Education

Education

A Crisp Guide on Differences between Kanban and Scrum

Effective agile software development calls for seamless integration, communication, and collaboration between various teams such as software development, testing, and operations. Kanban and Scrum are two of the most popular methodologies that provide ways of doing it effectively. Both Scrum and Kanban are iterative work systems based on process flows and aim to reduce waste. They are adaptive, transparent, and reduce project inefficiencies. While Kanban is a continuous and fluid methodology, Scrum is based on short, and structured work Sprints. Let’s understand these two in more detail. Scrum – In More Depth Scrum is more closely associated with Agile methodology, designed to adapt and handle frequent changes in complex projects. It is a tool that lets organizations arrange work into small and manageable pieces so that they can be completed by cross-functional teams within a specified timeline. The precise timeline or period, which is usually 2-4 weeks, is called Sprint. The entire workflow is broken down, and visually represented into smaller parts called Stories, and corresponded on the Scrum Board. Each Story moves on the Board from Backlog or the to-do list to the Work-in-Progress (WIP). The Scrum process is planned, organized, and optimized by three principle or prescribed roles: Scrum is built on the three principles of: Scrum has five core values: Each member associated with the Scrum methodology has a sense of ownership of the project that is marked by open, and clear communication. The Scrum process is: Stages of the Scrum process are: When to use Scrum? Scrum is best used for feature-driven development work with definitive release goals, and milestones, where priorities may not change as much over time. Kanban – In More Depth Kanban is a tool to help organize the Development Operation to achieve greater efficiencies. Kanban also breaks down work into manageable pieces using a Kanban Board letting team members visualize workflow and progress. The visualizing process in Kanban limits Work-in-Progress, and moves quickly from ‘in-progress’ to ‘done’ tags. The process accommodates continual incoming requests of varying sizes, and priorities. The main thrust of using the Kanban tool is to let team members go with the flow rather than take control of the flow as in Scrum. The Continual workflow structure of Kanban aims at keeping the team nimble, and ready to adapt to changing priorities. Work items here are organized on the Kanban Board, and each work item is represented by Cards. Workflow stages for Kanban are: The most effective part of Kanban is that it depicts the way a team works and delivers: Kanban cadence does not have any fixed task delivery time as in Scrum but releases its work as and when it’s ready, without waiting for any Sprint review milestone. The key metrics of Kanban are: Unlike Scrum, there is no Kanban master. The tool encourages collective responsibility to keep the development process smoothly operative. The entire team owns the Kanban Board, and jointly shares responsibilities to collaborate and deliver tasks on the Kanban Board. The Kanban process is: Kanban aims at gradually improving all processes and operations, from software development to its sales and procurement. The process follows these principles: Continual improvement is at the very core of the Kanban methodology, helping teams measure effectiveness by analyzing, and tracking flow along with quality lead time. When to use Kanban? Kanban is best used to accommodate incoming pieces or requests such as changes and enhancements for projects with widely varying priorities. Summing it up Scrum provides a great way of completing work with its iterative, and incremental work methods. Scrum team members have defined roles in the process that they are to complete within the Sprint or the set time. Kanban team members emphasize work-in-progress and are open to customization of work in progress. The process involves continual improvement with every piece of incremental work getting completed. Each member of the team owns collective responsibility towards a project and the overall improvement of the organization as a whole. The choice between the two depends on the unique business needs and goals.

Education

Here Is Everything You Need to Know About Cross-Platform Mobile App Development

Platform-agnostic applications are all the rage these days. With the plethora of platform-specific releases and updates and an ever-growing inclination towards multi-platform usage, creating a single app that can work across them is undoubtedly a lucrative and necessary endeavor.  As per Statista’s 2021 developer survey, around 42% of the global developers are working on cross-platform apps, with top frameworks like Ionic, Flutter, Xamarin, and PhoneGap being the choice of almost 73% of developers. But before we get into the nitty-gritty of implementing cross-platform apps, let’s understand the what and why of cross-platform mobile app development. What is Cross-Platform App Development? Cross-platform mobile application development is a software development process where a common code base is used to develop applications that can run on multiple mobile operating systems, such as Android and iOS. The idea is to facilitate wider access to an enterprise’s application’s resources. With a common code base, products developed on the same platform look and feel similar. A user gets a similar experience irrespective of their mobile device, which is precisely what enterprises aim for in the UX-centric economy.  No wonder much of the credit for this approach and philosophy of mobile development goes to the proliferation of progressive web applications (PWAs), rapid mobile app development (RMAD), and SaaS solutions. What are the Benefits of Cross-Platform Mobile App Development? With a cross-platform all, regardless of the platform, mobile users experience a consistent interface with standard navigation, style sheets, visual appeal, and control.  For Businesses, the benefits are many, such as Single Team, Multiple Fronts: A cross-platform app development team usually works with a common codebase, making them highly efficient and economical. Plus, the entire team is always on the same page, unlike working in a fragmented setup. Access and Reach: As mentioned earlier, access and reach are the two core goals of cross-platform mobile development. In the highly fragmented digital industry, enterprises can avail themselves of a larger and more lucrative user base by simply developing a single app that would work on multiple platforms. Faster Development: Cross-platform frameworks help developers create apps for multiple platforms without having to use platform-specific APIs in the code. Furthermore, cross-platform applications are developed using modern and matured frameworks, which means they’re up to date with the latest design trends. Both these facets expedite the development processes and make them less time-consuming. Code Reusability and Maintainability: All the source code, libraries, and APIs developed for one platform can be reused for other platforms. This practice reduces the amount of time and money spent on developing an app from scratch. Cross-Platform vs. Native Mobile App Development As opposed to platform-agnosticism exhibited by cross-platform apps, native mobile app development implies that each platform is coded individually for specific features and a user experience that is crafted specifically for each. Naturally, this approach offers the best user experience and tends to be more resourceful — precisely why 58% of the developers worldwide work on this model. However, this approach also carries with it several drawbacks. Every change made to the native code must be separately released across all platforms, adding to the development time and cost. Also, this approach is not ideal for small or new businesses, as they would have difficulty taking on the additional cost, upfront investment, and risk involved in managing separate codebases and associated teams. When Should You Consider Developing a Cross-Platform Strategy? Cross-platform development is a cost-effective and necessary practice. It clearly exhibits itself as the future of mobile app development, and businesses are already upping the ante. That said, here are some scenarios where you must create a cross-platform mobile app. You Know You Would Scale A cross-platform mobile app will be the right choice if you have a fair idea of how much traffic you can expect the app to generate in the forthcoming period. This is because it will help you: Avoid re-engineering a new codebase for each platform Ensure a single-to-multiple solution that would deliver a unified, consistent experience for the user You Know Your Customer Base is Scattered Your cross-platform mobile app will be the optimal choice if you have a pretty well-defined customer base that is scattered across multiple platforms. For example, as an eCommerce brand, you wouldn’t want to miss out on a relatively small iOS user base when their average eCommerce transaction amounts to $32.94 — 3X the amount of those shopping on Android. You Have a Good Development Partner Cross-development can be extremely challenging considering that a number of issues such as performance inhibition, sub-optimal UX, challenging API integration, and debugging intricacies are bound to crop up at one point or another. Therefore, you should only embark on this development journey if you have a trusted and reliable development partner with ample experience in creating cross-platform mobile apps.  Leverage Intellore’s Expertise to Ensure High-Grade Cross-Platform Mobile Apps As a leader in enterprise mobile app development, Intellore’s cross-platform mobile app development strategies are built on the principle of simple design and easy implementation. This entails using leading industry frameworks (such as Flutter, ReactNative, Xamarin and Ionic) and technologies (such as PHP, NodeJS, ASP .Net Core, HTML5, CSS, jQuery Mobile, JAX, and Angular) that developers can leverage to seamlessly replicate the same app functionality on multiple platforms. To know more about cross-platform mobile app development or to discuss your next project with our experts, drop us a line here. . Recent Blogs:

Education

Your Big Data Needs Cloud

Companies on the digital transformation journey are often found adopting big data technologies to make sense of the ballooning volumes of data being generated every day. Big data helps organizations in overcoming operational bottlenecks and improving business efficiency and it also allows them to focus on improving their sales and growing their business. But relying on on-premises systems to carry out big data analytics is not going to take organizations far. Instead, using Cloud as a foundation to leverage the resources and services needed is a more efficient way of unearthing insights from data every day – thus making big data technologies accessible and affordable to every enterprise. Big data and Cloud – The perfect union The volume, velocity, and variety of data that needs to be analyzed daily are swelling with each passing day. To process and analyze this data and extract timely insights from it, you require massive amounts of storage – which on-premises systems, unfortunately, fail to offer. Relying on on-premises systems will compel you to either constantly carry out infrastructure upgrades, add more capacity to your existing data warehouse, or power up additional servers to cater to your rapidly growing analytics requirements. Regardless of what course you choose, your infrastructure eventually will not be able to keep up. This is where the Cloud comes in, enabling you to process and analyze your big data faster – without storage issues – and thus leading to insights that can boost business performance and transform your organization. With Cloud, you can Defining the right Cloud strategy for your big data projects Using the Cloud as the foundation for your big data analytics projects can ensure continued access to the infrastructure needed to unearth vital big data insights. Here are some tips that can help you define the right Cloud strategy for your big data initiatives: As companies accelerate their digital transformation efforts to keep up with disruptions from conventional and unconventional frontiers, they are quickly realizing that the only way to drive value is by leveraging massive volumes of data. Ramping up the ability to make better business decisions in real-time is the need of the hour, which is why the shift to big data in the Cloud isn’t surprising. Given the numerous benefits the powerful combination of big data analytics and Cloud computing can bring, it is time to embrace the two technologies and change the way your organization does business and achieves its objectives.

Education

How Embedded and Software Testing are Different (and Why you Need Embedded Experts for that)

Today almost every product – be it a vehicle or high-tech medical equipment – works on embedded systems. Embedded systems are made up of tightly coupled hardware and software. So, if we take an example of a train with an automatic door, the software controls when the door opens and closes. Trends such as the Internet of Things (IoT), connected devices, and self-driving vehicles have further increased the demand for embedded systems. Almost 90% of processors are a part of embedded systems. The market size of embedded systems is expected to reach $116.2 billion by 2025. Given how critical embedded systems are in today’s world, companies need to invest in embedded testing. Embedded testing enables companies to test the software and hardware of embedded solutions. It helps companies identify and fix bugs in the hardware and software of critical systems and increases their chances of receiving the required certifications. Most importantly, considering that embedded systems are used for life-saving and mission-critical purposes, testing has to be done carefully. A single miss could pose a threat to someone’s life too. Hence, companies must remember that it’s very different from software testing and approach it accordingly. How are Embedded Testing and Software Testing Different? Embedded testing is quite different from software testing. Types of testing To begin with, software testing is limited to the software only. In embedded testing, the testing team needs to test both the software and the hardware of the system. Software testing mainly happens on client-server, web, and mobile-based applications. In software testing, companies do different types of tests such as accessibility, acceptance, integration, automated, black-box, and many more. Embedded testing goes beyond the software. In fact, it is done mainly on hardware. Software testing tests the functionalities of the applications, while embedded testing is focused on the hardware’s behavior. This doesn’t mean that software testing is sidelined or deprioritized in embedded testing. What it means is that the dependency on hardware is more. Product launch In the modern software development model, software testing is done along with development. So, the bugs are identified and fixed at an early stage. It helps the developers to build a better quality and secure product by design. This also helps the companies to launch the product quickly as development and testing happen simultaneously. In some cases of embedded testing, the software cannot be tested until the hardware is ready. Sometimes the custom tools are unavailable. The testers are compelled to wait till the late stages to test the product. The tight coupling of software and hardware might also lead to product launch delays. Bug fixing Another difference is that the bugs can be easily reproduced in software testing to allow testers to identify them and fix them confidently. However, the same method cannot be followed in embedded testing as the events have to be reproduced on the software and hardware level. The testers need to test every defect at a deeper level to find out the exact source. They have to collect more data to analyze the defects and may also have to alter the systems intentionally to fix the bugs. Testing method Unlike software testing, embedded testing relies mainly on manual testing. Considering that in embedded testing, both hardware and software are tested, automation testing could become complicated. However, it does not mean that the testing process cannot be automated. Testers could use modular and extensible testing environments to prevent any changes in the common hardware and software interface. In fact, testers could use specific automated testing tools that support the unique use case of embedded testing. This can help them perform embedded testing more efficiently and reduce the chances of errors that could potentially lead to life-threatening situations         Conclusion It’s clear that embedded testing has to be done differently to ensure that it is secure and functional. The skill sets would differ. Hence, companies need to work with a testing team that has expertise in testing embedded systems and ensuring that they are safe and compliant with the safety guidelines. It’s important to partner with a company that has specialized tools to test embedded systems. They must also follow the protocols and policies strictly. At Intellore, we help companies in designing, developing, and testing embedded products. We also offer independent testing services that are tailor-made to the company’s business needs to ensure their compliance and safety. To know more, contact us.

Business Models
Education

Intelligent Business Models for Intelligent Buildings

Intelligent Buildings are quickly becoming the norm. By combining the latest advances in cloud, connectivity, analytics, and physical design, they enable better visibility, greater energy efficiency, as well as improved safety for owners, operators, and occupants. Quick and easy access to real-time actionable insights delivers additional control over day-to-day operations while enhancing long-term outcomes. But, establishing Intelligent Buildings is not just about integrating cloud and IoT; organizations need to be able to devise intelligent business models, to be able to drive maximum value and returns from their investments. The Rise of Intelligent Buildings The growing focus on sustainable architecture and green design is the main driver that is driving the rapid growth of Intelligent Buildings. As concerns around global warming and climate change escalate, Intelligent Buildings pave the way for reduced energy consumption while allowing organizations to seamlessly integrate various building subsystems, which typically operate in silos, as they are supplied and installed by different vendors. Through sustainable design approaches, these buildings help preserve energy while offering new levels of insight and control. In addition, they also offer much-needed space flexibility along with high levels of safety and cost-effectiveness. In the long run, these features translate into highly efficient operations, optimized resource management, better space utilization, and greater occupant productivity. The Need for Intelligent Business Models Transforming urban buildings into Intelligent Buildings that pave the way for a sustainable and productive future is no longer just about fancy real estate. Today, the focus has shifted from cutting-edge smart building products towards offering unmatched intelligent experiences. In a green era, Intelligent Buildings need to enable companies to launch innovative business models where, instead of just the real estate, companies can charge for experience and lifestyles as well. Let’s look at some of the different business models building owners and operators can adopt to set Intelligent Buildings in motion: The shift towards intelligent models is quickly picking steam, as building owners and operators attempt to introduce an array of intelligent capabilities to keep up green energy requirements while also ensuring future revenue growth. This is increasingly imminent in the post-pandemic era, where most businesses are re-evaluating their strategies and seeking ways to enable on-demand, customized, and scalable access to space, amenities, and services. Instead of having “location” at the focus of every business strategy, operators now need to connect users with services, so location becomes deprioritized, and service becomes prioritized.

DevOps
Education

Applying DevOps in Product Development – Benefits and Best Practices

Rapidly changing market conditions often force businesses to think out of the box and come up with innovative solutions. Today, this innovation is mostly centered around digital transformation initiatives wherein businesses leverage technology to stay competitive in the market. Irrespective of the domain, every business now needs to think and act like a tech company to fulfill the desires of customers in a thriving digital economy. Businesses are not new to software. But the reality today is that enterprises need to ideate, build, and deploy digital applications faster into the market and with zero scopes for quality compromise. Every enterprise software today needs to be treated as a product that is continuously upgraded or evolved to suit the dynamic needs of the business. While moving into continuous product development or engineering paradigm of technology use, enterprises primarily must synchronize activities between development teams and the operations team who manage the technology ecosystem including infrastructure. The best methodology that promotes a seamless blend of product development and IT operations is DevOps. In fact, DevOps may be perceived less as a methodology and more as a cultural change that empowers collaboration and unification of objectives between different teams engaged in building software and taking it to the market. It is predicted that the global DevOps market size will witness a growth of over What are the benefits of DevOps in Product Development? DevOps is a game-changing factor in modern-day product development initiatives for enterprise software. In addition to being the core unification strategy that encourages cross-functional collaboration between IT operations and the application development teams, here are a few key benefits that businesses leveraging DevOps in their software product development journey can realize: What are the best practices for DevOps implementation in a product development scenario? DevOps, as we know, is a philosophy that promotes faster software development without compromise in quality. To ensure success it is important for enterprises to take the right roadmap to bring DevOps into their technology landscape. Here are some best practices: DevOps is at the heart of modern product innovations and software-defined business operations. Enterprises that thrive to leverage the several benefits that DevOps offers can stay ahead of the competition. These new business models can help building owners and operators enhance bottom line benefits, shifting the focus from offering just physical space to offering unmatched smart digital services. Irrespective of what model you choose, integrating and leveraging emerging technology to create unmatched Intelligent Building experiences is the way forward.

Evaluating a company
Education

How To Evaluate an Embedded Product Design and Development Company?

Today, a lot of research and development happens in the field of embedded products and their design. It is no wonder that the global embedded systems market is expected to be worth over USD 116.2 billion by 2025. The rising demand for new digital experiences that blur the line between software and hardware is the key factor behind the growth of embedded systems. As more businesses explore the possibilities of leveraging embedded product capabilities, the number of organizations offering embedded product design and development services has also increased exponentially. But then comes the challenge – how to evaluate an embedded product design and development company? From the vast number of providers available, it is important to partner and invest in the right candidate. But most businesses face difficulties in qualifying an option for their product development. Here are 5 criteria that businesses can use to pick the right embedded product design and development company for building their ambitious offering: Knowledgeable Domain Expertise Embedded systems find use cases in most domains. Your business needs to first finalize on the area or target customer domain where your embedded offering will be put to use. Then the next step is to evaluate the expertise level of service providers in that particular niche or domain. For example, if you are on the journey to build an embedded healthcare product, it is highly advisable to pick a partner that has built similar products for companies in the healthcare space or has expertise in building embedded solutions for a different niche in healthcare. This will ensure that the final product being built is compliant with unique demands from regulators and empowers successful customer experience metrics in your domain. Integrated Hardware and Software Experience Embedded product design and development is successful when there is the right balance of software and hardware intelligence that collaborates well within the operational ecosystem to deliver amazing customer experiences. When evaluating a partner company for building your ambitious embedded offering, there should be a clear understanding of how equipped they are from a hardware and software perspective. The partnering company needs to have specialized software tools for designing functionality, reliable and quality certified hardware components with handling and management expertise, trained or certified professionals to build the collaborative experience, follow recognized protocols and policies in embedded architecture, and so on. Proven Track Record One of the best and most important facets of evaluating a partner for embedded product design and development is to verify their credentials through proven past engagements. Request for references and portfolio of their work, research and seek recommendations from their past customers especially those operating in similar or related domains, and verify their work schedules, processes, and policies through comparing with internationally recognized standards. Innovative Outreach Not all businesses may have an end-to-end vision about their embedded offering. This results in gaps in product journeys wherein competitors with more forward-thinking approaches can win customers. To counter this, businesses can turn to partners who have established credentials for innovation. An example could be a dedicated R&D practice or COE from the partner that helps identify more use cases, recommends new features, and leverages more innovative hardware or software tools and architecture, etc., to build more appealing end-user experiences. A partner that can bring innovation to the heart of your embedded product design and development initiative is always a higher priority than those that lag in innovation capabilities. Sustainable Development Approach The key to the longevity of your embedded offering in the market doesn’t always lie in the celebrated feature list, but in how well it is able to sustain in dynamic market conditions. There is a need to constantly adapt to changing consumer demands, integrate newer technology in both hardware and software as they evolve, and accommodate newer use cases for as long as possible with minimal investment. This requires designing and building a product that has a sustainable architecture that can be flexibly extended or enhanced to meet new demands in the future. To achieve this, the partner you choose needs to have experience in architecting embedded products from scratch, envision their progression journey, and build a roadmap that can easily accommodate changes over time. Designing and developing an embedded product for today’s digital economy requires talent, technology, and the right vision. Bringing together these facets on their own will be a daunting task for businesses but they can always partner with vendors who excel in these areas. By evaluating their credibility using the five criteria we have outlined, businesses can kickstart their ambitious move into the embedded product development space, and can guarantee results in the fastest time frame possible.

Smart Service World
Education

Introduction to Industrie 4.0 and Smart Service World

Recently, Intellore was invited to speak to the audience of sales & marketing professionals of a leading and well-established Pune-based company that manufactures products in dimensional metrology mainly for the automotive and other engineering industries. While the company’s sales staff had heard about Industrie 4.0 and Industrial IOT, they were curious to understand the terminology, gauge its impact on their industry and brainstorm its relevance in future-proofing their product roadmaps.   Narayan Gokhale – Head of Sales & Marketing at Intellore Systems delivered the key note address.   He started off by highlighting the big picture – How over the past 5 to 10 years conventional companies (industry participants) have been disrupted – by highlighting the staggering market capitalization of “network brands” such as Facebook, Google, Amazon, Uber, Airbnb etc. and comparing them with “traditional brands” such as Hertz, AT&T, Starwood and Walmart, emphasizing that “Network Orchestrators” deliver value through connectivity. Digital networks and platforms are eating the world by changing all the rules of business, including the sources of value, the ways that organizations deliver it, and the mental models or beliefs that guide organizations and their leaders. This transformation is creating problems for existing firms with established, non-digital, non-network business models.   By using this pitch and mixing with day-to-day examples, the digital transformation of the Mfg. Industry -namely, Industrie 4.0 and Smart Service World topics were introduced. The world as we know and experience it today has been shaped by three major technological revolutions. The fourth industrial revolution promises to marry the worlds of production and network connectivity in an “Internet of Things” making “INDUSTRIE 4.0” a reality.  TWO of 10 “Future Projects” identified by the German government as part of its High-Tech Strategy 2020, the “INDUSTRIE 4.0” project and its successor “SMART SERVICE WORLD – Internet-based services for the economy” project, represents a major opportunity for Germany to establish itself as an integrated industry lead market and provider. Both these put together is also called as “The Internet of Things and Services”  Germany’s position as an embedded systems technology leader gives birth to enabling cyber-physical system (CPS) technologies which ingeniously marry the digital virtual world with the real world. Cyber-physical production systems (CPPS) made up of smart machines, logistics systems and production facilities allow peerless ICT-based integration for vertically integrated and networked manufacturing.   Narayan went on to give an example based on the project that Intellore is doing for a customer (OEM), by highlighting various stages of their digital transformation journey –  “product or an embedded-system” to “networked-embedded-system” to “cyber-physical system (CPS)” and finally to what Industrie 4.0 calls “Internet of Things, Data and Services”, culminating in to OEM’s new offering of “Product-as-a-Service (PaaS)”. Many North American companies call this concept as “Product-Service Hybrids”. He referred to another project that Intellore is executing by highlighting how their customers’ “offerings” evolved from “Product or Equipment” to “Equipment Services” to “Information Services” and simultaneously   their “Go-to-Market (GTM) Approach” evolving from “pre-digital product line” to “digital product line” to “new market segment” again leading to a new business model of “Product-as-a-Service (PaaS)”  As the company is yet to embark on its Industrie 4.0 (digital transformation) journey, Narayan advised them to refer to “Guideline Industrie 4.0: Guiding principles for the implementation of Industrie 4.0 in small and medium sized businesses” from the VDMA (German Engineering Federation) that is regarded as a practical tool for the identification and implementation of company-specific approaches to Industrie 4.0.   He specifically advised them to look at “The Toolbox Industrie 4.0” that is a key element of this guideline as it combines the different application levels of Industrie 4.0 in reference to product innovations and production-related technical applications. The application levels are each broken down into five technological and sequential development stages. The Toolbox Industrie 4.0 becomes the starting point for classifying the fields of expertise offered by the company and thus serves as a basis for new ideas during an Industrie 4.0 implementation process.  Narayan concluded by saying that tomorrow’s business economy would undoubtedly be dominated by “network orchestrators” and reiterated not to take anything for granted, as their competition might come from unexpected quarters and disrupt their industry’s conventional business model. He challenged the audience to rethink how value is created for their customers – can their products can be sold as “Gauging-as-a-Service” or “Metrology-as-a-Service”?  The Managing Director proposed a vote of thanks and assured the audience that the transformation will start from the top leadership team and announced that henceforth Industrie 4.0 to be topmost on their agenda of all internal meetings, especially for R & D, product management and marketing functions.  

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