The global crisis hit businesses of all industries all across the globe. Companies realized that investing in custom software development can be beneficial as one-size-fits-all software was no longer efficient and adequate to meet the growing and challenging needs of the business.

Let us dive deeper into the topic of custom software development and understand how it helps businesses to achieve team collaboration, performance, safety, and scalability.

What Is Custom Software Development?

Custom software development is the process of designing and developing a software product to meet the specific requirements of a business. These software solutions include features, function, performance parameters, and security features to meet the organization-specific requirements and precisely address the firms’ customer needs.

Traditionally, banking transaction applications were typically off the shelf products or platforms. However, client interaction pre-Covid was based on face to face contact and physically signed documents. Banks that are digitizing these processes are doing it with custom solutions from the ground up so that it meets their internal processes, manages their risks and fulfils customers needs. Banks that have quickly innovated in this space are well placed to be leaders in the post-Covid world.

How is Custom Software effective amid this Global crisis?

Entrepreneurs find custom software effective in addressing new challenges in business. Below we outline the ways bespoke software could be an essential tool and an effective strategy for a business.

Cost-Effective

Custom software is your very own asset. You don’t need to pay for licensing, upgrades, user fees, etc. Companies get the flexibility to build a personalized app within their budget when they go for custom software. As revenues grow they can extend the functionality of the app. Cost-effectiveness has become a critical aspect now as Covid has hit revenues and profits. This makes custom software development an effective strategy today.

Automate Business Processes

When Covid hit the world, businesses’ had to enable work from home almost overnight. Work from home, however, brought challenges to meet productivity requirements. A custom-made software in this situation helps automate several day-to-day operations and business needs and keeps everyone involved, connected. Not to mention, tailor-made software is built with unique features which are necessary for your specific business. A product on the other hand will offer you several features, not all of which may be relevant to your business.

App Integration

Integration with other third-party applications is key to business success in today’s time. Mobile apps as an extension to your website or enabling digital payment processing on your company systems are just a few examples of app integration. Custom software allows you to develop and integrate new software or apps easily into your existing business processes. Companies that are looking to tweak their business processes during this covid crisis can find it helpful. One can handle complex business requirements through app integration in custom software.

Scalable

The current crisis has affected the demand and supply equations of different products and services. So scalability of business has become essential, and it can be achieved seamlessly with a bespoke software development company. Custom software can be used to improve scalability in business operations to move faster and eliminate inefficient processes and practices. With growth comes complexity in executing business operations, and custom software are designed to handle this.

Flexibility

The product owner has complete control over the interface design, the user experience, the custom features and functionalities. This can help companies differentiate themselves from their competitors and sustain growth.

Software Maintenance

Some custom software development companies offer a dedicated support team for the maintenance of the application. The experienced and skilled professionals render regular maintenance and in-depth support to your apps. Personalized support like this means that security vulnerabilities and technical challenges will be taken care of promptly. Custom App development companies offer flexible packages on a pay as you go basis.

Streamline Methodologies and Processes

When the global crisis hit businesses, one of the biggest challenges was to streamline methodologies and processes. Companies that operated from multiple locations and branches faced many problems. Custom apps help in streamlining processes within an organization and improving team collaboration. Bespoke software can be designed to have all business data in one centralized location and distribute it from there. Cross-functional teams sitting across multiple locations can easily access this data through custom software and make informed business decisions.

Finally…

Most companies find off-the-shelf solutions appropriate for some specific conditions. If you are looking to improve operations within your company during this pandemic or thereafter, then custom software solutions might be your best choice.

Unit tests help in finding regressions, test error cases and reduces the requirement for manual testing significantly. Unit tests also help in improving the code quality, e.g. if you are not able to write a unit test for a particular scenario, then it typically means that the code needs to be refactored. For a better understanding of the topic, I recommend reading Kent Beck’s book on unit testing ‘Test-Driven Development by Example’.
Having said that, here are my comments on Unit testing –

● Any *newly*developed app feature should not be considered complete until a unit test has been performed. This means, the development estimates should always include the unit testing time. For example, a developer might build a feature without writing a unit test and perform manual testing instead for which he might spend 24 hours plus an additional 24 hours to fix bugs and regressions. Instead, it would be better to spend 48 hours or less for building a feature by writing the unit tests, as it will ensure that the code quality is better. The developer will have more confidence in the code after completing the unit test. Unit testing is particularly useful for identifying regression bugs, as the same tests can be reused to prevent future regressions.

● Some existing applications do not have any unit tests because they have been developed by developers who have not prioritized unit testing, or may not have been aware of its benefits. When new developers who are aware of unit test concepts start working on the application, they should not necessarily interrupt the work to start writing unit tests for all components immediately. Instead, the process can be undertaken gradually. For instance, if they are working on specific components that lack tests, they should take the opportunity to write unit tests, at least to verify the newly added functionality. It is important that the project manager takes care of estimates for development time for writing unit tests for old components. Over time the code coverage for these components will increase and at some point in time, it may become sensible to set a goal specifically to increase test coverage.

Advantages of unit testing –
1. It reduces the level of bugs in the production environment.
2. It builds confidence in the developer.
3. It allows the code to be easily refactored or changed.
4. Regression bugs can be caught easily.

Disadvantages of unit testing –
1. In our experience, writing unit tests requires about 20-30% more time at the beginning of the project. For a complicated project, it may require even more time.
2. If the architecture/design of the project is not correct from the beginning, then tests need to be rewritten when the project is re-architected. This can turn into a major time loss.
3. For big/complex projects, unit testing alone is not enough. Typically, integration tests and e2e tests will be required alongside the unit tests to have proper test coverage.

As developers, we always look to reduce costs whilst still fulfilling all the project requirements. Unit testing can play a big role in achieving this. Unit testing helps any developer to produce bug-free and quality software with confidence.
Over the years, MetaSys has successfully built a robust testing environment to build custom software solutions. Feel free to reach us and do share your feedback in the comments section below.

Barcodes are nothing more than a machine readable form of data represented in the form of lines.  Nowadays, barcodes are an essential part of inventory management for a number of reasons. Firstly, saving time both in terms of data entry, and the automatic processing of the entries. Secondly, entry errors are reduced as the barcode scanning process has a very low error rate. Finally, barcodes help companies track the product across the entire production pipeline. Even after the product is shipped out, the company can track the product throughout its entire lifecycle.

Recently, we worked on a project for a client who wished to include barcode scanning capability in a personal health tracking software application. The required functionality was that the end-user could scan various food items and store the data in the applications web portal. This would allow the user to record their daily food intake conveniently, without wasting much time entering the data.

The first step in the implementation was a data import of standard food item barcodes, which we imported from an available data library. This gave us over 200,000 records of day-to-day food items of popular brands.

Since the users don’t typically own barcode readers, we required a solution that allowed the users to scan the barcodes using their personal electronic devices. Since most people carry mobile phones with a camera, we started looking into the option of using phone cameras as barcode readers.

Since we had a web-based application, it was preferable for us to use a client-side code library or plug-in. After evaluating a few possible options, we decided to use ‘QuaggaJS’ which is a JavaScript-based advanced barcode reader. ‘QuaggaJS’ can read various types of barcodes such as EAN, CODE 128, CODE 39, EAN 8, UPC-A, UPC-C, I2of5, 2of5, CODE 93 and CODABAR.

‘QuaggaJS’ implements the following steps:

1. Read the image and convert it into a binary representation
2. Find the location and rotation of barcode
3. Decode the barcode

We wanted to allow the users to scan barcodes using their laptop as well as mobile phones. We kept specific benchmarks about camera resolutions, and if a user’s laptop or mobile camera met those benchmarks, then they could scan the barcode. We also required an alternative solution for users with older mobile phones which did not have cameras that met the benchmark. We decided to let the user choose any of three options to enter a food on the portal:

1. Live scan: using the mobile camera to scan the barcode
2. File upload: upload an image of the barcode on the portal
3. Manual entry: enter the barcode numerically

After entering the barcode, the user can look up various information about the item if it is in the library. The library includes valuable information such as calories, portion sizes, and nutritional content. Our goal was to make food tracking on the application very user friendly, and using barcode scanning we managed to provide the user a very quick and easy way to track packaged foods.

Feel free to contact us if you are interested in a similar implementation for your application.

There are four points that we consider when defining our testing strategy.

1. The first point is determining which devices and browsers will be used for testing. This is entirely dependent on the project requirements, and the development team analyses the application use cases to make the selection based on the following principles:

• For web applications, we usually test on the three most commonly used browsers (Chrome, Firefox and Safari). If time allows for more extensive testing, we will also test on other browsers like Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge.
• For Device testing of web applications, we choose the devices based on the functional requirements and priorities of the applications. In other words, if a web application is supposed to run especially well on any particular device we focus the testing on the corresponding commonly used browsers with the appropriate resolution. For instance, for the Android platform we focus on Chrome and Firefox, whereas for the iOS platform we focus on Safari and Chrome.
• For Native applications we directly test the application on the devices themselves, rather than using an emulator. This provides the most accurate feedback in terms of functionality and application performance.

2. There are instances where the project timeline and/or budget limits the amount of testing that we can do. It is very important to identify these situations, and to develop strategies in order to still deliver high quality software to the client. At MetaSys we handle these cases by focusing on high level general testing, which covers most of the UI and the functional part of the applications.
3. For functional testing of web applications, we utilise automation as much as possible. For repetitive testing of browsers, we usually design automated test cases. Using automation not only helps save the time of the testers, it is also very useful for retesting resolved issues. We use the Selenium WebDriver tool for automation testing and the Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2019 and the Microsoft Test Management tools for bug reporting and test case management.
4. For web applications, we put a strong emphasis on performance, in addition to the ‘look and feel’., The speed of the app is one of the most important factors that determines the user experience. For performance testing we use the Apache JMeter and New Relic tools which give very accurate results regarding the application performance. The New Relic tool also provides an analysis of database query level problems, and gives many more reports and real time graphs. This helps significantly with troubleshooting, and improving performance.

At MetaSys, We have a team of experienced Dot Net developers who build solutions using Microsoft technologies. We have done web application development using ASP.Net Core, .Net & ASP.Net Framework, Visual Studio, Microsoft SQL Server, MVC, Team Foundation Server, Javascript and JQuery. For more info. https://www.metasyssoftware.com/dot-net

Our experience with wkhtmltopdf

In the past, we generally used wkhtmltopdf to implement pdf functionality in our web applications. It was a practical choice, as it is an open-source tool with which we have extensive development experience already. The converter tool is given a destination file path and a URL of the report web page. Since the download button is contained within the generated report in web page form, the pdf conversion adds an unnecessary report generation step. To avoid this inefficiency, we wanted to explore different pdf converter options.

Our experience with NReco

We came across a library in a NuGet package called .Net Reusable Components (NReco), which contains a collection of reusable components for the .NET platform including a pdf conversion tool. The only input the tool requires is either a URL to the web page or the report contents as an HTML string. NReco is easier to implement, requiring only two to three lines of code. Even reports containing charts and images created using a third-party tool can be rendered to a pdf without additional coding. All CSS, fonts and images in HTML are supported by the NReco conversion tool.

The NReco tool is easy to install, and performs efficiently, taking much less time than wkhtmltopdf to generate a pdf. Although we currently only use NReco for pdf conversion, many other tools are available.

A major advantage of NReco, is that it supports both the .Net framework and .Net Core. Since we are looking to upgrade a number of our applications to .Net Core, it saves us considerable development time if we can use the existing code for pdf conversion.

To conclude, using NReco instead of wkhtmltopdf for pdf conversion has many benefits including easy implementation, performance, and compatibility with .Net Core.

About us

Our team of .Net developers have successfully delivered applications using ASP.Net Core, .Net & ASP.Net framework, Visual Studio, Microsoft SQL Server, Team Foundation Server, Javascript and JQuery. For more info – https://www.metasyssoftware.com/dot-net