual memory. This makes colorful white one of the top trends of web design in 2019.

19. Responsive Design

Gone are the days when separate mobile versions of websites were designed. With a Responsive design of your website, your end user can have a seamless experience of the website on different devices without any misalignments. This design helps a website to render the content in a flexible yet appropriate manner on the basis of the devices & OS on which it gets summoned.

Moving ahead with time, a responsive design offers your tech-savvy end user with the flexibility to access the website on different devices with varied screen resolutions. Thus, responsive design is a must follow web design trend in 2019 if you are looking forward to providing a flexible and seamless user experience.

LambdaTest provides you a platform where you could test your RWD(Responsive Web Design) over 44 different devices in a single go!

With these top 19 trends of web design, you can level up your website by enhancing the user experience and visual aesthetics of your website by multiple folds. As a result, it would be helpful in giving a boost to your business with a higher level of customer satisfaction and better brand image in the market. Let us know which web design you like the most in the comment section below. Also drop suggestions if you feel your favourite trend is missing.

Original Source: lambdatest.com

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