Forem: Saif Sadiq

20 Design Inspirations for SaaS Companies

Saif Sadiq — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 16:22:44 +0000

Are you planning to convert your idea into a live Software-as-a-Service product?

The quickest hack to build a live web design fast is to follow app design trends already set up by hugely popular SaaS companies. So before you kick-start the designing and development phase of your web app, check out some of the best SaaS design inspiration that has already helped companies succeed. But where to find those inspirations??

Don’t worry. We are here to help 🙂

Why Great Design?

A great user interface can make or break your Software-as-a-Service business. A great interface resonates with the users and complements their work, increasing their productivity, and of course, improves retention and stickiness.

Visitor starts evaluating a SaaS company at its website.You can’t deny that when an anonymous user visits your B2B site, first impressions always matter!

We here at LambdaTest as well did research on most popular SaaS product websites and found many interested design hacks. And here we compiled the list of top SaaS companies whose design pattern are most inspiring to me and I hope it will inspire you all.

We also worked on Top 10 Web Design Trends To Follow In 2018 which will help you in designing your web app more user-friendly.

LambdaTest

LambdaTest is great example of expressive visual hierarchy with clear functionality of every element. Interactive user interface and great user experience.

2. Drift

Drift is a good example of minimalistic design with big amount of spare space and flat illustration which makes it more interactive and user friendly.

3. Slack

Slack delivers seamless user experience supporting the general stylistic concept across all platforms.

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4. Litmus

Litmus is a nice blend of minimalism and modern design. The More of Less,Joshua Becker said:You don’t need more space.You need less stuff.

5. MailChimp

MailChimp combines vast amounts of data with empathetic design to make useful products. The design is minimalistic and uncluttered bringing aesthetic satisfaction as one of the factors of desirability in UX. Perfect design inspiration for productivity oriented SaaS companies

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6. Flow

Flow is a combination of harmonic layout and placement of the elements with high level of flexibility.

7. Canva

Canva have excellent navigation and functionality of every element is very clear.

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8. Asana

Expressive visual hierarchy is key design of Asana.

9. Box

Great use of isometric images and motion graphics. If you are a B2C SaaS company, this is a great design inspiration for you.

10. Atlassian

Interactive design that communicates the features visually.

Do you know? Minifying JavaScript code is the process of removing unnecessary characters, including white spaces, comments, and semicolons from the code without changing its functionality.

11. Freshdesk

Isometric illustration used in the homepage banner is both informative as well as visually appealing.

12. G Suite

GSuite have high attention ratio to core details.

13. Typeform

Typography as a significant design element in Typeform.

14. Kissmetrics

Kissmetrics have sophistication and contrast in illustration and fonts choice. It’s UI is a product of data oriented customer analysis. Great design inspiration for analytics oriented SaaS companies.

15. Heroku

Heroku have high attention to proportions and composition.

16. Mixpanel

Its very difficult to pull off gradient gracefully, and Mixpanel has nailed it. They have superbly used isometric graphics with gradients.

17. Plan

Plan gets the spotlight for coming up with a sophisticated, colorful-white theme and custom illustrations. They also represent a GIF on their landing page representing interactive view for engaging the visitors.

Check this out: Regression test: Complete Guide With Best Practices

18. Marvel

Marvel is a design app. And their design skills shows in Marvel product. Notice the subtle animation of dots in the banner fold.

19. Hellosign

The website is a perfect design inspiration for those niche SaaS products that require a lot of text. The site is loaded with content yet its elegant.

20. Jaco

Jaco has everything going right. It has awesome animated illustrations, great font, and clean white theme.

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Top Tips For Better Cross Browser Testing

Saif Sadiq — Wed, 01 Feb 2023 12:07:34 +0000

Web developers usually are biased towards a browser. They can debate for hours why the latest version of their favorite browser is the best one for all web development projects.

Many times, they work in their favorite browser assuming that the code they have developed will run on other browsers too.
But what about the other browsers that they don’t have in their system? Will the code they developed work for all browsers as well?

Here, Cross browser compatibility testing comes into action. As we know that browsers, operating systems, and devices are evolving every single day so it is good to add cross-browser testing as part of the daily activity to ensure the best possible end-user experience.

At the same time staying up to date with all of them and making sure that your web applications are working as intended without any discrepancy and compromises in quality is critical to touch the sky in this Internet world. You can read more about what is cross-browser testing and why we need it here.

I have done nuanced analysis and came up with few tips to keep in mind while performing cross-browser testing.

Target browser-OS configurations

Finding browsers on which you want to test your web application is the first and foremost thing to take care of before starting web app testing. Each browser has many versions and some browser like Chrome and Firefox update frequently like at least once a month.
Most tech companies support recent versions of browsers but we can not leave the user base who are still using old versions of Internet Explorer. This will curb us to a couple of versions of various browsers to test.

An alternative way to discover browser, browser versions and OS configurations with different screen resolution is data sampling. When our website is live publically, we use different tools like Google analytics or Splunk to track the user data. We learn about user browser, browser version, mobile device and operating system usage and list out most used configuration to focus more on testing.

You can also read this article to get tips for choosing the right Browser List for Cross Browser Testing.

Make list of browsers as per user taste

Monitoring your user browser usage is most efficient and pivot element for achieving best cross-browser testing experience for your company. You can extract report for user browser and device consumption, and prioritize them according to user base strength. Create a list of browser-OS configuration with different parameters like priority, usage%, availability etc before hopping into cross-browser testing of your web app.

Check this out: Test on Safari Browser Online with Real Mac Machines

Use Smart Tech Ways

Don’t assume anything before starting browser compatibility testing. Different browsers behave in a disparate manner for various browser elements. Let’s take one example: a data picker browser property will open and work perfectly on Chrome, but renders differently and have a bug in the month navigator on FireFox.

Have look this checklist for cross browser testing before going live publically.

Emulators and Virtual machines

Testing websites across old and new browser-OS combinations are necessary for cross browser compatibility. We can use emulators or virtual machines for testing, both have its own benefits.

Many cloud-based tools available which provide a different set of emulators of various configurations can replicate the exact look and feel of the website on all the browser versions.
You can test your web apps on these emulators with very small effort and negligible budget.

Alternatively, Virtual Machines are more authentic as they are framed to use specific browser versions. This will give us the idea of how the site will look to niche users.

WebDriver is a remote programming interface that can be used to control, or drive, a browser either locally or on a remote machine. Learn more in this complete Selenium WebDriver Tutorial.

Mobile first world

We have seen an exponential growth in mobile uses in the last 20 years. It increases from 318 million in 1998 to 7740 million in 2018. Mobile users are extensively conquering the internet world. Considering this, every mobile first IT companies very much careful for mobile user experience across different mobile devices. For them, cross-device testing is always on highest priority.

Daily new mobile devices are launching with different screen sizes and viewports, synching with them and setting up in-house infrastructure for testing is not an efficient way. Understanding these problems, many companies provides a cloud-based online platform where you can launch a mobile device of the desired configuration and test your website and web application with ease.

You can also use google chrome to responsive testing across different mobile and tablet devices with different screen sizes and viewports.

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Don’t underestimate tablets

Tablet devices cover approx 4% internet market share (Source: statcounter.com) worldwide which wide range of user base. 8% of people in the United States use tablet devices to achieve their internet need. Checking your website across different tablet devices with different screen sizes and resolutions is significant for great user experience

Automate the Testing

All set with user browser-OS usage? The first question comes to my mind is how to test the website on all configurations?
Browser-OS combinations count more than 2000 and performing testing manually on each configuration is very painful and repetitive task.

Automation web app testing act as an aid to this problem. It is very easy to perform and it saves a lot of time. With automation testing, you can your testing script and test your website across different browser and OS combinations. There are many online automation testing tools are available which offers browsers, OSes and mobile devices

Test before going live

It is the best practice to perform cross-browser testing before going live publically. Always perform testing of your web application when it is hosted on your local server. This is very helpful for keeping good user experience of your website. This saves you from unexpected blunders when you make your website live.

Take care of accessibility too

Have your website accessible to everyone? This is a very interesting thing to discuss, a different type of people can be your user. It can be a man who is not able to listen, a boy not able to see or a person with color blindness, people using screen readers to access your text, or people having some motor impairments who use nonmouse methods like keyboards and shortcuts to use the web. It becomes necessary to make your website accessible to everyone. So, making sure that your website is accessible to every user is ‘Accessibility Testing’

Use appropriate tool for testing

To perform testing, one must use best tool for that. However, finding that out is a tough decision. But there are many testing platforms available in the market, selecting one for your business is a crucial decision. It also depends on your requirements.
You can read out more about the top cross browser compatibility testing tool here.

Cross browser and cross platform compatibility testing of websites is becoming a principal factor for great user experience and satisfaction. For this era of cut edge technologies, user experience is what helps internet business fly.

Hope these tips might be helpful for you while going for cross browser testing.

Do you have any tips that we missed out? We would love to add them to our list ! Let us know in the comments below.

Till then Happy Testing!!

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How Do Software Engineers Choose Which Front End Framework To Use

Saif Sadiq — Wed, 01 Feb 2023 07:15:00 +0000

The choice of the technology used for your web project will directly influence your business goals. Hence, choosing the right framework is important. You cannot employ just any stack and expect favorable results. It requires deep analysis of the user requirements and expectations. With the advent of technology, a lot of tech stacks are available for the developers to choose from. Ranging from open source to paid technologies, the options are overwhelming and at times, confuse the developers.

Here, we bring you some of the exclusive questions every developer tends to find answers to before starting with any software project. The answers to these questions will solve all the queries you have regarding the choice of a framework for your application.

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How Complex Is The Project?

Selecting the right technology stack for your web application depends a lot on its complexity. If your project is a small project spanning a few web pages and having strict time constraints, using simple technologies the developer is already familiar with and content management systems like Joomla or WordPress is advisable. These are also great if you want to deliver a working prototype quickly and plan to continue with the subsequent development of the project later.

If the project is neither too simple nor too complex, the developers tend to use a combination of suitable programming languages to develop various essential functionalities of the portal. A heavy processing load demands the usage of complex frameworks able to support the features.

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How Expert Is The Team And How Wide Is Their Knowledge Base?

Another important factor to consider before committing to a framework is the expertise and the knowledge base of your team. Any project involves as much effort after the completion of development as before and during the process. Before choosing the framework, developers make sure that it has a huge community support and large developer base. Besides, the product developed must be easily testable. If you are trying to develop a cross-browser compatible application, employing the frameworks having cross-browser support is advisable.

Is It An Interactive Application Or Just A Static Collection Of Web Pages?

Whether the project you are developing is interactive or just a static collection of web pages also has a great say in the choice of framework. A website made up of static pages only, for instance, can easily be developed with a combination of HTML+CSS+Bootstrap. You do not need to increase your workload substantially by diving deep into the depths of complex frameworks for such requirements.

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How Scalable Is The Proposed Application?

Scalability is the capability of the web portal to handle work and traffic. As the number of visitors and users increases, the application must essentially be able to handle the sudden shoot in traffic and keep functioning flawlessly. The developers often choose a technology which easily accommodates the future scope of the portal. While choosing a framework for the project at hand, developers make sure that it caters to the needs of horizontal as well as vertical scaling.

This implies that the project must run on several servers at the same time to handle the inflow of traffic. Besides, the framework must support the addition of new programs to enhance the functionality of the website. Before starting the development of the actual application, the team leader must make sure that a development team to successfully build the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is set up. It is the set of deliverables at the heart of the application and indispensable to its functionality. These are needed for the deployment of the web portal. It is generally based on the highest return investment and lowest risk factor.

How High Or Low Maintenance Is The Application?

The choice of the framework must be done with its after-effects in mind. Preferably, the developers go for frameworks which produce codes that are easy to maintain, analyze, test and update. Rather than resorting to a code with tough syntax, consider working with technologies having a simpler syntax and easy testing support.

Check this out: Encode URL online tool is used to convert certain characters in a URL to their corresponding hexadecimal representation.

Which Is The Best Shot Financially?

Even though most of the amazing web development tools and techniques are free and open source, yet sometimes they require you to pay some additional fee to enjoy the advanced benefits. Depending on the technology, you may sometimes be required to purchase the license as well. Thus, before committing to a technology you must understand the financial implications it brings along and proceed accordingly.

The total cost incurred for the infrastructure used during the development of the project is also an important factor to be considered. A firm has to pay the salaries of the developers and take care of a lot of other expenses as well. In short, if bringing down the bills is a major aspect, then you preferably go with open source technologies.

Check this out: The Parse URL Online allows splitting up the query string into a human-readable format and takes care of decoding the parameters.

Is the Framework Cross Browser Compatible?

The framework that we use is directly related to the cross browser compatibility of the developed website or web application. Choosing a cross browser compatible framework in the first place saves you from unexpected cross browser compatibility blunders. Though, it does not assure you that there will be no browser compatibility issues however it decreases the chances.

So, even after using a framework supporting cross browser compatibility, you need to test the final website or web application for its browser support using some cross browser testing tool.

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What Do My Instincts Say?

Lastly, developers often tend to choose what appeals to them the most. A technology may be the best in the market, have a great developer community and appeal to a lot of people but if it doesn’t fall in the skill set of a particular developer, he or she will not choose it. The personal preferences of the developer also play a significant role in the choice. You can act on the various suggestions being given to you or ignore them all and choose something entirely different.

Although there are no hard and fast rules for selecting a framework and it varies from project to project, still you can consider the above points as a suitable starting reference.

A complete tutorial on retesting that sheds light on its features, importance, pros and cons, and how to perform it.

All About Triaging Bugs

Saif Sadiq — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 13:13:12 +0000

Triaging is a well-known but not-well-understood term related to testing. The term is said to have been derived from the medical world, where it refers to the process of prioritizing patients based on how severe or mild their disease is. It is a way of making the best use of the available resources — does not matter how scanty they are — and helping as many people as possible. Rather than strict scientific principles or hardcore concepts of computer science, triaging generally involves your perception and the ability to judge step. You can fare quite well here in case you can derive intelligent judgements from a given set of facts and figures.

In the dictionary of computer science, triaging means analyzing all the issues you discover in testing and organizing the results as per their priority. Sometimes, the order of priority is pretty obvious, sometimes it is dependent upon multiple factors like user requirements, business relevance, development efforts, costs involved, and frequency of occurrence. That’s why the process is often time-consuming and usually involves a project manager or even the client, in some cases. Whether you are testing a website for its cross browser compatibility or features, prioritizing the listed bugs is crucial.

As the process of triaging begins, each bug’s initial report, reproducibility, comments, and any other involved aspects are well analyzed. Its priority and status are discussed by the team and the future course of action is decided.

In this tutorial, we will cover the concept of Regression testing, its significance, different types, and the methods to conduct it effectively. You will gain a comprehensive understanding of Regression test by the end of this tutorial.

One of the major goals of triaging bugs is to evaluate and prioritize the various steps involved in the resolution of defects. The team needs to validate the intensities of the defect, make the required changes, finalize the resolution of the defects, and assign time, resources and people for the same.

The importance of triaging in the world of testing cannot be overlooked. Software testing is a detailed process involving a lot of steps. It usually means an abundance of work. In case you fail to triage your bugs well, you will see yourself getting drowned in a sea of bugs and code. Proper planning and analysis of the job at hand are must in order to succeed and ensure efficient results.

The success or failure of triaging depends on your and the team’s consistency and dedication towards it. Talking about an overview of the process, it generally involves analyzing the severity of the process at hand and deciding whether it needs immediate attention or can be done later. It is recommended to partner well with the client and take quality feedback before triaging as it is generally difficult for someone to assess the priority of certain actions without understanding the context. End of the day, we want our clients to have efficient results about test cases, bugs, and reviews. We want to make sure our reports efficiently and effectively communicate our feedback and leave a positive impression of the product we sell or the services we provide.

What To Look For When Triaging A Bug

Title And Summary

The title of the bug must be clear, concise and easy to comprehend. The client or the project manager must be able to clearly figure out what the issue is by a slight glance at the title. You may add a prefix to the title in case you want it or the client recommends it. Sometimes, the summary does not summarize the bug well. Your bug report should be easy to comprehend. A good title should preferably contain a brief explanation of the root cause of the bug or some of the problems the bug is leading to.

Type Of Bug

Understanding the type of the bug is also important when it comes to allocating it a spot on the priority list. You need to figure out whether the error is technical, functional or pertaining to the user interface.

How Hard And Often Does It Affect The System?

Sometimes, the bugs are not big impact and can wait to get fixed. For instance, consider the spelling mistakes in the content of a website. Although they are bugs technically and need to be fixed, however, they are low severity and low priority. Their presence would not keep the user from using the portal. Such bugs are low-priority bugs. On the other end, there are issues like the website crashing every time the user tries uploading something. Such bugs are high priority bugs and need to be fixed right away. It generally, depends on the tester’s as well as the client’s intuition and judgment as to which bugs need immediate attention and which ones can wait a little more. Ultimately, although, you need to fix them all.

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Frequency Of Occurrence

How frequently the bug occurs also decides its position on the priority list. The ones occurring frequently usually need to be treated quickly.

Besides, you should work really hard on isolating the bug. It is good if you attempt to isolate the bug at least six times in order to analyze and identify the shortest path to it.

Hence, this was a general overview of the triaging process. Lastly, it can be concluded that triaging is a team effort. Deriving valuable insights from each other and working on the bugs can lead to incredible results. You and your team should commit to some predefined deadlines in order to be more productive. Apart from that, a rule of thumb is to identify the steps properly while dealing with a bug. Listing or working on unnecessary steps like installing the application will only lead to wastage of time. In case you plan to present a video for the reference of others, it should have all the steps from beginning to end. Your steps should make sense to everyone and not just you. Happy triaging!

4 Ways To Reduce And Simplify Test Cases

Saif Sadiq — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 12:06:47 +0000

Software testing, over the time, has evolved as an important domain in computer science. There is no denying the fact that developing a new software from scratch requires significant efforts but an even greater amount of effort goes into detecting ‘faults’ in an already written piece. Analyzing the code line-by-line can be cumbersome. These faults, known as ‘bugs’, in the language of computers can give any developer some sleepless nights.

If your program is a ‘toy program’ spanning a few lines or sheets, you may check it manually. But, working with professional software often demands professional automated testing methods. It is practically impossible to judge or test each and every feature of professional software. Given the time constraint, speeding up the testing cycles is indispensable. Apart from implementing ways to speed up the testing cycles in general, it is important to strategize the test cases. Identifying the most important ones out of a large test-suite is the key here.

Here, we have brought you top 4 techniques to reduce the number of test cases in any given suite to make your life easier –

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Pairwise Testing

Although, techniques like boundary value analysis and equivalence partitioning are helpful in designing test suites, yet it is practically difficult to implement them in case of large test suites. Thus, a set of most suitable test cases are created using combinatorics method. Implementing this, all the possible discrete combinations of parameters involved can be tested.

Pairwise testing is a test design technique also known as All-Pairs Testing’ that aims to work on the idea of delivering hundred percent test coverage with a reasonable amount of test combinations. In the end, we get the ’best’ test cases, instead of the ‘entire’ test cases, but the test quality is ensured at this stage.

The test-cases in this technique are designed so that for every pair of input parameters to a system, there is a possible unique combination of parameters. Therefore, although it is not exhaustive yet is an effective method of finding bugs as it covers all combinations.

In this Ad hoc testing tutorial, let’s deep dive into what Ad hoc testing is, its advantages, disadvantages, types, characteristics, and their best practices.

In this Ad hoc testing tutorial, let’s deep dive into what Ad hoc testing is, its advantages, disadvantages, types, characteristics, and their best practices.

Clustering

The redundant test cases encountered while implementing a test-suite tend to increase the cost and time required in testing. Thus, the data mining approach of clustering techniques is used to reduce the number of test cases. With the help of this technique, the number of test cases can be reduced as the program is checked using any one of the clustered test cases instead of working on the entire test case generated by the independent paths

This approach works on partitioning of a given data set into groups or clusters so as to maximize the intra cluster similarity and minimize the inter cluster similarity. The entity to be clustered needs proper identification and attributes (on the basis of the similarity in profiling) before they are applied to the algorithm The three major profiles used for this are file execution sequence, function call sequence and function call tree. There is an existence of relation between function calls and sequential information that helps in enhancing the detection of faults

Clustering algorithms such as graph theoretical algorithms, construction algorithms, optimization algorithms and hierarchical algorithms are some of the most common techniques used in this field. Although, it is difficult to apply clustering on high dimensional data yet highly specialized algorithms like CLIQUE can be made use of.

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Genetic Algorithms

Genetic Algorithms (GA) are one of the computational intelligence based approaches which has been used as a solution for various problem of test cases reduction namely evolutionary computation. It works in the following manner:

A genetic algorithm is proposed for test-suite reduction that further builds the initial population based on test history.

The fitness value by using coverage and cost information is calculated.
Selection of the successive generations by making use of genetic operations is done.
These steps are repeated until a result with the minimized test-suite set is found

The results show that the proposed test-suite reduction technique has cost-effectiveness and generality. Genetic algorithms use the following three operations on its population

Selection
Crossover
Mutation

One of the major advantages of this algorithm is that it helps in the reduction of the number of test cases along with a simultaneous decrease in the total run time. However, the method falls short when examination on the fault detection capability along with other criteria is asked for.

Greedy Algorithm

One of the popular code –based reduction techniques, greedy algorithms are applied on test suites obtained from Model-based techniques. This technique is applied repeatedly to all test cases in the test suite leading to the production of a reduced test suite. This algorithm works on the basis of the relation that exists between testing requirements and test cases

This algorithm comes equipped with an advantage by providing a significant reduction in the total number of test cases, but meanwhile it involves random selection of test case if a case of a tie situation occurs.

It works in the following way:

The test cases satisfying the maximum number of unsatisfied requirements are selected and in case of a tie capricious choice is made.
They consider test cases are termed as objects and requirements as attributes.
This analysis works for objects which have discrete properties.
Using concept analysis framework, identification of maximum groups of objects and attributes is done which is called as contexts.

Check this out: To minify CSS through LambdaTest’s CSS Minify just paste your code in the Enter CSS field & click CSS minify, removing the elements which are not required for CSS to be used successful.

Fuzzy Logic

Another way for the optimization of test suites is by using fuzzy logic. This is termed to be a safe technique as it helps in the reduction of regression testing size along with execution time. The level of testing using this method based on objective function which turns to be similar to human judgment.

When the genetic algorithm and swarm optimization are combined with fuzzy logic, it results in making optimizations in test suite which can be used for multi-objective selection criteria. Some CI based approaches are often used in order to achieve optimization of the test suite and analysing the test suite for safe reduction which can be executed using control flow graphs. These graphs are used for traversing test cases of optimal solutions .According to the facts and surveys, this method is rated to be safe while other methods are inadequate for regression testing.

No matter how insignificant they may be, small actions taken towards simplifying test cases can result in huge results. Just follow the right techniques and you’re good to go!

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The Top 5 Practices For Debugging Website Issues

Saif Sadiq — Mon, 09 Jan 2023 14:38:31 +0000

Coding is fun and easy. But, not always.

Well, when does it stop being fun actually? It stops being that fun when you accidentally come across something called as an ‘error’.

All of a sudden, the world starts looking like a dark hopeless tunnel and from code your focus shifts towards the ‘bug’ which crept into your code under your nose. The size, application, and features of a program are inversely proportional to the developer’s capability of interpreting the errors by herself.

However, the world of coding is not that gloomy. If you are well-versed with the language and some debugging tools, debugging the code is not that difficult. Following some tips and tricks, you can easily cross the river without being bitten by the ‘bug’

Here, we have brought you top five practices for debugging websites in general –

Syntax May Be The Culprit

As compared to logical errors, syntactical errors are found in abundance in any piece of code. Missed semicolons and brackets can damage your code a lot more than you can imagine. Even though experienced developers tend to focus more on the logic driving the code yet syntax also demands and deserves a lot of attention.

It is a good practice to resolve all the syntax errors before diving deep into the technicality of the code.

All the semicolons and brackets must be in place.
All the HTML elements should be closed.
The typing errors should be eliminated.

Such seemingly meaningless mistakes can change the entire meaning of your code.

Blackbox Some Scripts

Due to its asynchronous nature, many developers find debugging JavaScript quite challenging. However, with the introduction of libraries and frameworks, the task has been simplified a lot. Libraries and frameworks are pieces of code supposed to be used as they are according to the demands of the software. They are already well tested and made bug free by their developer. While debugging your code, you do not need to test them all over again!

Hence, it is a good practice to blackbox these scripts so that the debugger does not waste a majority of its time just to confirm the already known fact that they are bug-free. The principle can even be extended to your own scripts. If you have separately tested a relatively large script and are sure that it is bug-free, you don’t need to test it again while debugging the rest of the program. Blackbox it and make your life easier.

Check this out: Data Driven Testing: A Comprehensive Guide With Examples and Best Practices

Check Cross-Browser Issues

A majority of the display problems related to HTML and CSS are cross browser issues. Your code may be written perfectly well but giving you a hard time because of browser compatibility issues. In such a situation, rather than finding errors in the code, you must address cross browser aspects

A pro tip to reduce cross browser issues is to ensure that they are not there in the first place. It is nice if you are making use of a decent CSS reset. Using this would level out a number of inconsistencies between the browsers, making them behave more uniformly.

Another recommended practice is to use only those properties and features of HTML and CSS, which are supported by multiple browsers. You can use cross browser testing tools like LambdaTest to test your website for cross browser issues in HTML and CSS.

A comprehensive User Acceptance Testing (UAT) tutorial that covers what User Acceptance Testing is, its importance, benefits, and how to perform it with real-time examples.

Minification — Yay Or Nay?

Making the source code free of all unnecessary characters such as white space characters, new line characters, comments and block limiters without changing its functionality is called minification.

These are generally added to the code to enhance its readability but do not have any significance in executing the code. Debugging minified code, however, can be a pain. Most of the times you won’t have to deal with minified code, but the few times that you have to, it can give you some serious troubles. Pretty Print is an option in Chrome allowing you to debug minified code less problematically. No doubt, it would not be as helpful as the original code, but at least it will help you figure out what actually is going on in there leading to easy debugging.

Check this out: XCUITest Tutorial: A Detailed Guide To XCUITest Framework

Optimize The Development Environment a Bit

Optimizing the development environment a bit before starting with the process of debugging can also make it easier. For instance, consider Symfony. It creates large-sized PHP files in the system’s cache containing aggregates of PHP classes your software needs for every request. However, such a behavior confuses the debugger as the same class can be located in two separate places, namely the original class file and the large file created by Symfony. It is recommended that you disable the Bootstrap file and class caching beforehand in order to avoid the debugger from getting confused and do its job efficiently.

Hence, these were some of the best recommended practices for debugging code and websites in general. Apart from these, there are some general tips and tricks which must be followed like rules of thumb by any developer. For instance, you should always consider reproducing a bug before you blindly start editing the code. Additionally, you should consider writing a test case that reproduces the bug.

Try LT Debug Chrome Extension for debugging websites!

Check this out: Selenium Guide Tutorial: A Complete Guide on Selenium Automation Testing

Don’t assume stuff

You should know what you are doing with the code. Wild-goose chase will only waste your time. Next, you should understand stack traces. Not all bugs have it, but for those which have, you must understand them thoroughly. Apart from that, you should know all the error codes well.

Besides, you should understand (and more importantly admit!) the fact that you cannot fix all the bugs.

If you have already spent an hour or two on a piece of code trying to locate bugs, you should pause there, call a friend or colleague and take some friendly piece of advice. You will be surprised at how easily someone else can spot the error you have been missing.

Lastly, you must celebrate all the debugging successes — doesn’t matter how major or minor they are. It will boost your morale and help you figure out the remaining bugs more easily.

Happy debugging!

And yes, Happy Testing 😉

In this tutorial on Agile testing, let’s deep dive into the history of Agile testing, its advantages, disadvantages, methods, quadrants, and best practices.

Developing Cross Browser Compatible AMP pages

Saif Sadiq — Mon, 09 Jan 2023 13:15:09 +0000

If you don’t already know about it, then let me tell you that the next big thing going in web world right now is Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). Backed by Google, AMP pages are quite popular in mobile-first world especially in emerging markets. If you are building AMP pages of your website then you are going in the right track. However have you wondered about the Cross Browser compatibility of these pages?

With more and more diverse types of mobile devices being launched each month checking cross browser compatibility of AMP is becoming more and more essential. But how can you ensure that your AMP give instant and irrational user experience to your users across all mobile browsers like iOS Safari, Opera , UC browser, Chrome and so on.

Why Cross Browser Compatible AMP pages?

To start with, let’s revise what AMP is first.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), it’s an open-source project aimed at allowing mobile website content to render nearly instantly.

We have seen that the number of mobile users back in 1998 were 318 millions whereas in 2018 it’s 7740 millions. So, with increase in number of mobile users, tech companies were worried about how to provide smooth distribution of their web content to mobile users, especially to those that are not on fast internet.. And if they fail to do the same, it will result in slip away of users.

Another argument in favor of cross browser compatible AMP pages can be inferred from this data: (Source: https://www.ampproject.org/learn/overview/)

75% of mobile sites take 10+ seconds to load
53% mobile site visitors leave after 3 seconds of load time
2X more mobile ad revenue for sites that load in 5 seconds vs 19 seconds

Dive deep into mobile world analytics for June 2018 and found some interesting facts.

Mobile users are leading the world with 52.52% of market share while Desktop users are 43.63%. AMP is revolution for all companies to provide their content to their users in no time. We need to take care of all the users accessing different type of mobile browsers irrespective of geo locations. If we talk about mobile browser uses across the globe, here is the browser share report according to http://gs.statcounter.com

Most tech teams work on a web project taking one browser in mind which covers most of user base supporting all the cut edge web technologies. But a BIG FAT QUESTION comes in my mind who will care of other users who are using some hatred browsers like Samsung Internet, Opera, and Default Old Android browser (covers approx 12–13 % of mobile user base, if I count It will be approx 100 Millions!).

So, I researched on some of the major factors that cause cross browser compatibility issues in AMP pages.

Check this out: 30 Top Automated Testing Tool In 2022

Cross browser issues of AMP pages.

As Cross browser compatibility is very critical, diagnosing the issues encountered for AMP pages is a important factor to take care of.

Taking browser elements and property compatibility for specific mobile browsers is first step to find issues. I found following web elements which are not supported by different mobile browsers.

Web elements not supported on Android Native Browser
::placeholder CSS pseudo-element
CSS text-orientation
CSS display: contents
:focus-within CSS pseudo-class
Web elements not supported on Blackberry
Speech Synthesis API
Media Queries: interaction media features
Picture element
HTML templates
Web elements not supported on Opera
CSS writing-mode property
High Resolution Time API
Link type “noreferrer”
Viewport units: vw, vh, vmin, vmax

Latest web technologies doesn’t support old mobile browser versions

AMP uses HTML5
Few HTML5 tags are not supported in old browser versions of all the latest mobile browsers. Eg.
header
footer
aside
bdi
canvas
Draw graphics, on the fly, via scripting (usually JavaScript)
Although AMP tags are supported in wide range of browser. But there is few browsers that does not support amp tags like. E.g: amp-img, style amp-custom, [amp-font], [amp-anim]. AMP page are designed for mobile browsing. Although page looks broken in old android 4.0 devices below chrome 28.
If you are using AMP img tag and your image is third party resource, then you have to define dimensions (height and width). Other wise you are going to face the following error–

Script rendering : Allows only asynchronous scripts
SVG animation : The biggest limitation is that, due to scripting restrictions, you won’t be able to animate your svg vectors with JavaScript. you can still do so using CSS animations
CSS Style compatibility : Different CSS style property for different browsers.
-Moz- prefix is used for mozilla browser
-Webkit- prefix is used for Chrome browser
AMP pages layout and required properties of there tags.
Following table describes acceptable parameters, CSS classes, and styles used for the layout attribute.

Check this out: 30 Top tools for Automation Testing In 2022

How to fix issues faced across different browsers?

Accelerated Mobile Pages are just like any other HTML page with a limited set of allowed technical functionality. AMP is very important for publishers and CMS providers. Hence diagnosing the issues and fixing them is foremost thing to do. Let’s quickly hop to the solution of issues found for cross browser compatibility.

Check this out: What is Regression testing: Complete Guide With Best Practices

Use inline CSS style sheets:
AMP uses inline CSS placed under head section. We need to add all CSS elements and class inside a style amp-custom tag in the head of the document. For example:

    !doctype html
          head
           ...
          style amp-custom
          /* any custom styles go here. */
          body {
            background-color: white;
          }
          amp-img {
            border: 5px solid black;
          }
          amp-img.grey-placeholder {
            background-color: grey;
          }
        /style
        ...
      /head

For better font rendering, fonts must be loaded with a link tag or a CSS @font-face rule.
Let’s Validate AMP codes:
Are you done with coding part? Have you taken care of all precautions and conditions while coding? AMP code validation is crucial part of AMP development life cycle. Like web pages you don’t need to validate HTML and CSS separately. You can validate AMP code directly with AMP project validator.

Last but not least Cross Browser Testing:
Validating AMP code is not enough to go live. Testing AMP across different mobile browsers is necessary for seamless user experience especially for those website that have a very diverse user base.. You need to make sure your efforts making AMP are of worth or not. Now the questions arises, how we can test these accelerated mobile pages?
For this, You can take help from LambdaTest cross browser compatibility testing platform. You can test your AMP for cross browser compatibility across more than 500+ Mobile browser and OS combinations. You can test your AMP for javascript errors, html5 tags, css tag and elements and svg animation. You can also debug your AMP code while performing testing and check how it is reflecting on mobile browser screen. Responsiveness of AMP is also an important thing to care of, so we provide responsive testing feature where you can check responsiveness of your AMP across mostly used mobile devices and tablets.
You are all set with bugs and issues found in your AMP. Now are ready to move ahead!

Remote Debugging Webpages In iOS Safari

Saif Sadiq — Tue, 06 Sep 2022 13:41:37 +0000

Safari is one of the most popular web browsers. Developed and promoted by Apple , it is based on the WebKit engine. The first version of the browser was released in 2003 with Mac OS X Panther. With the launch of the iPhone in 2007, a mobile version of the browser has been included in iOS devices as well.

Unless specifically changed by the user, Safari is the default browser on all Apple devices and it is one of the main reason why it is still popular among internet users.

Developing web pages or debugging hybrid applications is tough. However, to the utter delight of all computer science professionals, Apple offers a remote ‘Web Inspector’ for debugging.

This article explains the emulator vs simulator vs real device differences, the learning of which can help you select the right mobile testing solution for your business.

Remote debugging, is debugging a piece of code by connecting the application running remotely with your environment of development. Generally, developers do this using a debugger which has support for remote debugging, and a small debug server running on a remote machine.

This small debug server must allow the debugger to interact with the code running on the remote machine as if it were running on the same machine.

Remote debugging Safari can be painful especially if you are not a Mac user. Web developers, generally are familiar with the tools available to them while local page testing, but face problems while debugging applications developed for mobile devices such as the iPad or iPhone.

A possible solution to the problem is remote debugging — making use of the same tools as you would have used while performing the task on a desktop, except for the fact that now you are connected to your mobile device. Debugging safari on iOS requires a minimum of Safari 6. However, there is a bad news for Windows and Linux developers here as the latest version of Safari is not available at all for Linux while for Windows only Safari 5 is available.

Perform manual or automated cross browser testing on 3000+ browsers online. Deploy and scale faster with the most powerful cross browser test tool online.

Remote Debugging iOS Safari on OS X

Before starting with the debugging process, you would need a device running iOS. It may be any device like an iPad or an iPhone which can be connected to a Mac computer by USB. Test on safari browser version 6+ must be installed on the computer.

The next step demands you to enable ‘Web Inspector’ on your iOS device. This can very easily be done by going to Settings > Safari > Advanced. Toggle the ‘Web Inspector’ so that it gets enabled in case it was not by default.

After successfully enabling ‘Web Inspector’, you should also enable the ‘Develop’ menu in Safari on your Mac computer. This can be done by going to Safari > Preferences > Advanced and checking the checkbox for the Show Develop menu in the menu bar. In case it is already enabled, you do not need to do anything.

Further, you need to open the web page you want to debug on your computer. Make sure that your iOS device is plugged into it. Go to Develop > iOS Device Name in the desktop Safari browser. Click on the page you want to debug.

Finally, you can view and update the Document Object Model, and have access to the JavaScript console and other options and features.

Need a great solution for the Safari browser for Windows? Forget about emulators or simulators — use real online browsers.

Remote debugging iOS Safari on Windows and Linux

Although not many options are available for remote debugging Safari from Windows or Linux, the situation is not as hopeless as it seems. A popular way out is to call an application called JSConsole to your rescue. The application works in an interesting way by inserting a script tag into the target web page that overrides the console behavior.

To begin with, go to jsconsole.com and execute: listen in the prompt. This will present you with a unique session ID and a script tag which you further insert into your mobile web page.
Hence, any console output that your mobile page generates will be shown on the console open in your desktop web browser. This includes all the errors too. Thus, this gives you an alternate path to remotely debug iOS Safari. Although, it is not a replacement for a full web inspector, in fact, stands nowhere near to it, but is a good way out when you don’t have access to Mac.

Now test Safari on Linux online & start your free testing!!!

Thus, this was a quick overview of the process of remotely debugging iOS Safari both on Mac as well as non-Mac platforms. Happy debugging!

Do you use a Mac and want to run the test in Internet Explorer? This article explores how to test Internet Explorer on Mac.

What Is Codeless Automation Testing And Why It Is The Future?

Saif Sadiq — Mon, 05 Sep 2022 13:37:53 +0000

Testing has always been a bane of the product development cycle. In an era where a single software bug can cause massive financial losses, quality assurance testing is paramount for any software product no matter how small or how big.

In the current agile development cycle where the development and release cycle involves releasing a set of features and extending those sets in iterated releases, testing has become even more complicated. Manual testing, though very useful in many cases, fails under the deluge of features, buttons, links, accordions, javascript, and integrations. Add performance testing, and user experience testing to the equation and you get no choice but to automate the testing process. And that’s where codeless testing comes into place and the subject of this post.

Explore how to cherry-pick the right (tools for automation testing)[https://www.lambdatest.com/blog/automation-testing-tools/?utm_source=devto&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=sept_05&utm_term=rd&utm_content=blog] for your business and delve deeper into the top tools available in the market in 2022.

Automation Testing and Codeless Testing

Automation testing is a necessity of an agile development process. It involves creating a separate software framework to test the primary solution through automated means. The more complex a solution is, the complexity of the testing framework becomes. Automation testing becomes critical once you get to a stage where every release requires the execution of thousands of test cases and actions. Traditional automation testing involves writing separate execution software scripts for each test case and then executing them through a separate software setup dedicated to running, monitoring, and logging the test cases.

Run Selenium, Cypress, and Appium tests on LambdaTest to scale with the demand of your website and web apps.

For large projects or projects having a fast release cycle, creating a test environment, and writing test scripts themselves take a huge amount of time and resources. This ultimately defeats the whole purpose of automation testing which was aimed at reducing testing times and testing resources.

A solution to this problem is codeless testing. Codeless testing is creating automation tests without writing a single piece of code. This approach has been steadily evolving with new innovations in technology, focusing more on reducing the coding process and making it more user-friendly. The ultimate aim is to make the setup so easy to use that automating a test scenario takes very less amount of time and requires almost no coding efforts. Making the process true codeless testing.

There are many tools already in the market that aims to achieve this objective, however, to term them Codeless is still not very accurate. The correct term would be something like script less because, in the background, most tools would just provide the testers one more abstraction layer, which would translate user actions and instructions to testing scripts which in turn drive test automation. This abstraction layer is more user-friendly with good graphical interfaces, that will make the testing process easier and more manageable. So even though the user doesn’t have to write a lot of code personally, the tool still runs on scripts.

In this Cypress tutorial, we talk about the (Cypress test automation)[https://www.lambdatest.com/blog/cypress-test-automation-framework/?utm_source=devto&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=sept_05&utm_term=rd&utm_content=blog] framework that is fundamentally and architecturally different from the Selenium test automation.

How Codeless Testing Works

There are multiple approaches to codeless testing. The two most prominent ones involve recording manual tests and playing them back, and creating structured test flow diagrams that are used to run tests. The record and play approach is the most popular one right now and is especially favored by web-based products.

The idea behind the approach is that a tester manually performs a test, in which the tool records click by click. The tool then creates scripts to automate the test itself. The testers can also edit the scripts, and the testing process to best suit their requirements.

This Playwright testing tutorial, explores each part of the process from the initial installation of the Playwright automation framework until the full execution of a test suite.

The Future of Codeless Automation; Will It Kill Automation Testing?

For the foreseeable future, the need for automation coders would not diminish. Codeless testing would be a tool for automation testers to fast-track their jobs rather than replace their jobs. In the unforeseen future, the tools will become smart enough that they will completely eliminate the need for test script coding, allowing testing instructions to be directly passed on to the system in a complete codeless package. Right now though, automation functional testing is the most important requirement of any agile software development process.

Best Usability Testing Tools For Your Website

Saif Sadiq — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 14:55:36 +0000

When a user comes to your website, you have time in seconds to influence them. Web usability is the key to gain quick trust, brand recognition and ensure user retention.

So, what basically do you mean by usability?

It means to have a user-centered design. In user-centered design, both development and design processes revolve around user’s perspective in order to make sure to meet the user’s goals, mental models, and requirements while building efficient and easy to use products.

Investing in UX optimization is what makes you win the heart of users. Here we are compiling the list of parameters and top usability testing tools which will help you to optimize the user experience.

1. User Journey Analysis

The primary goal of a perfect website is whether users are able to perform their tasks when they visit your website. So, we need to test user task analysis on highest priority.

We have following considerations to take care of during testing of user task analysis:-

Ease of use:- How easy is it for a new user to perform a task?
Accuracy:- How vulnerable to errors is the task?
Maintain Integrity:- If a user makes a mistake while doing a task, how fast can he recover?
Instinctiveness:-How obvious and easy is the task to accomplish?
More efficient:-Are users doing tasks with optimization?

There are many online tools available to check user task analysis. Here are the top usability testing tools for the same.

Usabilla

Usabilla helps companies to improve the performance of their websites with live user feedback. This website helps to perform micro-usability tests, including the measurement of task performance.

Check out and test your web & mobile apps on Android Emulatorsonline. Ensure your apps are compatible across latest and legacy Android operating systems, devices, and browsers.

Loop11

Loop11 is a remote based user task analysis testing tool that gives you lots of features which don’t need any coding knowledge.It provides very clean platform to setup tests and create report for same.

UsabilityHub

UsabilityHub is a remoteweb and mobile usability testing tool that allows you to backup design decisions with real user data.

2. Readability

Readability is the measure of how easy it is to read and comprehend a document. Website content readability is one of the key features of great user experience. However, a web app is not content-centric as, say, a blog or web magazine, but a problem in the understanding user interface may affect user retention. So we dig into this problem and found top usability testing tools to test the readability of a web app.

Juicy Studio: Readability Test

This service analyses the readability of all rendered content. You need to give input URL and then you will get readability score based on different readability algorithm.

Here's how you can accelerate your release velocity with blazing fast test automation on cloud.

WordsCount

Communication is important in personal and business relationships. So this is very important to make sure your users can understand your website content clearly. Wordscount will help you to make your business grow.

Check My Colours

This tool is useful for checking foreground and background color combinations of all DOM elements and determining if they provide sufficient contrast when viewed by someone having color deficits. This usability testing tool makes sure readability of your content stays as intended by design.

Prowritingaid

This usability testing tool helps you to analyze your content entirely including your readability. It gives you a readability score based on various readability scales like Flesch Reading score.
You get line-wise readability score for very good scoring or bad scoring lines.

3. Site Navigability

It means how easy it is to move from one component to another component in a website. If a user lands on your website, he must be able to reach every page easily. Information Architecture, Findability, and Efficiency of Navigation are major concerns to take care of during setting up navigation of your website.

Here I am listing top usability testing tools to check your website navigability.

Treejack

This platform will help you check your website navigation hierarchy. Treejack uses tree testing technique for evaluating the findability of topics in a website.

Here's how you can accelerate your release velocity with blazing fast automation testing on cloud.

WriteMaps

Generate, manage and share your site maps using WriteMaps .This tool will help to build you perfect navigation tree for your website.

Usability Hub’s Click Analysis

Usability Hub’s Click Analysis will help to fetch information how your users on website switching through webpages. You can find whole path analysis, heat maps and user action flow by capturing every click performed by your users.

4. Web Accessibility

A website should be accessible to everyone regardless of any physical disabilities, mobility issues, mobile devices, tablets, netbooks, web browsers (like IE, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera). You need to give attention to Cross-Browser/Cross-Platform Compatibility, Semantic HTML Markup, Color Choice and Use of HTML Accessibility Features when performing web accessibility analysis. Below mentioned are top usability testing tools for browser compatibility testing.

W3C Markup Validation Service

You can give your website URL as input and you will get mark up issues. This tool will be helpful for testing your web accessibility.

LambdaTest

LambdaTest is a cloud-based, cross browser testing tool to help you ensure the browser compatibility of your website across 2000+ browser and OS combinations. LambdaTest also offers Selenium. You can run your automated test cases in multiple languages such as C#, JavaScript, Python, PHP, Java, and Ruby. You could also perform parallel testing using their Selenium Grid to drastically trim down your test cycles.

5. Website Speed

Web page load speed is the first factor to retain users. I believe in the first impression is the last impression. Webpage response time, webpage size and code quality are considerations for evaluating the speed of a website. I have curated top usability testing tools to test your website speed.

Pingdom Tools

This is web-based tool to test webpage load speed. It is very easy to use. You just need to give input URL and it will give you report analysis for webpage size and load speed.

Page Speed Online

Google provides this tool for website owners and web developers. This tool require your website URL and it will evaluate your site based on its best practices for web performance

6. User Experience

If a website is not pleasant to use for a user, it is a very big problem for web developers and website owners. User feedback is key to improve the user experience of your website. Ask more questions to users, get more feedbacks and modify your website accordingly.

We need to take care of fulfillment, usefulness, enjoyment and positive emotions while evaluating UX.
There are many online platforms available where you can get user feedback. However, the below mentioned are some of the top usability testing tools that would server the purpose.

UserVoice

This platform is helpful to obtain and manage user feedback.

Well, these are the top usability testing tools in my opinion. Hope they help! if you use some other tool, kindly let us know in the comments below.