Vedran

Business Analysis

The first thing that pops into most people’s minds when someone mentions the term “design” is most likely something visual. The point of this post, however, is that that “visual” aspect is just one (admittedly important) chapter in the wider story about design and, that that particular story includes a few more important chapters that often get overlooked.<hr>Throughout this blog, we’ll try to inspect and analyze the process by which the software solutions get designed, and place the UX/UI design in its rightfully deserved and crucial place within that context.Additionally, and arguably even more importantly, we’ll try to identify another crucial, and often overlooked component of the overall design process — the functional design, and see how we can use this newfound knowledge to “level us up” in regard to our peers and competitors.We’ll start our analysis by finding out *why* the software solutions get designed in the first place.We’re in the business of solving problemsOne of the basic premises that we’ll base our discussion upon is this:Anyone who has a problem (that they are aware of), will be willing to compensate someone for solving that particular problem, where the compensation would be proportional to the individual’s perceived importance of that problemThat is really just a fancy (and admittedly, a bit convoluted) way of saying that the money in any business (including the IT agency business) is typically made by solving customers’ problems and getting compensated for the effort. Note that that statement holds true even if the said customers had no idea that they had a problem until you presented them with the solution in the form of your new product.So if we agree that we make money primarily by solving problems, we then need to figure out what exact problems are we solving for *our* clients?Well, there are two main ones. The first one is fairly obvious, they have a business idea — ie. an idea of how to solve some real-world problems that their potential customers might have (whether they know it or not) and as a consequence, get the compensation from them — but they don’t have any means of embodying that solution it in a form of an IT system such as web or mobile application.Or put in another way, they cannot create a technology-based “idea vehicle” for their business idea by themselves. That particular problem we can obviously easily solve for them and get paid for doing so, but, there is another problem, perhaps one that is not so obvious, but is nevertheless extremely important for our discussion.That second problem is the fact that our clients are typically not technical experts(*), and have rarely (or ever) engaged themselves in the software development projects in any significant depth, but their career paths (or salary bonuses) are more often than not, linked to the success of that software development project.As a consequence, they feel quite like “fish out of water” when it comes to designing and developing the technical idea vehicles(*). And to exasperate the problem further, IT projects in most organizations tend to be of a “revenue-generating” or at least “revenue preserving” kind, and as a consequence, their success is often linked to the career paths of the people involved (those whose projects tend to fail, usually fare worse in the long run than those whose project tend to succeed).And the proverbial “cherry on top” of all that is the fact they know damn well that most IT projects fail, at least to some degree.That’s quite a “pickle” to find oneself in.So, let’s do a quick recap here. What we’ve postulated so far is that we make money by solving our clients’ problems and that our potential clients typically have the following set of these:&nbsp;<ol style="list-style-type:decimal;"><li>They have a business idea (developed to a certain degree) but they have no internal means of embodying that idea into a technical product — ie. they cannot build “an idea vehicle” for their business idea themselves,</li><li>They are aware that they are not experts(*) in the art of defining, designing, and building a technical product, but that the outcome of the product/project they are assigned to will affect their career or their salary/bonuses at least partially,</li><li>They know that the IT project tends to be brittle and more often than not fail for numerous reasons.</li></ol>&nbsp;(*) although some might consider themselves to be technical experts and even can have an actual technical background — unless they can produce a comprehensive a set of functionally complete and consistent requirements themselves (and I have yet to meet a client that can do that) — they still have the same problem.Luckily for them (and us — as we get our money for solving other people’s problems, remember?), all those problems fall well within our area of expertise, provided that we understand the process of how solutions get designed and can use it to our (and our clients) advantage.<h2 style="margin-left:0px;">The “solution space” of an engineering problem</h2>Let’s consider how we’d go about finding a solution for the first problem stated in the previous chapter (we’ll deal with the latter two in the next post as this is a multi-post topic).Let’s restate the problem in a form of a task or an assignment – ie. state what we need to do in order to solve our particular problem:<blockquote>Define, design and develop a “business idea vehicle” that embodies the client’s business idea in form of a IT system that is functionally complete and consistent, visually and ergonomically pleasing and of optimal technical quality for the scenario it would eventually be used in the “real world”</blockquote>That is an engineering problem right there, and a thing with engineering problems is that they always have multiple solutions. So we’ll introduce a new term here, and we’ll use it heavily for the remainder of the argument in this text— we’ll call a set of all possible solutions for an engineering problem a “solution space” for that particular problem.<figure class="image"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/media/11805b96771464bf527a17a9d4f2903b.png"></figure>Solution space for the “two-bedroom house” problem<h2 style="margin-left:0px;">The design is navigating and molding the solution space</h2>It stands to reason that if there is a number of possible solutions within the solution space of a given problem, and if we typically select and develop just one of those possible solutions, then there must be some way of choosing a particular subset of solutions from that space and even molding that actual space to our liking.Well, there is a way and what I propose here is the following:Any design(*) process is the process of navigating through and/or molding the solution space of the particular problem.or alternativelyThe process of selecting individual solutions form the solution space of a given problem is called (solution) design(*).(*) Note that the term “design” here is used in its broadest meaning and since the term is heavily “loaded” to mean “UX/UI design”, I typically try to use the term “solution design” instead. But I wanted to point out what I believe the design process is — when considered in its most abstract form.We’ll come back to this statement later, but first, in order to understand the position of the design in a wider context of the software development process, we need to define the process itself.Any software (and not just software) development process goes through the following four basic stages or steps: (they can be, and sometimes are, named differently, or decomposed into more fine-grained sub-steps, but for our purpose, this simple flow will do just fine):<ol style="list-style-type:decimal;"><li>Discovery (the process of specifying the “problem” (business idea) in enough detail so that the solution for the problem can be designed. — defines the “what”s and occasionally some of the “why”s),</li><li>Design (the process of selecting the preferred solutions from the solution space of the problem defined in the discovery phase, composed of three components — functional, visual, and technical —defines the “how”s),</li><li>Development (it’s…well, development… and also it’s out of the scope of this post, so we’ll happily ignore it for now),</li><li>Delivery (although there are some connections with the discovery and design stages through the written acceptance criteria, the delivery is also outside the scope of this post, so we’ll ignore it too).</li></ol>There is nothing complicated or particularly enlightening about the process and its steps depicted above, except for one thing, and I’ll state it again, clearly in case you’ve missed it — because it’s extremely important.The design of any technical (IT) solution is not a monolithic process but is rather composed of three distinctive design processes: functional, visual, and technical. Each of those process involves different experts within your organization.<h2 style="margin-left:0px;">We’re all good developers (and UX/UI designers)</h2>At this point we should have a fairly clear idea of why and how we design the software solutions and so now I want to present you with one of the key propositions of this text:We all do the development stage of the software development process more or less equally well, the thing that make each of us different is the solutions we choose to develop.What I mean by it is that the software development market has matured, long gone are the days of the 2010s and inept UIs and untested PHP4 spaghetti code FTP’d to the webroot folder of the default apache installation on a shared hosting account. These days, pretty much everyone has decent internal processes, uses appropriate and modern tech stacks, performs automated testing and CI/CD, and can design and produce industry-standard UIs and the UX that goes alongside them.So if we all do development comparatively well, that leaves us pretty much only with the processes of defining the problem and selecting the solutions from the solution space as the obvious candidates for the things that we might want to develop further within our organization if we want to distinguish ourselves from our peers. And since I’m stating things left and right here, I’ll claim the following is also true:The design phase of any software solution development process, happens for any project in it’s entirety, regardless of whether we, as an organization, are aware (and in control) of it’s individual aspects (functional, visual and technical) or not.So, if we combine the last two premises, what logically follows (at least for me), is:<ol style="list-style-type:decimal;"><li>Design (and especially its functional aspects) is the area where we stand to gain most in the context of our overall competitiveness — since in other areas it’s much harder to offer something different than our competition,</li><li>It makes sense to master the process that makes us individual and raise ourselves above the group of our peers and that also happens regardless of whether we control it or not (with unstable and unreliable results in the latter case).</li></ol>&nbsp;And that neatly brings us back to the opening statements of this post, as for most, the design process is synonymous with the UX/UI design, but what I’ve hopefully demonstrated here is that UX/UI design is just one (very important) part of the overall process of the solution design, and there is another, often neglected one. The functional design.<h2 style="margin-left:0px;">Conclusion and summary (the first one)</h2>The functional design is a topic in itself, and it is very reliant on the skillset of the person performing it (spoiler alert, it’s someone almost but not entirely like a business analyst), and therefore we’ll address it in our next post.To wrap things up for this post, however, we’ll summarize what we’ve established so far, and then we’ll (hopefully) build on that foundation later:<ol style="list-style-type:decimal;"><li>We solve problems for our clients — and that’s how we earn our money,</li><li>The problems we solve are of an engineering kind — since what we build are technology-based “idea vehicles”,</li><li>Every engineering problem has multiple solutions, and the set of all solutions to a given problem composes what’s called the “solution space” for that particular problem,</li><li>Design is the process of navigating and molding the solutions space and has three aspects — functional, visual/ergonomic, and technical,</li><li>We all do development well, what sets us apart is which solutions we choose for development, and that is determined by the design process. Or in other words, the quality and versatility of our design process is what sets us apart from our competition,</li><li>All three aspects of the design process will happen for any development project, regardless of whether we control them or not, the only one we typically control is the visual aspect, in a form of the UX/UI design.</li></ol>If all that holds true then it makes a lot of sense to become aware of the functional aspect of the solution design process and try to understand it and leverage it to our advantage.UPDATED - Check out <a href="https://undabot.com/blog/solution-design-first-part-2-the-functional-design/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Functional design </a>part 2 now!

solution-design-first-part-one-01.png

Solution design first! Part one.

Design

As a part of our mentorship engagement with Lumen Development, we had an opportunity to host a workshop for students participating in the competition in our offices. The competition consists of designing and developing a mobile or web application and is the biggest one of that type in Croatia.<hr style="margin-left:0px;">Apart from the workshop, Undabot also provides consultations to teams and shares advice and best practices to overcome all the challenges they might be facing.Since the teams are creating products from scratch, we decided to host a “UX 101” workshop to help them understand the process behind creating good products for a specific user group.During the 2.5-hour workshop, we covered the following topics:<ul><li>What is UX</li><li>UX processes</li><li>What is bad UX?</li><li>A group assignment</li><li>What are user interface platform guidelines</li><li>How and where to learn from</li></ul>We finished off with a short quiz on topics discussed during the workshop. The winner received a small gift.<h3 style="margin-left:0px;">1. What is UX</h3><blockquote>“User experience” encompasses all aspects of the end-users interaction with the company, its services, and its products.”</blockquote>&nbsp;We discussed the definition of UX by Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen, the pioneers in this field, and watched a short video of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BdtGjoIN4E">Don Norman explaining the term UX</a>.One important thing to keep in mind is that there is no “perfect UX”, simply because nothing in life can be perfect. In my opinion, life is easier when you embrace that fact. You can strive for perfection, do the best job you can, but you don’t need to stress too much about it. Our products are used mainly by users of a wide age range, and it is not easy to meet everybody’s needs seamlessly.Don Norman also says: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTE-v4RzRHs" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Focus on Results, Not on Perfect UX</a>.Psychology plays a big part in UX design. It helps understand the users and influence of human behaviour. Design psychology is a combination of social psychology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and human-computer interaction that approaches user experience design through the lens of human behaviour.Therefore, we discussed some of the principles and theories behind the design decisions backed by psychological principles. You can read more about each principle and theory on the <a href="https://lawsofux.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Laws of UX</a> website.Heuristic Aesthetic-Usability Effect Fitts’s Law Goal-Gradient Effect Hick’s Law Jakob’s Law Miller’s Law Parkinson’s LawPrinciple Doherty Threshold Occam’s Razor Pareto Principle Postel’s Law Tesler’s LawGestalt Law of Common Region Law of Proximity Law of Prägnanz Law of Similarity Law of Uniform Connectedness Law of Symmetry Law of Closure Law of ContinuationCognitive Bias Peak-End Rule Serial Position Effect Von Restorff Effect Zeigarnik EffectColor psychology Maslow’s hierarchy of needs<h4 style="margin-left:0px;">UX vs UI</h4>A crucial thing to explain to someone new to this field is the difference between UX and UI and why they are two completely different things.UX = User experience UI = User interfaceAs defined by <a href="https://www.interaction-design.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">the interaction design foundation</a>:<blockquote> “User interface (UI) design is the process designers use to build interfaces in software or computerised devices, focusing on looks or style. Designers aim to create interfaces which users find easy to use and pleasurable. UI design refers to graphical user interfaces and other forms—e.g., voice-controlled interfaces.”</blockquote>Simply put, UX is how it works, and UI is how it looks. Together they create an end product.<h3 style="margin-left:0px;">2. UX processes</h3>There are several stages in the UX life cycle. They primarily originate from the design thinking process and are defined in different ways but often overlap. The UX design is an iterative process, not a linear one, so it is not uncommon to go back and forth between some of the phases.<h4 style="margin-left:0px;">1. Product definition</h4>In this phase, the idea behind the product is explored and more clearly defined. This is usually done in collaboration with stakeholders, where the UX designers brainstorm with them and try to grasp the ideas and goals thoroughly.This phase usually includes stakeholder interviews and various sessions, defining the product in terms of what it is, defining who target users are, and their incentive to use the product.Business goals also need to be clearly defined. Concept sketching is also done during these workshops or sessions. Low-fidelity mockups of the product are often created as paper sketches.At the end of this phase, there should be a set of documentation containing the most critical agreed-upon things about the product. What follows is a kick-off meeting with the whole team that will be working on the product. The goals, scope, timeline, and everything connected to the product development are discussed during the meeting.<h4 style="margin-left:0px;">2. Research</h4>The next phase is user and market research, which outcomes should confirm the product’s value on the market and explore whether there is a user base potentially interested in using the product. Establishing the product concept value during this phase, early in the process, can save a lot of time and money.The scope and length of research depend on the complexity of the product, timeline, resources, etc. It can include user interviews to understand the users and competitive analysis to understand the industry, competition and identifying opportunities.<h4 style="margin-left:0px;">3. Analysis</h4>During this phase, insights are drawn from the data collected in the research phase. Designers create user personas that represent different types of users. The most important thing while creating personas is to use actual data and real users, not to develop users we think should use our product. They should represent our real target audience.Besides creating personas, user stories and storyboarding are often done. User stories help identify all the interactions with our product from the users’ perspective. An example of a user story can be, “As a user, I want to register successfully so I can use the product”.<h4 style="margin-left:0px;">4. Design</h4>When the analysis phases are finished, and everything is clearly defined, we move to the design phase. This phase contains different activities such as creating user flows, IA, wireframes, prototypes for the final UI, etc. At the end of this phase, a design system is created, containing components, a colour guide, a typography guide, etc. The design system helps developers implement the design correctly.<h4 style="margin-left:0px;">5. Validation</h4>During this phase, we see whether the design will be suitable for our users. It is usually done when the prototype is finished and can be done with a low-fidelity prototype created with wireframes or a high-fidelity prototype containing the final UI. Besides this, only small parts of the prototype or separate functionalities can be tested, depending on what we want to validate. Testing the prototype before development saves a lot of time and money. Changes are more easily implemented, and the product can be tested again and again until our users, and we are satisfied.&nbsp;Testing can be done with other team members and stakeholders, but testing with real users is the most important thing. It can be done live or online, with many software options available for online testing.We also discussed the most common activities and processes performed during these stages. They depend on the size of the project, the timeline, client needs and are therefore incorporated and chosen in the planning phase.Some of them are:<ul><li>UX Research</li><li>Information Architecture (IA)</li><li>User flows/journeys</li><li>Wireframing</li><li>Prototyping</li><li>Usability testing</li></ul><figure class="image"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/media/ef0b160cd47aeac0a67dea89904642d7.jpeg"></figure><h3 style="margin-left:0px;">3. Bad UX</h3>What is considered a bad UX? If the users can’t (simply) find what they are looking for or (simply) do what they want with our product, UX must be the problem. We put “simply” in brackets because sometimes UX is good, but the process is long and not so simple, for example, opening a bank account or buying insurance where you need to follow more steps.If our users get frustrated, stop using our product, or need help to figure out how to use it, UX is bad, and we need to reevaluate it.<h4 style="margin-left:0px;">Dark patterns</h4>Dark Patterns are UX/UI interactions created to deceive and mislead users into doing something they don’t intend to do.Some famous examples of dark patterns are Amazon’s deletion of an account that is challenging to find on their website, so users mostly give up and keep their accounts. Another example is Booking.com’s “only one room left”, “you’ve missed a good opportunity”, “the best price in town”, where you can’t be sure if this is true, and the point of using it is to create a sense of urgency with the users, so they don’t hesitate and buy something immediately. These are also often used on different webshops.A list of dark patterns was created by <a href="https://90percentofeverything.com/about/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Harry Brignull</a>, who also coined the term “dark patterns”.<ul><li>Bait and Switch</li><li>Disguised Ads</li><li>Forced Continuity</li><li>Friend Spam</li><li>Hidden Costs</li><li>Misdirection</li><li>Price Comparison Prevention</li><li>Privacy Zuckering</li><li>Roach Motel</li><li>Sneak into Basket</li><li>Trick Questions</li></ul>Read more about <a href="https://www.darkpatterns.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">dark patterns</a>.<h4 style="margin-left:0px;">How to improve bad UX?</h4><ul><li>understand the reasons behind bad UX</li><li>understand stakeholders’ vision</li><li>understand user goals and expectations</li><li>test, test, and test some more!</li></ul><h3 style="margin-left:0px;">4. Group assignment</h3>Participants formed groups and sketched low-fidelity wireframes on paper in 30 minutes. We gave them a fictional app and asked them to sketch a home screen and one other screen with the listed elements. One of the participants presented their solution, which we then commented on.It was a simple way for them to try out what they were learning about, and everybody was interested in the assignment and actively participated. These assignments are always good in workshops to assess whether the participants understood the matter covered.<figure class="image"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/media/047e9e5127e5db7ef160a8d3a3306e29.jpeg"></figure><h3 style="margin-left:0px;">5. What are user interface platform guidelines?</h3>Design guidelines are sets of recommendations on how to apply design principles. Designers use them to provide a positive user experience to their users.While designing mobile applications, we use <a href="https://material.io/design" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Material Design</a> by Google for Android and <a href="https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Human Interface Guidelines</a> by Apple for iOS. These guide us to use elements known to users, such as dialog box, navigation, buttons, etc., and help to adapt the design to all screen sizes. Using elements from the guidelines helps users, since they are familiar with them and don’t need to think about how to use something. The guidelines also help developers since they already have the code for the most often used elements.Using these guidelines is not a must, but to have good UX and happy users, it is recommended to follow some basic rules. One important thing to add is that following guidelines doesn’t mean that UI will be the same as every other app. There is still freedom in creating exciting and beautiful UI following them.One thing to keep in mind: you don’t have to know these rules by heart. You should read them and understand them, so you will know where to look when you need something.But while designing websites or web applications, these are some of the rules to follow to have good UX:<ul><li>Simplicity</li><li>Visual Hierarchy</li><li>Navigability</li><li>Consistency</li><li>Responsivity</li><li>Accessibility</li><li>Conventionality</li><li>Credibility</li></ul><h3 style="margin-left:0px;">6. How and where to learn</h3>There is a vast amount of information and resources available online to learn from. The number of different resources can sometimes get overwhelming, so we tried to help with our suggestions.Books <a href="https://sensible.com/dont-make-me-think/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Don’t make me think</a> by Steve Krug <a href="https://www.nngroup.com/books/design-everyday-things-revised/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The design of everyday things</a> by Don Norman <a href="https://uxmag.com/articles/100-things-every-designer-needs-to-know-about-people" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">100 things every designer needs to know about people</a> by Susan Weinschenk <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780123848697/observing-the-user-experience" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research</a> by Elizabeth Goodman, Mike Kuniavsky <a href="https://www.invisionapp.com/inside-design/about-face-essentials-interaction-design/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design </a>by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin, Christopher NoesselLinks <a href="https://www.interaction-design.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Interaction Design Foundation</a> <a href="https://lawsofux.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Laws of UX</a> <a href="https://www.nngroup.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Nielsen Norman Group</a> <a href="https://uxdesign.cc/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">UX Collective</a> <a href="https://www.coursera.org/professional-certificates/google-ux-design" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Google UX Design Professional Certificate</a> <a href="https://uxplanet.org/ux-ui-design-growing-list-of-top-resources-last-update-10-2021-66e053cdb3c4" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">UX/UI Design Resources</a> <a href="https://humanebydesign.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Humane by design</a>Podcasts <a href="https://uxpodcast.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">UXPodcast</a> <a href="https://xd.adobe.com/ideas/perspectives/wireframe-podcast/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Wireframe podcast</a> <a href="https://www.usersknow.com/vidcasts" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Users Know</a> <a href="https://uibreakfast.com/category/podcast/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">UI breakfast</a> <a href="https://designdetails.fm/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Design Details</a> <a href="https://userdefenders.com/podcast/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">User Defenders</a><h3 style="margin-left:0px;">Conclusion</h3>During this workshop, we scratched the surface of the vast UX field. There is so much more to learn and adapt, but we hope we helped the students with some basic understanding and good points on why it is essential to put their users first and how to do that.&nbsp;They should also keep in mind that if something seems reasonable to them, it doesn’t mean their users will see it as reasonable; that is why testing is one of the most important things to do during this process.&nbsp;We finished the workshop with a group photo, a tour of our offices, goodie bags and a message to contact us if they need more information or help with their projects. We are always open to sharing knowledge about tech topics and <a href="https://www.designrush.com/best-designs/apps" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">good app design</a>!

UX for beginners - learn the basics, principles and processes

Ivana

Quality Assurance

<h3 style="margin-left:0px;">Culture, Quality and Culture of Quality</h3>To understand what the Culture of quality represents, let’s break it down into two terms: Quality and Company culture and try to define them first. Then, let’s see how they again fit together and form the Culture of quality.<hr style="margin-left:0px;">Quality is a term not easily definable and mostly based on perspective, since it applies to everything around us. If we take, for instance, the quality of products and/or services in industries like manufacturing and engineering, we can say that Quality is what makes those products/services ‘fit for purpose’, while at the same time satisfying customer/client/end-user expectations. ISO 9000 also defines Quality as the “degree to which a set of inherent characteristics of an object fulfils requirements”.Company culture can be defined as a “set of shared values, goals, attitudes and practices that characterise an organisation”. We could say it represents the personality of an organisation – all the traits that make your company what it is: ways how employees feel about the work they do, how they interact with others, values they believe in, the decisions they make every day, where they see the company going, and so much more.All of those traits collected in an organisation’s culture have a huge influence on the quality produced by the organisation. That is why we strive to instil quality in the company’s culture and create a Culture of Quality.Quality Culture (or Culture of Quality) can be defined as “the opinions, beliefs, traditions and practices concerning quality”. It represents the environment in which the employees follow guidelines, take quality-focused actions, talk about quality, but also see other employees do the same thing. Culture of Quality is also an environment where everyone can feel the quality all around them.<h3 style="margin-left:0px;">The benefits of having a culture of quality</h3>So, now that we know how to recognise the culture of quality, let’s look at all the good things that can come out of having the culture of quality in your company.Companies that focus on Quality and manage it effectively:<ul><li>have lower costs, since quality generates savings (mostly through less reworks needed late in the process), which boosts their profits;</li><li>their brand and reputation enhance;</li><li>their efficiency increases;</li><li>are more successful;</li><li>are more protected against risks;</li><li>survive and thrive (keep on growing).</li></ul>Employees that go above and beyond regarding quality and understand its importance:<ul><li>are more productive and innovative;</li><li>make fewer mistakes (and, accordingly, their companies spend far less time and money correcting mistakes);</li><li>are more engaged;</li><li>better understand their roles (resulting in fewer issues, less wastage and lower costs);</li><li>are more proactive;</li><li>are happier.</li></ul>Companies that make sure their stakeholders’ needs are met and their expectations exceeded:<ul><li>receive fewer complaints;</li><li>instil customer with confidence and loyalty;</li><li>make customers happier;</li><li>get higher customer satisfaction;</li><li>achieve customer delight;</li><li>provide better customer experiences;</li><li>get more referrals and higher customer lifetime value.</li></ul><h3>Ways to create a culture of quality</h3>After seeing what good comes out of implementing the culture of quality, another question is presenting itself – What should we do to get all these benefits? How and where to start with the culture of quality implementation?There is no strict path to follow to create a culture of quality in your organisation. Each organisation is different and will require different tools and techniques. But all of the companies would have the same first step.<figure class="image image_resized" style="width:100%;"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/media/296df5d6c768f80f4dfc1c3b3724b6d2.jpeg"></figure><h4 style="margin-left:0px;">Evaluate your current company culture</h4>First, through evaluation, define and outline company values. Once you and your company see where you stand with your current culture, you are ready to start the process of improving it by embedding the quality in it.Look at your evaluation with Quality in mind and see if those values speak quality. That will give you a rough idea of what parts you should be focusing on the most.According to the Quality Magazine: “Companies that have achieved the true culture of quality, demonstrate three common traits: leadership commitment, employee ownership, and organisation-wide continuous improvement”.Some of the most important parts of this process of developing a culture that fosters quality are mentioned below and directly feed in the values mentioned above. Each company, during their journey, should decide the way they would implement any of those steps and where their focus will lie, depending on their current culture, their organisation, employees and the work they do.<h4 style="margin-left:0px;">Involve Senior Management</h4>One of the most important aspects of creating a culture of quality is getting everyone involved. That does not just include senior management, but makes them the first ones to get involved. If the top of the company is advocating quality, it is more likely that the employees will follow and take this quality journey seriously.The entire company must embrace a quality mindset in everything they do, including cross-department interactions. This is easiest to accomplish if starting from the top because that gives it credibility and a push for everyone to commit to it.<h4 style="margin-left:0px;">Involve your customers / end-users</h4>As we mentioned at the start, Customers play a big role in defining quality. So, don’t ignore their feedback, but rather use it to improve your culture of quality.Since everything you are doing should be about the needs and expectations of customers and end-users, ask them what their wants and needs are. The easiest way to do that is by using customer experience surveys and asking direct questions often. But also, pay attention during any kind of feedback – meetings, UAT testing, emails, etc.<h4 style="margin-left:0px;">Make your processes well-defined and easy to comprehend</h4>Well-defined processes in the company show all the employees how to carry out their assignments and it makes the work uniform across different teams. If employees understand the activities that make a process and all of it is very well documented, it is much easier to implement it in everyone’s daily routine. That way the employees perform their work without having to be reminded to follow the process guidelines.For a process to become a routine, employees have to be educated on the use of the process and trained in the use of the tools that will help them in their work.Processes that should follow this are not just development and QA, but rather all the processes in the company. Each process defines the minimum set of activities mandated for each project executed in the organisation, making the QA process focus on QA activities and other processes focus on their tasks at hand.<h4 style="margin-left:0px;">Create QA department, if you don't have one</h4>No single tool, test or person can guarantee quality. That also means that the culture of quality is not achievable by a QA team alone. Having a dedicated team or a department will take you closer to it, because your QA department should champion quality within the organisation.That means they will be:<ul><li>providing counsel and guidance on quality matters;</li><li>monitoring quality achievements;</li><li>evaluating and obtaining tools that will improve productivity and quality.</li></ul>If you already have an existing QA department that focuses only on uncovering defects, that is a good start, because their knowledge will be improving quality. But you should still work on modifying their responsibilities to include the ones mentioned above, since that will make a big difference in achieving the required level of quality and helping other employees play their part in it.Additional change you should do regarding your QA department is making them champions of organisational process initiatives. Since their job is to make organisations better at producing outputs that meet the needs and expectations of the stakeholders, there is no one better to advocate for those initiatives.Also, remember that your QA department should be of the same importance as any other department.<h4 style="margin-left:0px;">Train employees in quality culture</h4><figure class="image"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/media/9f15163244d3dd25682358d27cefc277.png"></figure>Employees need to be involved in the culture of quality in a way that they understand what they should do, how, and also most importantly why. The culture of quality is not made by simply following the rules, but by training everyone to think about quality, own it, care about it and act upon it.Embedding quality in the company means involving everyone (not just developers and testers) and teaching them what their responsibilities are, what the idea behind the culture change is and what the plan for the future is.One other aspect of training employees is asking for feedback. Given the opportunity, employees will adopt a quality mindset if they see their input is valued and their decisions impact the overall work and the company.In addition to the QA team training other employees in quality (process, tools, activities) and management influencing cultural values, teamwork should be encouraged, as well as employees learning from one another.Create a reward system for achieving excellence in qualityThis will be different in any company, depending on their capabilities and wishes, but it is important because it has a great impact on employee performance and motivation.A reward system can include monetary rewards and recognition or praise. The system should define goals and actions so that employees know what is expected from them to receive the rewards/recognition. That way, when the goals are achieved or actions completed, they get the rewards or recognition immediately. Remember, the time aspect of the recognition is very important — “delayed recognition is as good as denied recognition”.If quality is an important issue for a company, the reward system that they design should not emphasize rewarding the quantity of work accomplished by a business unit.<h3 style="margin-left:0px;">Maintenance — once you have it, don’t lose it</h3><figure class="image"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/media/b3493ef04b773fb3f8f30d07d31d75dd.png"></figure>Once you and your company go through this long process of developing such a culture, don’t forget about it, but rather work on maintaining it.Don’t forget to include everyone in this part of the process as well. Everyone should support the maintenance and contribute to it.The best way to do that is to not stand still and continually drive the improvement effort.So, how to do that? Well, here are some actions you can take:<ul><li>introduce quality metrics and use them to re-evaluate processes and behaviours;</li><li>maintain open and honest communication, ask your employees for feedback and suggestions and use collected information to work towards improvements;</li><li>work on promoting quality and other desired values (through improving accountability, clarifying goals and responsibilities, providing training and support, mentoring, rewarding good performance, engaging employees etc.).</li></ul>And at the end, do not forget:<blockquote>Quality is everyone’s responsibility.</blockquote>(W. Edwards Deming, Father of the Quality)&nbsp;

Culture of Quality - What is it and how to get it?

Visualing use cases undabot.png

Visualizing use cases using mermaid.js

Valentina

Development

Throughout the years, Undabot has placed a great emphasis on sharing knowledge and expertise with new IT generations. We supported students through mentoring them in a number of student competitions and by participating in various student conferences and events. This year we decided to take it up a notch and organized our first ever iOS internship conducted fully online.<hr style="margin-left:0px;">Our internship program consisted of 7 lectures and 7 live coding sessions during 7 weeks through September and October 2021. Lectures included topics from iOS app lifecycle &amp; programmatic autolayout, Architectural design patterns, Dependency management, Separation of concerns – networking to Reactive programming and Unit testing.We asked our mentors<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivan-amidzic/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> Ivan Amidžić</a> and <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/dino-gustin-896952165/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Dino Guštin</a> to share their thoughts on the internship.<blockquote>“I’m quite pleased with the organization of this internship since it’s the first time we organized a program of this sort. I am sure that with the help of this year’s experience, we will be able to raise it to an even higher level next year,” said Ivan.</blockquote>Both Dino and Ivan were very impressed with the base knowledge of students and their interest in iOS Development.<blockquote>“Although Danijel and Marko already had a good level of knowledge, I think that this internship gave them a more detailed insight into certain practical challenges. In addition, they had the opportunity to learn completely new things such as reactive programming and testing.”</blockquote>&nbsp;<blockquote>“I think they got a good basic knowledge that will help them a lot in the future, but you should really ask them that!”, added Dino, our Senior iOS Developer.</blockquote>In Undabot we cherish feedback culture, therefore we asked Danijel and Marko, our iOS interns and students of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing in Zagreb to share their thoughts about this experience.<figure class="image"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/media/56582e033abb7ec761ad4b8c4c3d9f52.jpeg" alt="Interns, Danijel and Marko with Dino, iOS developer, and Jeton, iOS Team Lead."></figure>7 weeks of the internship are behind you. How would you describe your experience?“The internship as a whole proved to be a very positive and informative experience, primarily because of the knowledge gained on application development, but also because of the general impression of working in the profession of interest,” said Danijel, a first-year master student of Computer Science at FER.“A very useful, educational experience that I went through with the help of excellent mentors and during which I gained various skills that will help me be a better programmer,” added Marko, a graduate student of FER. What did you learn specifically?Marko: “I’ve learned to avoid common problems related to the MVC architecture, program reactively using Combine, use new tools like SPM and SwiftLint, and a lot of different little things that help develop iOS apps.”“Along with this, I encountered reactive programming and deep links for the first time,” Danijel mentioned. What was the most interesting thing you learned in this internship?Danijel: “Reactive programming and its application in connecting interfaces to services is one of the most interesting learning units for me. In addition, through the code review process, I noticed many flaws in my code and ultimately noticed significant progress.”&nbsp;Marko: “Combine and MVVM, since this is a new approach for me that I have not encountered before, and it is significantly different from what I have used so far.” What would you single out as the best experience of the Undabot iOS internship?Danijel: “I find the knowledge of reactive programming in iOS very useful for creating future applications and as such, this represents the best part of my internship with excellent lectures and where the lecturers were always open to discussion and supported the theory with practical examples from the profession.”Marko: “Certificate awards! I spent most of the day meeting various people from the team, which was a very pleasant experience, and the food was good.” What would you recommend to future interns at Undabot and to whom would you recommend an internship at Undabot?“I would recommend the internship to anyone interested in iOS application development. The advice for the future interns – relax, ask if something is not clear because everyone is willing to help and at least take a brief look at the topic before each lecture,” advises Marko.&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/media/a14acc704419499bd753530c2eadb4f5.jpeg"></figure>Encouraged by this positive experience, we will surely establish new internship programs in 2022. Applications are accepted throughout the year, so if you are interested in Web or Mobile Development and UX/UI Design, send us your CV and portfolio via e-mail <a href="mailto:jobs@undabot.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">jobs@undabot.com</a>.&nbsp;&nbsp;Stay up to date with <a href="https://www.designrush.com/agency/profile/undabot" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Undabot</a> news by subscribing to our <a href="https://email.undabot.com/x/plugin/?pName=subscribe&amp;MIDRID=S7Y1BAAA38&amp;pLang=en&amp;Z=-691325057" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">monthly newsletter</a>.Would you like to join us? Check out the open positions at our <a href="https://careers.smartrecruiters.com/undabot" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Careers page</a>.

Undabot iOS internship - student’s and lecturer’s impressions

Since November is recognized as Quality Month, we decided to use that opportunity to share our story about working as a team to learn more about the subject of quality through a fun and interesting game.In light of the current COVID-19 pandemic and remote way of working, the process of meeting new colleagues and connecting with them is a challenge that we decided to overcome with a fun game.“We hoped it will be a fun activity for all of our colleagues through which they will get an opportunity to meet new people, but also learn something new, “ said Jelena, our Quality Assurance Engineer and the originator of the idea for this QA Game.<h3 style="margin-left:0px;">How it all started</h3>On the morning of May 6th, our QA team posted on our general Slack channel a worrying message; they were asking for our help because they are being attacked by something dangerous and unpredictable.We all gathered in a meeting to find out what we can do to help and quickly realized that the problem was a Superbug Pandemic. We put on our capes and prepared for an adventure of fighting the viruses and embarked on a quest to save the world and become superheroes.&nbsp;<figure class="image image-style-align-center"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/media/44a49e75478d6cdbfa24360baa538a6e.jpeg"></figure>&nbsp;For such a specific problem we had to enlist the help of experts in that area, virologists. We were split into eight teams by a random picker that allowed us to work with colleagues we wouldn’t normally cooperate with: HR with a Frontend Developer, Account Manager with an iOS Team Lead, and other interesting combinations. Every team fought from their assigned position in a virologist unit. As we prepared all our weapons – mobile phones, laptops and tablets for the war on the pandemic, the QA team prepared some interesting challenges for us.&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/media/e8b81af669885729acd7851a22d98348.png"></figure>&nbsp;People from Undabot, developers, designers, project managers, but also marketing, finance, and HR specialists put themselves in the QA’s shoes for a whole month; finding bugs, testing web and mobile applications, learning how to write reports and by doing that, helping defeat the viruses. During those 4 weeks we participated in battle games, big and small challenges, but also the final battle. During this time we became infected by the biggest virus of them all, the fun virus, and it was contagious.<h3 style="margin-left:0px;">The Game</h3>The QA Team informed us to gather at the Google Meet call on Thursday at 11 am and prepare our battle gear. We were waiting impatiently for instructions at home in front of our laptops, knowing that some giant bug is awaiting us. As we chatted and tried to guess what unexpected tasks lie in front of us, Ivana and Jelena, our QA Engineers, presented us with a battle plan. Instructions were clear: go to the designated website and make a bug report using a QA handbook. The timer was set and the game began.In our team, we first tried to understand what kind of bugs we can expect to find on such a website. Since I never used any tool for bug reporting, my teammate spent some time coaching me on it. The time was ticking so we split up and took our chances in the wild vastness of the internet, talking about our findings the whole time. As we fought the Dengue fever, we sure were sweating till the time ran out.Since then, every Thursday we traveled all over the world to find and defeat the most dangerous of the viruses: Dengue fever in Brazil, Tick-borne encephalitis in Germany and West Nile virus in the United States. Every battle had a different challenge we had to overcome to find the cure. We were testing mobile and web applications, writing test cases and documentation, used Youtrack board for writing bug reports, but also communicated with each other a lot. It is important to mention that the apps we were testing weren’t Undabot projects, they were randomly chosen by our QA Team for this specific purpose. Reported bugs were rated by the QA team so we had to be careful and pay close attention, since even the little bugs counted and could undo our efforts to defeat the virus. The team with the most points conquered checkpoints and got a Veto card that allowed them to skip one question in the Quiz Game or mini challenges but still receive the points for it.We also participated in a Quiz game every Monday through Kahoot. That mental exercise with 10 questions with the 30s to answer each, allowed us to stay sharp and resourceful during the game. Each Team selected a representative with the fastest typing skills and other team members were helping them through a channel of communication of their choice (Slack, WhatsApp, Google Meet).&nbsp;The questions weren’t hard, but the time was short, so in a spree of the moment, sometimes I clicked the wrong button (luckily, my team was very understanding). Googling was of no use if you wanted to score some points, so you just went with your gut and trusted your teammates. Although it seems that the game was the easiest for a team that had good general knowledge, it turned out that the real team players got the most points. The quiz included questions about bugs, viruses, but also QA in general. That way not only did we learn about QA in practice, but also the theory behind it.Another part of the game were the mini challenges. Occasionally, the QA Team would post a question or a puzzle in our game Slack channel, which could earn bonus points for the quickest of teams. We had to be vigilant and responsive to get our team on the top of the scoreboard. It was a fun activity, but also quite competitive. The best example would be the time they posted a picture of a sign-up page an gave us instructions: Look at the image carefully and find a bug! The subsequent discussion that started was a true example of how people with different expertise see one picture in a different way. Some focused on the e-mail validation, some on the grammar, others focused on emojis, gender inclusivity, the lack of specifications for the page, the list goes on. When we got a hint: Think outside the box, the chaos ensued.&nbsp;Our squad gave some excellent ideas, but only one answer was correct. When the QA awarded the points, some weren’t happy with the outcome since the similar answer was already offered, but then we learned about another thing we have to pay attention to, being precise.<h3 style="margin-left:0px;">The Results</h3><blockquote>“Sharing a bit of the QA world with others and trying to expand their horizons in order to help with our teamwork was all I hoped we would achieve with this game. But most of my colleagues surprised me with their involvement and desire to learn something new. And, of course, seeing everyone have a lot of fun makes it worthwhile. I’m hoping we inspired other Undabot departments to try something similar, “ said Ivana Rajora, QA Lead, when asked to share her thoughts on the game.</blockquote>Each member contributed significantly to the fight against Superbug Pandemic, but, of course, only one team was the winner: The Generalists. They saved the world from pandemic, one bug at a time, and became the Superheroes!&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/media/5b12785e19b4af412f355dfb01fb93ba.jpeg"></figure>&nbsp;The first three places didn’t leave empty-handed, they were also awarded Fox in a box gift certificate for an escape room adventure and a commemorative cup to always remind them of the great achievement they accomplished.&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/media/ca31ce0d6851650b0dcf0a7e4ed809f7.jpeg"></figure>&nbsp;We gave a survey to everyone to check their opinion on the game and to share something they found challenging or useful in this experience. There was a common agreement: fun, but a lot of work. Quizzes and finding bugs were selected as the best parts of the game. Through this survey, we also got a lot of suggestions about improving the game in the future.For me it was fun to take a break from the usual work and hang out with colleagues. This game gave us the opportunity to know each other better, improve our teamwork and elevate the level of our communication.When asked what his biggest takeaway from this experience is, Domagoj, the winner of the game, said: “Empowering and supporting your colleagues to share their expertise can be a great educational experience and very beneficial to your work. There’s a lot we can learn from each other, and people can surprise you with their passion and knowledge, if you let them.”Not everything has been just fun and games, throughout these challenges we had an opportunity to learn what the QA is firsthand and try our hand in the QA activities in an interesting way. In Undabot we take great pride in cherishing the Culture of Quality.&nbsp;That is not achievable by a QA team alone, but with everyone in the company included in the way that they understand what they should do, how, and most importantly why. This game helped us to understand the importance of quality and it was a valuable experience through which we learned from one another.To learn more about what the Culture of Quality is and how to get it, check out <a href="https://undabot.com/blog/culture-of-quality-what-is-it-and-how-to-get-it/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">this blog</a> from our Lead QA Engineer, Ivana Rajora.<hr>We would like to thank our QA Team for organizing this fun and educational game that brought us closer together.The idea for this game came with a help of the following article about the game company Cobe did for their employees: <a href="https://medium.com/p/25c5d016a61a" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://medium.com/p/25c5d016a61a</a> (and some inside information we got from their employee ;)). We answered their challenge, now we encourage you to organize it in your agency too, and see for yourself all the benefits of the game.

How we became superheroes and beat the pandemic

Hrvoje

Business

<h3 style="margin-left:0px;">Large enterprises and digital transformation&nbsp;</h3>Less than 5% of the Fortune 500 companies were established in this century and more than 70% are older than 40 years. Members of this prestigious group are characterized by their top revenues and stability in the market, which, combined with their aforementioned maturity, brings us to the fact that most of them are highly complex, well structured, have a strict hierarchical structure and are “process heavy”.At the same time, the importance of digital transformation and building new digital channels between businesses and their customers is continuing to grow, without any sign of slowing down. This is especially relevant for those older and traditional large enterprises that have no other choice but to fully dive into digital transformation, in order to keep up with emerging customer demands and therefore potentially survive in the next 5-10 years.<h4 style="margin-left:0px;">The challenges</h4>So, what are the typical challenges these enterprises face when they decide to start with a digital transformation? Challenges start with their inadequate (in the context of the requirements of the digital transformation) organizational structure,&nbsp; their capacity to efficiently execute the transformation itself and finally the ability to update their internal operational&nbsp; processes, both within their specific internal sectors like Finance, Sales, Production, IT, R&amp;D and in the area of the cooperation and interaction of these sectors with each other.One of the good examples of such a gap between the organizational readiness and their need to transform can be observed at the moment when a traditional enterprise decides to implement a new core software solution, or to build a new digital channel with the market. This is the moment when they usually start following their internal process that worked for them in the past, such as specifying the project request, budgeting, approving, procuring, monitoring fixed price, scope and timeline delivery, and finally accepting the project at the end.&nbsp;We can also add a classical maintenance as the next phase, to complete the picture.<h4 style="margin-left:0px;">Internal processes slowing down the transformation</h4>However, in the attempt of their implementation and integration within the large traditional enterprise, digital projects of such scale and complexity can seriously challenge existing internal processes and create a huge stress on the organization. We’ll walk quickly through the steps, together with the associated challenges and doubts.<ul><li>Specifying the project request: Does the organization have the knowledge and the needed resources to do this? Can they freeze the requirements at one moment, knowing that the market around is changing rapidly?</li><li>Budgeting and approving the project: Is it possible to fix the budget for the project which is not fully defined?</li><li>Procuring: Can the organization build and send a clear and precise project request to potential vendors? Can the estimates from the vendors, based upon defined requirements, be competently analyzed, and, if needed, challenged? Which are the key criteria for selecting the right partner for the project? Price, capability to deliver, or the level of their commitment to the project’s success?</li><li>Monitoring the execution of the fixed price/scope/timeline project:&nbsp; Is it possible to deliver a 6-12 months digital project without adjusting or fine tuning the original idea along the way, in order to adapt to the constantly emerging and changing needs of their customers? It gets even more difficult in case the organization is driving more than one digital project at the same time, which is very often a realistic situation.</li><li>Accepting the project: Would the market permit long development times typical for waterfall scenarios typically preferred by the large enterprises? Are the internal processes mature enough&nbsp; to implement a phased delivery, or, ideally rapid, incremental and agile delivery, acceptance and integration cycles? Can the organization pivot mid-project easily and quickly, if the market dictates such an action?</li></ul><h4 style="margin-left:0px;">Impact on business priorities</h4>I have listed just a few of the obvious challenges and potential blockers that traditional enterprises can face while trying to implement a digital project, which should help them to be more efficient, more automated, more competitive in the market, or to have more satisfied and loyal customers. All of these top business priorities are at risk if these challenges are not addressed properly and on time.&nbsp;Budgeting processes can produce inaccurate results, potentially under-budgeting the project and thus jeopardizing its execution, or over-budgeting it and thus potentially preventing it from being internally approved.&nbsp;&nbsp;Procurement process can take longer than expected, because vendors are not sure about the requirements, so the received offers are highly different and inconsistent. This can potentially lead to selecting not the best, or even an inadequate vendor for the project, which can then lead to the project execution disaster.&nbsp;Last, monitoring and managing the execution of the project, with the intention to have it completed within the fixed agreed upon price, scope and the timeline, spanning over 6-12 months, or more, which touches or involves multiple organizations’ business units and which potentially needs to integrate with various internal and external systems, this is a gigantic task that most of traditional enterprises are simply not able to pull through to the end by themselves.<h4 style="margin-left:0px;">The solution</h4>I have listed just a few of the obvious challenges and potential blockers that traditional enterprises can face while trying to implement a digital project, which should help them to be more efficient, more automated, more competitive in the market, or to have more satisfied and loyal customers. All of these top business priorities are at risk if these challenges are not addressed properly and on time.&nbsp;So, the question is, is there a way how large traditional enterprises can keep all the characteristics which make them large, structured and stable and at the same time digitally transform themselves, by implementing strategic, comprehensive digital projects?Is there a way they can quickly launch successful solutions and apps that make them more competitive in the market, like so many small agile startups are doing every day?The way I see it, the solution lies in executing two main streams of strategic directions and actions that a traditional large enterprise should undertake:<ul><li>First, bringing the agility in their existing processes;</li><li>Second, surrounding themselves with a network of reliable, highly skilled, agile partners.</li></ul>I will give more detail about both streams of strategic directions and actions by going through the same process traditional enterprises follow after deciding to implement a new core software solution, or e.g. to build a new digital channel with the market.<ul><li>Specifying the project request: Bringing agility in this phase means that not 100% of the project requirements needs to be fully defined in this phase. The focus should be on the big picture, key business goals that need to get achieved and on the key project requirements. Top priorities can be planned in the first phase of the project and these can be specified in more detail. The rest can be split into different project phases, also allowing different organizations’ business units and sectors to plan their involvement. Involving a skilled external partner in this phase can also significantly improve the process, because the partner will use his relevant planning knowledge from other projects and his technical knowledge as well, and will improve the overall efficiency and accuracy of this phase. The result? A more realistic project scope, with higher chances for the successful implementation. Moreover, system analysis, requirements discovery and capture processes require very specific set of skills and expertise, which, if absent, can (and often does) produce requirements that are incomplete, inconsistent with the existing IT environment or even partially unimplementable - sometimes making the situation even worse than if there were no documented requirements at all.</li><li>Budgeting and approving the project: As the project requirements will not be fully specified, bringing agility into this phase means that the budgeting process should adapt to such new reality as well. Project budgets should be planned with more precision only for the first phase of the project, while more flexibility should be applied for the later phases. However, this doesn’t mean that the budget can’t be planned precisely for these remaining phases, not at all. What it means is that the organization can fix the precise budget for the whole project already at the beginning, but should be ready to accept a flexibility in the scope of software functionalities that will be delivered within that budget, as well as in their prioritisation. A partner with strong experience in planning and estimating complex projects will bring a tangible value to this phase, helping the organization to identify which project priorities can be fulfilled within the assumed budget, how are the expected software features distributed in regards to their complexity and cost, what are the potential deviations from the initial estimations and at the end, what is the potential impact on the planned budget. The result? A more realistic budget, increasing the chances of project success.</li><li>Procuring: Bringing agility into this phase means that potential partners should be evaluated from more different angles, shifting the biggest focus from the price of their offer to other areas, like: the project approach they are suggesting, their ability to deliver, transparency in challenging the project requirements, or in communicating potential project risks, offered project delivery and risk mitigation methodology and to the stability and maturity of their team. Also, besides all these important evaluation factors, one of the key results of the procurement phase should be a solid understanding about which of the vendors can be trusted to deliver the project and which can’t and why. The role of the partner in this phase is to be transparent about his offered services and anticipated risks and to make sure that there is a high level of understanding with the organization, without hesitation. Such an attitude will result in creating trust, which is probably the most important ingredient in executing complex and demanding projects. The result? Efficient project delivery with clear mutual expectations and trust between the organization and the partner.</li><li>Monitoring the execution of the fixed price/scope/timeline of the project: If all the previous steps of specifying the requirements, planning, budgeting and procuring are transformed to a more agile way and if the right partner is selected, then the responsibility of the organization is not anymore to watch out that the predefined project milestones are delivered exactly as expected and when expected, but rather to take care that the key goals of the project are consistently achieved and that the velocity of the project is at the expected level. Budgets are, in this case, more related to the size of the partner’s team and to the duration of the project, and not to the predefined fixed scope, which sets the key task of the organization - to consistently work on the prioritization of the project features and to make sure that they are delivered in smaller chunks of work, or sprints, launched as quickly as possible. The role of the trusted partner in this phase is on one hand to support the agreed project delivery model with its professional services and capabilities, and on the other hand to constantly coach the organization on improving the project delivery processes and methodologies, cooperation between teams, technical decisions on the project and the project overall effectiveness. The result? Maximum number of top project priorities delivered in the first phases of the project, enabling the organization to test them early. While having full control over the budget, the organization has the necessary flexibility in shifting priorities, changing tasks and project requirements, depending on the current business situation or market demands.</li><li>Accepting the project at the end: There is no more need for a “big bang” project acceptance at the end, which the whole organization has waited for for so long . In the meantime, nobody had the real chance to witness what the project is going to deliver - or even if the implemented solution is being developed in tune with ever changing market requirements, that is, until the last moment - the monumental acceptance event, when, unfortunately, any significant change in the project features (or realization that some features worked on paper but not “on screen”) becomes prohibitively expensive. In contrast, in the case of organizations that applied a more agile approach, they are at that moment rather having just another project milestone, where they can decide if the project is now at the satisfactory level of delivered functionality, or it needs to continue going for a while, or permanently, depending on the business priorities and available budgets.</li></ul><h4 style="margin-left:0px;">The conclusion</h4>Despite the fact that the enormous growth of new technologies and software applications was, and still is, strongly adapted by small, innovative, creative and agile startups, large traditional enterprises need to digitally transform their internal and external operations as well, and build new digital channels with their customers in order to stay competitive, or, dare we say, to survive.&nbsp;We have also found out that such large IT projects, and their peculiarities with which the typical organization is, at least to a certain degree, unfamiliar,&nbsp; can, and often do, become a huge stress on the organization itself as whole.&nbsp;In order to avoid those risks, or to increase their chances of succeeding, they need to strategically change their internal processes and start partnering with experienced, agile partners, who can support them along the way.

Traditional enterprises and agile digital transformation

Traditional enterprises and agile digital transformation.png

Saša

Culture

Sigmund Freud once said, “Time spent with cats is never wasted.” Old Ziggy was undoubtedly right, and we dare say the same goes for dogs and other beloved animal friends. Since our very first day at the office, we have welcomed all our employees’ pets because we know how lonely they get staying at home, and how worried our colleagues feel about being apart.For the same reason, we understood how important it is to have one central place for all information on lost and found pets in Croatia, and this is how and why we started working with the NGO SUZA on creating <a href="https://suza.hr/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Suzin oglasnik</a>, a directory for information on lost animals. But, of course, none of it would be possible without its founder, Mrs. Jadranka, whom we invited to share her story!<h4 style="margin-left:0px;">1. Can you tell us how SUZA began and grew into what it is today?</h4>SUZA is a federation of animal protection associations that started as an NGO in 2004. Straight away, we began two big projects with our member associations: “The pet info center” and “The emergency service for injured animals”.For 11 years, we received call after call about lost, found, wounded, neglected, or abused pets. Even the largest animal welfare charity in the UK recognized our efforts and donated a vehicle for our pet emergency service.&nbsp;The projects grew in Zagreb and other cities all over (and beyond) Croatia, especially during tourist season, when people came to us for help after losing a pet on vacation (or finding one). Our activities are unique in our region, so for better or for worse, we had quite the results regarding incoming calls and solved cases. This goes especially for injured, neglected, and abused animals.<hr style="margin-left:0px;"><h4 style="margin-left:0px;">2. And how and why did you start the SUZA directory (Suzin oglasnik)?</h4>Well, our funding got cut in 2017, which meant we had to shut down almost all our projects. Since we continued getting regular updates from people about lost and found pets and were still eager to help them, we had the idea of making a sort of directory where we could post this information and make it visible. However, our finances made it impossible to realize the idea, and that’s where Undabot and Trikoder came into the picture! Together we managed to set up the unique “Suzin oglasnik” website. And when I say unique, I really mean it — it’s the only directory in Croatia dedicated to just animals and their welfare.<h4 style="margin-left:0px;">3. What were the biggest challenges in the beginning?</h4>Although we were well-known among citizens even before Suzin oglasnik, it took a while for owners and finders of lost pets to understand how essential it is to have all information about a lost animal in just one place. With the rise of social media and different Facebook groups, it became increasingly difficult to gather information because it was posted in various places, and piecing it together was no piece of cake.<h4 style="margin-left:0px;">4. And what about now? What are some of the challenges you currently face?</h4>One of our biggest challenges is funding — our budget consists entirely of individual donations provided by legal or natural persons. Also, we want to improve the existing directory and make it more valuable and transparent by upgrading the statistical aspects of the database, e.g., filtering by species and a count system for all the lost and found animals.<h4 style="margin-left:0px;">5. How did Undabot get involved?</h4>As I said, we had a great idea, but we couldn’t make it happen without a software company like Undabot. This is a demanding project with a hefty price for an NGO that funds itself only through donations, so we wouldn’t have nearly enough money for it. And I’m happy we’re currently working together on solving issues and improving the site so it works even better!<h4 style="margin-left:0px;">6. What rescued animal story do you remember most?</h4>What sticks out most to me is the story of a kitten that got lost in Zagreb, then a year and a half later her owner recognized her on Suzin oglasnik when a lady posted about a cat wandering into her yard in Samobor. That’s the kind of story that proves that you should never give up on finding lost pets because some of them can return home even after a few years.&nbsp;&nbsp;Also, this is a prime example of how helpful it is to have all information regarding lost animals in one place — only that way can we put bits and pieces together and help pets find their way home.<h4 style="margin-left:0px;">7. What are your plans for the future?</h4>We have heaps of ideas for new projects, but unfortunately, not enough money to go through with them all. Our biggest wish for the nearest future is to set up a nationwide call center that would receive calls 0-24 regarding lost, found, abused, or wounded animals.The center’s employees would automatically relay the info to institutions responsible for solving such issues, which would greatly help our local government units, currently unable to implement existing legislation. The call center would also employ people with disabilities, serving a double purpose for the benefit of society.<h4 style="margin-left:0px;">8. One final message to conclude our little interview?</h4>Only that I hope we collaborate with Undabot once again. Here’s to working together on further projects!&nbsp;<figure class="image image_resized image-style-align-center" style="width:41%;"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/media/7fbe740ab49e0cd5c9dea3787ff6f046.jpeg"></figure>&nbsp;If this story inspired you to donate your time or money, paws what you’re doing and feel free to contact us, the SUZA association, or donate directly to their bank account: HR8623600001101697565. A little goes a long way, and we know that many pets and owners will be grateful for your contribution. ❤️

SUZA oglasnik

The sweetest homecoming — helping lost pets find their way home

By now, we all should be able to recite the Scrum roles in our sleep, however, the role of the “business analyst” is suspiciously absent from that list. Does that mean that the skillset of a competent Business analyst has no place within modern agile processes?<hr><h3 style="margin-left:0px;">The business analysts, what are they good for?</h3>Let’s begin by stating that this text should apply to any iterative/agile framework, but we’ll focus on Scrum since it’s (for better or worse) the best-known and most widely adopted one.I’ve written (rather extensively) on the general role of the <a href="https://undabot.com/blog/solution-design-first-part-one/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">business analyst in the solution design process</a>, however, I haven’t explicitly covered the topic of how the business analyst fits into the agile methodologies in general and scrum in particular. This text should fix that.It stands to reason that in order to figure out where, and if, the business analyst “fits” in the scrum process, we first need to define what skillset and overall capabilities your “garden-variety” business analyst (*) brings to the table.(*) please note that the BA role/job description tends to vary significantly between organizations, so what I’m describing here *is the BA role as I see and practice it* and, consequently, the way in which it is “configured” in the organization where I work.So without further ado, these are the main skills that a typical business analyst should bring to any game:<ol style="list-style-type:decimal;"><li>An ability to elicit/discover functional requirements and business rules — through communication with one or more “knowledge owners”</li><li>An ability to document functional requirements and business rules — ie. the mastery of requirements documentation techniques and formats such as a) use cases, b) acceptance criteria, c) user stories, d) actor-goal pairs, d) business rule examples, etc.</li><li>An ability to manage functional scope —ie. ability to “slice” or partition the functional scope into adjacent, autonomous (as much as possible) functional segments of various sizes</li><li>Ability to adjust the detail level for any particular functional segment (ie. quickly and easily switch between “birds eye level” and “low-level” views of the particular feature or a functional segment)</li><li>Ability to validate functional completeness of any given functional segment and the system as a whole</li><li>Deep and thorough understanding of both the top-down and bottom-up design processes</li></ol>&nbsp;Also, it’s worth noting that a good Business Analyst should be able to perform all the skills mentioned above, quickly and flexibly in an agile setting — just as well as in the large “design everything up-front” waterfall-y scenarios.So with that in mind — let’s see whether those listed BA skills might come in handy in your typical scrum process.The scrum process is composed of a well-defined set of events/ceremonies, let’s try listing them and see whether there are some that might benefit from a Business analyst’s skills we’ve listed before.&nbsp;<ul><li>Backlog design workshop — typically happens before the first sprint (or is sometimes the sole purpose of the first sprint — often called “sprint zero” in this case) and its goal is to create a rough functional scope definition for the project and produce the material for the first refinement session. This is typically done by producing a full set of (or at least as complete as possible) high-level user goals (a.k.a. “epics”) which define the scope in low detail and a partial set of medium-level user goals (a.k.a. “user stories”) that define one or more epics, or their segments in more detail.&nbsp;</li><li>Backlog refinement session — its goal is to produce the “raw development material” for one or more upcoming sprints in the form of fully defined story cards (or analogous work items). This is typically done by taking one or more items from the backlog, slicing them up, and detailing them, resulting in a number of “high detail level” or “development ready” story cards (a.k.a “work items”). Said work items usually need to have at least the following defined: 1) user story — defining the goal and giving the context for the work item, 2) a comprehensive set of well-structured acceptance criteria, 3) any additional information (business rules and examples, UI wireframe references, etc.) which anyone who gets to implement this particular work item might require in order to complete their job without needing to look for any additional information elsewhere (a.k.a “the single source of truth”).&nbsp;</li><li>Planning session — happens every sprint and its goal is to prioritize the backlog items and plan the upcoming sprint&nbsp;</li><li>Retrospective — happens every sprint and its goal is to figure out whether the sprint went well, and whether we can improve something in the overall process</li><li>The demo session — happens every couple of sprints (exact timing depends on a number of factors — but it’s not important for our discussion) and the goal is to introduce the project stakeholders to the product increments with the ultimate goal of giving them the ability to gauge the direction the product is taking as early as possible, and subsequently to change it if they see the need for it.</li></ul>Please note that those sessions mentioned above are not all the sessions of a classic scrum process, there are also daily standups and we didn’t mention the development at all. Also bear in mind, that these listed sessions and events tend to come in many varieties and their details and nuances can and do vary between different scrum projects and organizations that implement them, but for the purpose of this text, those mentioned above should suffice.Right off the bat, there are two events that stand out as good candidates for employing the skills of a Business analyst, and those are:<ol style="list-style-type:decimal;"><li>The initial backlog design workshop (or workshops — plural) and</li><li>Backlog refinement sessions.</li></ol>The initial backlog design workshop is actually very similar to the functional system design process, the main difference being the required level of detail of the resulting end product. Typical functional system design results in a fairly detailed SRS document and the initial backlog design workshop usually focuses on the actor-goal pairs (or user stories — it’s mostly the same thing if you think about it) and leaves the detailing (ie. acceptance criteria, use cases, etc.) for the backlog refinement sessions.So for the initial backlog design workshop — any business analyst should feel right at home and should be able to add significant value to the design process and the resulting deliverable — and as a consequence, make the product owner’s job much easier.For the backlog refinement it’s basically the same story, but this time the focus is on details, scope management, and precise acceptance criteria, rather than on functional completeness and high-level scope, and this is the portion where all that requirements documentation mastery really comes into its own.&nbsp;Funnily enough, the main benficior of this involvement is the same as for the initial backlog design session — ie. the product owner (although the scrum master and the development team should really feel the positive impact as well)Other sessions/events don’t benefit much (at least not directly) from the presence of the business analyst (or someone with the same skills), but these certainly do.So, if what I’ve written stands, then the conclusion that follows is:&nbsp;By now, we all should be able to recite the Scrum roles in our sleep, however, the role of the “business analyst” is suspiciously absent from that list.&nbsp;<h2 style="margin-left:0px;">Does that mean that the skillset of a competent Business analyst has no place within modern agile processes?</h2>Sadly, in my personal (and rather extended) experience, it doesn’t.I’ve directly participated (or in some cases, I have been an active observer) in a number of scrum projects of various sizes and complexity, and more often than not they struggled at least to some degree. What I found interesting (and telling) is the fact that the common thread in all those projects which did struggle was that the work items were poorly defined, and those projects which had their work items (story cards, etc.) defined well, usually also performed well.&nbsp;<blockquote>Please note that “well defined” does not mean “heaps of written information” — just that the *information that was provided* on them, was of good quality, functionally complete, and consistent.</blockquote>&nbsp;Typically work items (a.k.a “story cards”) on the projects which struggled fell into one of these two categories:<ul><li>work items contained insufficient information — information typically consisted of a (malformed or incomplete) user story, or some other version of “goal statement” and either comically sparse and underdefined acceptance criteria or (seriously) no acceptance criteria at all</li><li>work items contained a lot of incomplete or contradictory information — those work items utilized some sort of formal format (ie. gherkin for acceptance criteria, etc.) and even made a big deal of using that particular format, while the information conveyed within that format was incoherent, contradictory, incomplete or (often) all of the above</li></ul>The primary reason for those problems was that no one in the team really knew how to define requirements correctly, identify functional holes and write proper acceptance criteria.And to make things worse, the scrum framework is very vague and ambiguous when it comes to those topics. It’s simply assumed that said knowledge and capabilities “just exist” within the individual participants’ skillsets, that the design and definition of well-formed user stories, management of functional scope, etc. can be done by the product owner, and that the acceptance criteria and functional decomposition are a collaborative process between the product owner and the development team.Unfortunately, that doesn’t really work IRL. And the simple logic behind that statement is this:&nbsp;<blockquote>If no one in the scrum team has sufficient skills required for functional design, documenting the requirements and overal scope management, then no amount of collaboration between those same team members will somehow produce those skills.</blockquote>&nbsp;This is a problem since *those skills are essential* in avoiding the poorly defined work items I’ve mentioned before.The Scrum framework in general, and agile manifesto, in particular, puts heavy emphasis on communication, collaboration, and self-organizing teams, and that’s all fine and dandy when you’re talking about a team of experienced individuals where at least a subset of them possesses all the skills I’ve mentioned so far, but unfortunately, the reality is that you most likely won’t be working in such team, but rather in a team of individuals with varying degrees of skill and experience and where very few (if any) of your team members will have any requirements documentation/capture/management skills on any significant level.Let me be clear here, I’m not stating that the scrum doesn’t work, it does, and I’ve been a part of successful scrum teams and have witnessed and participated in their success — so the core idea of a process like a scrum is not invalid or problematic in my experience.What I’m saying here is rather that the scrum framework was designed with a team of competent, well-rounded, self-organizing individuals in mind, where those individuals possess all the skills needed in order to make the process work – but “in the real world,” the framework is implemented in an environment where those assumptions simply aren’t true.My argument here is that this “missing/crucial ingredient” or rather “the missing set of skills” is that of the business analyst and that by adding one in the mix and mitigating those issues I’ve mentioned, you can significantly improve your scrum teams’ performance.When it comes to the details and questions of whether the business analyst should be a permanent member of the scrum team or an “external domain expert”, I’ll leave those up to you — both approaches work IMHO, but I’ll implore you to try the following.<blockquote>If you do happen to have Business Analysts (or functional designers) in your organization, the next time you encounter a struggling project which uses scrum as its methodology and especially if that project exhibits the classic “symptoms” I’ve described in this text, just try adding the BA to the mix for a few sprints and refinement sessions in a way described in this text, and you might be pleasantly surprised(*).</blockquote>(*) or if you are not — you can always contact me, explain to me that I’ve got no idea what I’m talking about and that you curse the day that you read my blog, but please augment your well-deserved critique with some examples of what happened as I’ll be genuinely interested in hearing what went wrong and perhaps even be able to point you in the right direction.&nbsp;

business analyst in scrum

BA — a crucial ingredient in a successful scrum project?

Undabot

<figure class="image image_resized image-style-align-center" style="width:45.73%;"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/media/01fe7ad0ab2fae6dc5495b37fca127fb.png" alt="Most reviewed software developers"></figure>We’re a technology company with extensive experience in delivering high-quality, custom made mobile and web software solutions. We believe that technology is brought to its full potential by the most talented professionals, and our team is always up for the challenge.We’re excited to announce that we’re named among the leading <a href="https://themanifest.com/hr/software-development/companies#most-reviewed" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">technology firms</a> on The Manifest. In the B2B platform’s latest research, we were listed as one of the highest-reviewed software developers in Croatia.&nbsp;We have always been committed to helping our clients stand out from the crowd and stay ahead of the trend. Our mission since 2013 has been to support our partners at every stage of their development process for the best output. With a go-getter attitude paired with our passion for technology, we have grown to be the go-to software development partner for organizations worldwide.&nbsp;<blockquote>“We are continuously investing in our expertise and knowledge, as we know that aiming for uncompromising quality is vital for staying on top. The culture of excellence runs deep in the company, mirrored in internal processes, precisely executed projects and premium services delivered to our clients, so we are thrilled to see our efforts awarded with positive reviews and sterling five-star ratings.”— Hrvoje Kapetanović, CEO, Undabot</blockquote>&nbsp;Our latest <a href="https://clutch.co/profile/undabot#review-1937340" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">feedback from the Austrian Post Group</a> is a testament to our drive. When the client came to us in 2021, they had a a challenge with their API integrations across different regions. After working closely with them and their regional subsidaries, we delivered comprehensive documentation that details what they need to do to solve their current integration problems.&nbsp;<blockquote>“Undabot’s strength is that they’re very customer-oriented, and they have an impressive track record of developing APIs and custom software solutions for important international companies. Whenever we have a software development project, we can trust them to deliver within our timelines and budgets, and they’re always ready to do it — we know what they’re capable of.”— Michael Boehm, Market Development Manager, Austrian Post Group</blockquote>&nbsp;We empower organizations to tackle their complex development problems. <a href="https://undabot.com/contact/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Get in touch</a>, and discover how we can help you.

Top App Company By Manifest.jpeg

The Most Reviewed Software Developers in Croatia By Manifest

<h4>Assuming is an integral part of our conscious experience, but still, assumptions have a bad “rep” when it comes to engineering. Why is it so and, more importantly, is it deserved and can we still use them to our benefit somehow?</h4><h3 style="margin-left:0px;">A bit of theory</h3>It can safely be said that, at least to a certain degree, we assume our way through life. The truth is that our brains simply don’t possess enough “processing power” to analyze every single change in every single detail of every moment of our conscious experience in real time.In order to compensate for that — we, and by “we” I mean “our brain”, assume. And that fact is well established in neuroscience research (as for example described <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1079232/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">here</a> or <a href="https://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-04-eyes-brain.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">here</a>, etc.)Although the article mentioned above describes skipping the processing of the information by assuming the expected result, assumptions still work just as well in the scenario where we don’t have all information, to begin with, but are still expected to come up with some conclusion or a result anyway.<blockquote>Since assumptions are nothing other than our best guesses about the things that we “know that we don’t know” (or we simply don’t have enough time to process fully), our default solution to the problem of the missing information is to just assume those information gaps away.</blockquote>The point I’m trying to make here is that the statement above is not an abstract observational fact but that it applies just as well to the assumptions we make in a much more particular context of software requirements and IT engineering in general.<h3 style="margin-left:0px;">The reputation</h3>You might’ve noticed a bit of contradiction here – so far we’ve asserted that the assumptions are perfectly normal, and are an integral part of how we perceive everyday reality. Still, we all know that when it comes to engineering, they have quite a bad reputation.&nbsp;It is said that the assumptions make an ass out of both you and me, and some even go as far as suggesting that the assumption is the mother of all f**kups.And generally speaking, “they” are right.However, “they” do make one assumption themselves. And that assumption is that all assumptions are created equal.That particular assumption is, however, wrong.The thing is, assumptions in the context of engineering are not a monolithic concept, but rather come in two “flavors”. In particular, we should distinguish between non-communicated (silent) assumptions and communicated ones.Uncommunicated ones are bad. Those are the ones that so rudely make an ass out of you and me and foster all those nasty f**kups we keep hearing about.The (clearly) communicated kind is perfectly fine though, and I’ll even argue that it’s an extremely valuable tool for anyone creating any requirements and designing any system in an environment where information is incomplete or fragmented or the time available is insufficient for the task at hand.So, with all that in mind, you are right to ask the proverbial “what’s in it for me, the business analyst?”.<h3 style="margin-left:0px;">One simple but quite powerful usage scenario</h3>&nbsp;<figure class="image image_resized image-style-align-center" style="width:69.12%;"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/media/93dd2db1185670a7cff18319e676e2ab.jpeg" alt="Digital Art on engineering"></figure>“An engineer thinking up assumptions, digital art” (OpenAI Dall-E 2022)There are actually quite a few ways to use assumptions to our advantage and we’ll start with the one that is rather easy to implement and whose (hopefully positive) effects should be immediately felt.&nbsp;<blockquote>Observe that the communicated or “spoken” assumptions are essentially just additional requirements. It is as simple as that. It can sound a bit trivial, but it’s quite powerful, as unlike the majority of the requirements you’ll be working on in a role of a business analyst or when documenting requirements — *you* are the one authoring the assumptions and consequently the requirements that they represent — and therefore, you have the control over them.</blockquote>&nbsp;Imagine the following scenario.You are tasked with providing the high-level requirements for a project and you know that those requirements will later be used for the effort estimation. Your only input is what the client provided – and that typically tends to be rather lopsided and generally skewed towards the topics that the client is either strongly opinionated about, are the core of its business idea, or are just things that whoever created the information is familiar with.In other words, what you received from the client and are supposed to base your entire analysis and/or estimate upon — is usually quite far from being functionally complete.&nbsp;Now, “where’s the problem?” you say, “we can compile a detailed list of questions based upon what we see is missing and the client will answer those questions, and we’ll fill the missing requirements with the information provided within their answers”.I envy your innocence.That never really works, at least in my experience, as you’ll either get the information that is still incomplete, or you’ll ask things that the client hasn’t really thought about and, consequently, won’t be able to give you a useful answer on the spot. And the timeframe for getting the answers is typically very constrained at this point in the project lifecycle.As a result, you’ll just end up putting yourself in the position where the client (and often your project manager/sales rep/team lead as well) thinks that you’ve asked everything you wanted to ask and that they provided you with all the answers they could and now everything is peachy. The reality is that you’re still stuck with a fractured and incomplete set of requirements while the client and your boss believe that you’re fine, and in my opinion (and experience), you’re typically way worse off at that point.So what can you do to prevent that?Remember how we observed that the spoken/communicated/documented assumptions are really the requirements you have control over? Let’s find out what can we do with that.<h3 style="margin-left:0px;">Ask for confirmation rather than for the information</h3>If we assume that the above is true (note that we’ve clearly stated our assumption here), then what logically follows is that, given that we’re competent functional solution designers/business analysts, we can “plug” all the holes in the requirements with some reasonable assumptions until the system described is functionally complete and makes sense to us first, and only then turn to the client for answers or even just for confirmations of our assumptions.&nbsp;It’s important however to keep our assumptions relatively big in scope and to assume standardized, easily communicable solutions as much as possible — as otherwise you’re risking going down the rabbit hole of designing low-level functional details in a situation where you don’t have time for that.Why is this approach any different from the “classic” one described before? You still end up asking the client some questions related to the missing information, don’t you?Well, the main difference is that in the first scenario we started with a fragmented system description and were asking the user to provide us with the information required to fill the holes, as opposed to the alternative approach where we start with a functionally complete system defined by the initial set of requirements and augmented with a set of reasonable assumptions that bridge the “functional gaps”, and then we’re just asking the client to confirm that our assumptions are correct/acceptable.This is a very significant difference — as the question “is this particular assumption valid?” is much more precise and easy to understand and answer than “How did you plan for this feature to work?” “What about this situation?” etc.Also, and that is very important — the answers you get either validate your assumptions or not, but in any case, they allow you to very transparently produce a “backlog” of assumptions that are invalid and then work them one by one with the client — where the client is very aware of open topics — avoiding that entire “but you asked and we answered, why is that not clear yet” situation — as the answers to the “is this assumption correct” are manly yes/no ones, and it’s very easy for the client to understand what exactly is open and what isn’t.In a nutshell, by filling the functional gaps with precisely stated and clearly communicated assumptions, the communication with the client immediately becomes much more manageable and exact in nature.Add to that the fact the assumptions are easily enhanced and illustrated with examples — for both the situations where the assumption is validated and for the situations where it isn’t and you have yourself a very very powerful tool.<h3 style="margin-left:0px;">But that’s not all!</h3>There are a couple of other handy techniques that become available as unlockables in your “functional designer skill tree” once you start looking at the assumptions in this new way.UPDATED - &nbsp;Check <a href="https://undabot.com/blog/the-power-of-the-assumption-the-techniques-and-the-examples/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">the techniques and the examples</a> in part 2 of our writings about assumptions!<h2 style="margin-left:0px;">&nbsp;</h2>

The power of the assumption — the introduction

<h4 style="margin-left:0px;"> In the <a href="https://undabot.com/blog/the-power-of-the-assumption-the-introduction/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">previous post about the power of assumption</a>, we discussed the assumptions in general and provided one powerful way of using them in a “low-on-time and low-on-information but high-on-commitment” scenario. In this post, we’ll further explore what you can accomplish just by assuming things the right way.</h4><h3 style="margin-left:0px;">1. You can choose the solution which is optimal for *both* you and your client</h3>In the engineering world, any problem defined by a set of requirements can be solved by several different technical solutions, and when all those possible solutions are considered together, they compose what is called “the solution space” — a set of all possible solutions for a given problem/set of requirements (if you want to know more about this concept — <a href="https://undabot.com/blog/solution-design-first-part-one/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">this article</a> should get you started).Since that solution space includes all possible solutions, it also includes the one that would work best for our client and us simultaneously. So we need a way to extract it. The easiest way to mold and navigate the solution space is to fence and then isolate the set of solutions we prefer (and are still good solutions for the client — that is a crucial thing we must never forget, as we’re not designing the solution for our amusement but rather for our client and their business needs/ideas) with a carefully selected set of assumptions — remember, they are just additional requirements, and each additional requirement directly influences the solution space by either restricting or enlarging it — depending on the particular requirement added.The process here, therefore, is to take a kernel idea provided by the client and — using well-formed assumptions — design the requirements around it so that they pick the “just right” solution from the overall solution space. Where “just right” caters not *only* to the needs of the client but also to your organization’s strengths.<h3 style="margin-left:0px;">2. You can “stabilize” the project environment in a way that allows you to estimate and plan significantly better</h3>You’ve probably been there — there are some requirements, the client and the vendor (a.k.a. “you”) agree upon them, and then as soon as you start developing things start to change and the “is this a change request or not” discussions start and begin eating everyone’s time and degrading the relationship with the client.Assumptions fix that. (that is if you know how to write them well, and have written them at the right point in time).The trick here is to explicitly state the assumptions in the offer/contract and make sure they are written properly — ie. as unambiguous and as detailed as possible, and make them “fragile” in a sense that if the environment changes in a direction that would have a negative impact on the development process or the scope, those assumptions would automatically be invalidated and (this is important) that fact would easily be demonstrable.&nbsp;Let’s assume that you’re developing a mobile app that heavily depends on an API provided by someone else.&nbsp;Consider the difference between these two assumptions:<ul><li>“API is available and well documented”</li></ul>And the following set<ul><li>“The API is Restful, it is well documented and the documentation includes usage examples”</li><li>“The API provides the sandbox test environment”</li><li>“API is fully featured, available, and testable at least 2 weeks prior to development start”</li><li>“API features fully match the functional requirements of the system and no additional complex processing of the API response or combining the results of the multiple API calls is needed besides the basic decorating or simple linear combinations”</li></ul>The first assumption would still stand regardless of whether the API is JSON: API, GraphQL, or SOAP, or some custom abomination, not available fully during half of the development, and that in order to accomplish anything of relevance in your app would require you combining and arranging responses from 5 different API endpoints in complicated ways.The other set would break like a dry twig in those conditions.Now if your contracts include stipulations that trigger change requests or some other measure by default as soon as some key assumptions are invalidated by the real-world situation — provided your assumptions are realistic and written in good faith — the whole “is this change request or not” thing pretty much goes away, the relationship with the client is preserved and you can spend your time developing rather than doing “document and mail forensics” to prove whether something was agreed upon previously or is a billable change request.&nbsp;<blockquote>IMPORTANT: I’ve said above “provided that your ‘fragile’ assumptions were realistic and written in good faith”, That is crucial, as it’s very easy to use “fragile” assumptions as a sort of trap or a minefield where you start with *expecting* the client to break them so you can charge them for the CRs quickly and early. That approach is opposite of “written in good faith” and you should never do it (unless you are a terrible person, in which case you probably should do it, as it’s very effective).</blockquote>&nbsp;The key is for assumptions to be realistic — meaning that they provide a set of requirements for the solution that you honestly believe to be of good quality, while at the same time they are detailed enough that they cover all the main risks that you expect in the project.This is where you can really use your experience with past projects in order to protect yourself from the things you know might go wrong.Assumptions are tightly connected with risk management — as they are very suitable for stabilizing the scope in areas where we identified significant risks. So in order to be able to write good assumptions, you’d also need to be able to identify risks well.<h3 style="margin-left:0px;">3. You can guide your estimates towards the given target in a meaningful way</h3>Another scenario where assumptions really come in handy is when you’re trying to get a “committable” value out of your estimated range with as little risk as possible.As a refresher — estimates are always a range with the “most likely” the value placed somewhere between the optimistic and pessimistic extremes. The range communicates the uncertainty (risk) that the estimators have about the amount of work that would be needed for the implementation of the technical solution for the currently known scope. The commitment, consequently, is a value within the said estimated range that you are willing to “commit” to — ie. a budget value in which you believe you can build the software product or a feature — with relative confidence.You’ve also heard about the cone of uncertainty and it depicts the typical error margins due to the undefined scope.&nbsp;Those two (estimate and the cone) error margins add up, and at the beginning of the project, which is usually just about the time you’d typically be asked to do an estimate, the error margins can be in the multiples of 100% (yes, that’s not the typo — 400% is often cited value for the scope related estimation errors at the beginning of the project — before any real requirements are done).So if know that there is a 100%–400% area where our real effort might fall, that means that our estimate, and consequently the bid can be anything in that range, and picking a lower number will introduce a higher budget overflow risk while increasing our chances of getting the contract, and vice versa. So how do we select a lower committable budget while not increasing the risk?The approach is pretty similar to one described previously in this very text, and they do often go hand in hand.The idea is to identify functional segments/system areas where most of your uncertainty lies (stuff like 3rd party integrations, very complex business processes/logic, tricky operational requirements or dependency on external teams you have no experience working with, etc.) and then “assume them away” — by creating a set of assumptions that both remove that uncertainty away and at the same time use solutions, techniques and technologies your organization is familiar with and can utilize them in an optimal way.However, here again, it is of extreme importance that whatever assumption you propose — has to be both feasible and you honestly must believe that the resulting solution would be of the required quality and good for the client.What you end up with is an estimate that is biased towards a potential solution through a set of carefully selected assumptions, and where that solution is selected so it fits the target budget for the project (provided by the sales typically) as well as it possibly can right from the start. This approach eliminates the “please estimate effort for X — why is the estimate so high? — can you reestimate and make it lower?” sales/pm-engineering estimation loop that we all know and love (hate) so much.<h3 style="margin-left:0px;">4. You can significantly improve the quality of your estimations</h3><figure class="image image_resized image-style-align-center" style="width:68.37%;"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/media/5802ef7f1e59377a1d180faa2cc33c77.jpeg"></figure>“A business analyst wields its newfound power responsibly, digital art” (OpenAI Dall-E, 2022)&nbsp;Assumptions are pure gold that (should) come as one of the mandatory results of your estimation process — provided you do it correctly, but more about that in a couple of weeks.<h3 style="margin-left:0px;">The "method"</h3>Now that we covered a few techniques and scenarios where a well-designed set of assumptions can (and do) make all the difference in the world, what we still need to figure out is some kind of process for coming up with those assumptions.And one fairly simple process, which utilizes all the experience you’ve gathered so far in your career and that results in a relatively comprehensive set of assumptions whose role is to stabilize a particular project environment would look something like this:Trigger event: You are confronted with an environment that has a lot of inherent risks and unknowns, but you are still tasked with giving some form of fixed commitment&nbsp;<ol style="list-style-type:decimal;"><li>First, think about all the reasons you can think of that prevents you from feeling secure in giving commitment at this point (the stuff that scares/worries you)</li><li>Now visualize the reality in which those reasons do not exists, and in particular, pay close attention to what exists in their place — ie. with what you’ve replaced them within this new reality of yours</li><li>Write a “diff” between those two realities in as much detail as you can</li><li>That diff you came up with is the list of assumptions that need to be fulfilled in order for the risks to go away.</li><li>You win and become an inspiration to millions around the world.</li></ol>So it might feel a bit abstract, all that talk about visualizing and diffing realities (but you have to admit it sounds rather cool) but it’s really not — as what you come with is typically stuff like this:<ul><li>API documentation is written using OpenAPI 3.0 standard, documents every API endpoint, and includes illustrative examples of complex usage for each of the documented endpoints</li><li>An IT operations provider is available during development for consulting</li><li>An IT operations provider’s staff working on the project have at least one year of operational experience with technologies X, Y, Z</li><li>An IT operations provider’s staff has extensive experience and expertise in technologies Q, W, and E and at least 3 years of experience with each</li><li>UI designs are ready and verified at the latest one week prior to the development start for each individual functional section.</li><li>UI designs and wireframes are verified against the functional requirements and confirmed to be complete and accurate before being delivered to the development team</li></ul>The level of detail will depend on your previous experience and the particular situation but the rule of thumb is always that whenever you feel that you can make an assumption more precise, then do so. Otherwise, you might end up adding some silent assumptions to your explicit ones — and since that former variant is bad, that will just result in weakening the explicit assumption you worked so much to create in the first place.<h2 style="margin-left:0px;">Conclusion</h2>Assumptions are nature’s out-of-the-box solution to “known unknowns”, and if used correctly they can even somewhat reduce the “unknown unknowns” space as a “side-effect” — although they can obviously never eliminate it completely. And for that alone, they are an extremely powerful tool, as a large chunk of the problems related to IT development often stems from the incomplete requirements implicitly supplemented by a set of various silent assumptions by different actors within the project.Understanding assumptions and using them consciously (and communicating them loudly and clearly) is, at least in my opinion and experience an extremely powerful and resource-light / effective tool. It provides you with a way of tackling uncertainties at the early stages of a project, shields you from most of the harm in the “fluid” requirements scenarios, and as an added bonus, you’ll be able to understand (and tweak) your estimates much better.So as a final word — don’t be afraid of assuming, just make sure you let everyone know when you do, and you’ll have a superpower at your disposal without the inconvenience of going through lab explosions, exposure to radiation, or other personal trauma in general. I find it much more enjoyable and altogether safer this way.&nbsp;

The power of the assumption — The techniques and the examples.png

The power of the assumption — The techniques and the examples

Marija

<h4 style="margin-left:0px;">During the summer of 2021, I had to do an internship as a part of my university course. Being a visual communications design student, I’ve had the opportunity to attend many different design courses and was very keen on finding something related to UX/UI design.</h4>One important thing I did was think about my personal preferences. Would I fit in better in a smaller environment where everyone knows each other? A big company with a recognizable brand? Or maybe a combination of both?It was easier to imagine myself in a smaller-sized company, and I was also determined to find a community that respects its employees and encourages them to stay curious. More importantly, since I was afraid that no one would take me seriously as a student with no previous job experience, it was crucial that I feel validated. There were still many restrictions due to COVID-19, and I was very stressed if I could even find an internship opportunity at all. I’ve decided to use my personal networks to explore possibilities, and that’s how I got to Undabot.Even though they didn’t have any open design internship positions on their website, I emailed them anyway to see if they could maybe offer me an internship. Lo and behold: after a couple of days, they got back to me saying they were more than happy to have me as an intern.<h3 style="margin-left:0px;">"Leave your ego at the door"</h3>This was the first thing my mentor said to me on my first day at work, and I immediately knew I’ve made the right choice for my internship. Not only did such an attitude help create a healthy workplace, but it also proved to be necessary when creating a digital experience for users. After all, our work centres around their needs and not my opinion on something being pretty or not. Besides that, I learned very quickly that each Undabot designer is responsible for creating both UX and UI, instead of only focusing on one element of the job.My mentors also taught me that accepting feedback is a part of the learning process and showed me how to use it as a tool for self-improvement. Sometimes the feedback is positive, sometimes negative — but it’s always a way to improve your self-esteem, prevent the same mistakes from happening again, and enrich relationships with mentors.After becoming acquainted with how the company works, I was immediately given an assignment: I had to design an app. My mentors gave me a topic for the app and short instructions, and off I went.I began by browsing the competition and taking screenshots to see the similarities and differences between various apps. After that, I started working on the user flow and features I wanted to incorporate. In the next phase, I worked on wireframes and style guides. I did a few sketches on paper and later proceeded to do the rest on Figma. Finally, it was time to work on the on-screen design and prototype, do user testing, and incorporate everything in the final presentation.I’ve also had help along the way, and instead of waiting for an official weekly meeting, I could always ask my mentor to hop onto a call and discuss any issues.&nbsp;<figure class="image image-style-align-center"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/media/34f0f6c55e4720b4c5eb215721a8372e.jpeg" alt="Internships Croatia"></figure><h3 style="margin-left:0px;">There is more than one solution to a design problem</h3>During the creative process, designers (especially us juniors) are often insecure about design choices. While it’s necessary to follow some principles and methods (as described in this <a href="https://undabot.com/blog/ux-for-beginners-learn-the-basics-principles-and-processes/">blog post</a>), there will always be more than one solution to a design problem. As designers, our prime responsibility is to keep the target audience in mind and approach the design as objectively as we can.When I wasn’t sure about the direction I should take, I could always reach out to my mentors for creative or technical advice. During my internship journey, they helped me understand the differences between designing for iOS and Android platforms. They also gave me valuable feedback on my assignment and suggested some other UX and UI design variations on different screen resolutions. After that, I got to know the platforms better and could make choices more independently!<h3 style="margin-left:0px;">Being curious is a must-have</h3>Curiosity is one of the skills that definitely make you a better designer. Asking questions, researching, and having the courage to try new things helps you understand the world around us, which also applies to design. We usually design solutions for different products or services, and we can’t know everything about a specific topic or field.&nbsp;However, our goal is to try to understand the context, which is where that curiosity comes in handy. Not to mention, there are also always new technologies, trends, and limitations designers need to master. Curiosity sparks innovation that is so welcomed in the industry, and also personally rewarding. Undabot is definitely a place that encourages new and unique ideas, especially when you are an intern. Instead of settling for a single solution, I was always encouraged and challenged to find multiple ones.As for my assignment, I spent a couple of days researching and finding similar apps that could help me determine which features are missing.&nbsp;After that, I interviewed a couple of people from my surroundings to gather the little pieces of information necessary for creating personas. Some of the ideas I even got during my coffee break. At the final stage of my curiosity journey, I needed to decide whether these ideas were useful for my app or just interesting, sipping-on-coffee thoughts.<figure class="image"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/media/c9185b34baef5e557f04a84507857abd.jpeg" alt="Work from student internships in Undabot"></figure><h3 style="margin-left:0px;">Creative work is never over, but you have to know when to stop</h3>When I first started working on my design task, I had so many ideas and features I wanted to incorporate. I was very excited to include as many things as possible, but my mentors told me to pause and try to differentiate between features that are necessary and those that are fun to have. After some time, I realized I had gone too deep with my analysis and was not completely satisfied with my UX and UI, which led to a creative block.&nbsp;That was when I decided to take a step back and implement the advice from other designers to remove some of my initially planned features. Deciding that my project was finished was very hard for me because I didn’t believe it was good enough to present. Eventually, it was time to share my final work, and after the mentors praised me, I realized I was satisfied. Now when I look back, I think I could have done this or changed that, but overall I’m happy I completed something — and took their advice on when to stop!Oh, and I have to say I thought about my design even when I wasn’t working, whether I was taking a walk, going to the cinema, cooking, etc. Of course, I wasn’t obsessed, but this helped me find inspiration and ideas outside the workplace.<h3 style="margin-left:0px;">Take time to relax and have fun (especially with your colleagues!)</h3>I had a lot of fun from the very beginning of my internship and was grateful to be a part of such a positive work environment. At times it was tricky to concentrate because I was laughing too much, but moments of joy and laughter helped me focus more on my assignment later on.&nbsp;Also, spending time with the team helped us build mutual trust and encouraged me to communicate more freely. After work, we often went for drinks or did other fun group activities, like quizzes!&nbsp;<blockquote>Looking back at my internship, I realize how rewarding it is to be a part of a passionate and hardworking team.&nbsp;</blockquote>&nbsp;I had a lot of time to work on my assignment which helped me improve my self-esteem, and had a lot of fun creating something and collaborating with others. At the end of my journey, I even got a permanent design internship as a junior UX/UI designer. Shoutout to my main mentors, Ana and Jelena!&nbsp;And thanks to everyone at Undabot who made my internship such a great experience!

Internships in Undabot

5 lessons I learned from my UX/UI Design internship at Undabot

Ines

<h4 style="margin-left:0px;">Before releasing an application to the general public, you want to ensure your app is fully optimized, capable of high performance, and ready to endure considerable traffic for your client.</h4>If you have doubts about your app breaking down under a load of a high visitor count, fear not — you can easily test this before the application gets into the hands of customers. Read on to find out how a load test is performed and how it can help you in the final stage of developing an app.<h3 style="margin-left:0px;">How do you benefit from load testing?</h3>Thanks to load testing, we can check how systems operate under a large number of simultaneous virtual users carrying out transactions over a period of time. The load test answers two basic questions: “Does my system do what I expect it to do under these conditions?” and “Does it perform well?”. In the Microsoft guide Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications, load tests are defined as the following:&nbsp;<blockquote>A load test enables you to measure response times, throughput rates, and resource-utilization levels, and to identify your application’s breaking point, assuming that the breaking point occurs below the peak load condition.</blockquote>&nbsp;Three steps are crucial for a complete load test: preparation, implementation, and analysis. To better understand the importance of load testing, let’s demonstrate these steps with an example of how to perform a load test on the Google website using tools such as JMeter and BlazeMeter.<h3 style="margin-left:0px;">1. Load test preparation</h3>Proper preparation is crucial if you want your load test to succeed. This means identifying the correct targets in test cases, test groups, and expected results. As we have mentioned before, we will show the Google Chrome website load test as an example. There are three test cases that the virtual users will go through on the Google website, as you can see in this table:<figure class="table"><table><tbody><tr><td>Test case / Test steps</td><td>Search Quality week</td><td>YouTube</td><td>Images of cats&nbsp;</td></tr><tr><td>1</td><td>Open Google Chrome</td><td>Open Google Chrome</td><td>Open Google Chrome</td></tr><tr><td>2</td><td>In empty field add Quality week</td><td>Click on YouTube icon</td><td>Click on Google images</td></tr><tr><td>3</td><td>Click on Search icon</td><td>In empty field add text “House relax”</td><td>In empty field add text “cat”</td></tr><tr><td>4</td><td>Click on the first link that shows up</td><td>Click on Search icon</td><td>Click on Search icon</td></tr><tr><td>5</td><td>Scroll to the bottom</td><td>Exit</td><td>Click on the image when it shows up</td></tr><tr><td>6</td><td>Exit</td><td>/&nbsp;</td><td>Exit</td></tr></tbody></table></figure>Load test preparation - test cases table&nbsp;After writing the test cases, we should define:<ul><li>the number of virtual users</li><li>thread start-up period</li><li>how many times the virtual users will perform test cases (loop)</li><li>the duration of test cases.</li></ul>&nbsp;Here you can see the defined values for the specified parameters.<figure class="table"><table><tbody><tr><td>Virtual users</td><td>1</td><td>10</td><td>60</td><td>200</td></tr><tr><td>Thread startup period (sec)</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>4</td><td>9</td></tr><tr><td>Loop</td><td>1</td><td>1</td><td>1</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>Duration (sec)</td><td>10</td><td>20</td><td>30</td><td>120</td></tr></tbody></table></figure>Load test preparation - Test groups table&nbsp;We have only one parameter left to define — the expected results, which are very important because we are going to compare them with the results actually achieved. These are our numbers, aka the expected time required by virtual users to complete the defined test cases.<figure class="table"><table><tbody><tr><td>Virtual users/Test case</td><td>1</td><td>10</td><td>60</td><td>200</td></tr><tr><td>Search Quality week</td><td>2 sec</td><td>5 sec</td><td>15 sec</td><td>35 sec</td></tr><tr><td>Youtube</td><td>7 sec&nbsp;</td><td>12 sec&nbsp;</td><td>22 sec&nbsp;</td><td>40 sec</td></tr><tr><td>Images of cat</td><td>10 sec</td><td>16 sec</td><td>32 sec</td><td>42 sec</td></tr><tr><td>Total</td><td>19 sec&nbsp;</td><td>33 sec</td><td>69 sec</td><td>117 sec</td></tr></tbody></table></figure>Load test preparation - Expected results tableAs soon as we’ve defined these three parameters, we are ready to move forward with the next step: implementation.<h3 style="margin-left:0px;">2. Load test implementation</h3>We will use the two tools mentioned earlier to implement the load test, BlazeMeter and JMeter. In this example, we will use the BlazeMeter extensions on Chrome to record test case steps. Next, we will save the recorded scripts and open them in the JMeter tool.<h4 style="margin-left:0px;">BlazeMeter</h4><a href="https://www.blazemeter.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">BlazeMeter</a> is an easy-to-use, open web application available to anyone, making work simpler for Quality Assurance engineers everywhere. It’s an advanced SaaS tool that increases the capability of JMeter by being able to simulate up to 10 million users, providing advanced test analysis and collaboration, and having functional and API testing capabilities.The Chrome browser includes a BlazeMeter extension that captures all HTTP/S requests and actual user interactions sent by the browser, creates JMeter or Selenium scripts, and automatically sends them to the BlazeMeter application, where the script can be executed with just one click. The extension can also enable debugging and testing of a recorded Selenium session on a local Chrome browser, and JMeter can be used to locally debug and improve the JMX file created by the Chrome extension to ensure the script is ready. We will show how the extension works, and the recorded script resulting from the BlazeMeter extension will be edited in the JMeter tool.&nbsp;After you go on Chrome extensions and add BlazeMeter extensions, you will see the BlazeMeter icon in the top right corner. To record your steps, click on the icon to get the following image. When you add the name of our test case and click on the red button, it starts to record the steps defined in our test cases table.<figure class="image image_resized image-style-align-center" style="width:36.39%;"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/media/da1fcaf2de4510b24c18a52db7bbfb83.png"></figure>After you finish and click the “Stop” button, the steps are documented and you can edit record scripts and see every API request we recorded.<figure class="image image-style-align-center"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/media/e9ec03890d134f40f7382aa560010afe.png" alt="Load test implementation - The BlazeMeter editor with API requests"></figure>Load test implementation - The BlazeMeter editor with API requests<figure class="image image-style-align-center"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/media/c653a51f3acc4898464ca13d7fd4ca1d.png" alt="Load test implementation - The BlazeMeter API request details"></figure>Load test implementation - The BlazeMeter API request details After recording the three test cases: Search a “Quality week” phrase, YouTube, and Images of cats, you need to save the records. On the top right of the BlazeMeter editor, you can find the “. JMX” button, and when you click on it, the recorded case is saved on your computer with the .JMX extension. You can also save the recorded case with a .JSON extension or Taurus, but in this case .JMX is needed to add a recorded case in the JMeter tool.<h4 style="margin-left:0px;">Apache JMeter</h4><a href="https://jmeter.apache.org/">Apache JMeter</a> is an application designed to carry out a load test and measure the performance of the tested system. Apache JMeter is used to test the performance of dynamic web applications and static and dynamic resources, simulating a large load on a server, server group, network, or facility to test its strength or to analyze performance under different loads.&nbsp;The Apache JMeter tool is free and allows the use of source code for system development. It has a simple user interface, so it doesn’t take much time to get familiar with it. You can also run it on multiple platforms and it allows the simultaneous operation of different functions of separate test groups.The results from the application can be shown in different formats, such as trees, charts, tables, and log files. You can also write your tests and include basic protocols such as HTTP, JDBC, LDAP, SOAP, JMS, and FTP. The JMeter application can also record/playback the tests.Now let’s get back to our steps!&nbsp;Once we have the recorded test cases, we must install Apache JMeter. You first need to download the latest version of Java, then install Apache JMeter and run it. Once the installation is completed, you should see this screen:<figure class="image image-style-align-center"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/media/5d87dceb08cbbc9c410f89444ea8a1ba.png" alt="Load test implementation - Apache JMeter"></figure>Load test implementation - Apache JMeter Now add recorded test cases to JMeter GUI. With the right click on the “Test plan” element and a click on the “Merge” element in the dropdown menu shown here, we repeat the process until all the recorded cases are added.<figure class="image"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/media/e5fe4c7d86f0309f3be1dbd971c22160.png" alt="Load test implementation - Added recorded case in Apache JMeter"></figure>Load test implementation - Added recorded case in Apache JMeter After adding all the required saved cases, this is what you’ll get: on the left side you can see all the saved APIs, and on the right side you can see the details of the APIs, which you can change.&nbsp;<img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/media/132d237ed7627924ad14eb9de046da78.png" alt="Load test implementation - Recorded API requests in Apache JMeter"> Load test implementation - Recorded API requests in Apache JMeter&nbsp;On the left side, above the recorded cases, there is a “Thread Group” element. When you click on this element, the right side opens the “Thread Group” details. Here you add the data from our Load test preparation table.<figure class="image"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/media/81c3f8b3525a33d0154a495818279f28.png"></figure><figure class="image image-style-align-center"><img></figure>Load test implementation - Recorded Thread Group in Apache JMeter&nbsp;Once you have defined all these elements in the JMeter, you need to create a .csv document where the results are saved, and create a folder where that report will be generated in. The test can be performed directly in JMeter or via the console. It’s recommended to do it via the console if tests are performed on a local server, to minimize complications and misunderstandings.<figure class="image"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/media/61a670c1b7b0defef885eee814d8ea9c.png"></figure>Load test implementation - Command in the console for running the Load test&nbsp;The command line to run the test consists of:<ul><li>sh jmeter – indicates the program the action is performed in</li><li>-n – indicates operating mode without GUI</li><li>-t – indicates the location of the JMeter script</li><li>Script path</li><li>-l – indicates the location of the .csv file or the file the results are saved in</li><li>Path to the .csv file</li><li>-e – indicates the creation of an HTML report</li><li>-o – indicates the creation of a report folder</li><li>Path to the folder where the HTML report will be saved.</li></ul>&nbsp;After you put in the command, you get the screen from the following image, where you can see the results of the load test. You can see that we are adding 200 virtual users, each user connecting to the test every 9 seconds. When the load test is completed, the message “End Run” will appear. You must repeat the command after modifying the data in Thread Group in the Apache JMeter application for 1 user, 10 users and 60 users. For each change, you need to create a new folder and .csv file to obtain and compare all the reports for each number of virtual users.<figure class="image image-style-align-center"><img></figure><figure class="image"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/media/09683ab7ac8894ae2f40fe4bbbc7987a.png"></figure>Load test implementation - Command running Load test in console&nbsp;The report during testing consists of a summary of the average execution time, the minimum and maximum execution time and the number of active and started users, as well as the number of users who have completed their paths. At the end of the test, the recorded data is verified and the test group values are modified.<h3 style="margin-left:0px;">3. Load Test Analysis</h3>As mentioned before, the analysis will be done using the generated HTML reports from the folder specified in our console command. Once you open the HTML report, you will see charts and tables with the data needed to get the answers to our questions: “Does my system do what I expect it to do under these conditions?” and “Does it perform well?”. As part of the analysis, you need to compare the results achieved with the expected results (defined in step one, preparation). In this video you can see an HTML report for 200 virtual users, just to show an example.&nbsp;Expected results:<figure class="table"><table><tbody><tr><td>Virtual users/Test case</td><td>1</td><td>10</td><td>60</td><td>200</td></tr><tr><td>Search Quality week</td><td>2 sec</td><td>5 sec</td><td>15 sec</td><td>35 sec</td></tr><tr><td>YouTube</td><td>7 sec</td><td>12 sec</td><td>22 sec</td><td>40 sec</td></tr><tr><td>Images of cats</td><td>10 sec</td><td>16 sec</td><td>32 sec</td><td>42 sec</td></tr><tr><td>Total</td><td>19 sec</td><td>33 sec</td><td>69 sec</td><td>117 sec</td></tr></tbody></table></figure>&nbsp; Load test analysis – Expected resultsObtained results:<figure class="table"><table><tbody><tr><td>Virtual users/Test case</td><td>1</td><td>10</td><td>60</td><td>200</td></tr><tr><td>Search Quality week</td><td>3 sec</td><td>9 sec</td><td>21 sec</td><td>214 sec</td></tr><tr><td>YouTube</td><td>11 sec</td><td>17 sec</td><td>45 sec</td><td>1904 sec</td></tr><tr><td>Images of cats</td><td>7 sec</td><td>13 sec</td><td>34 sec</td><td>316 sec</td></tr><tr><td>Total</td><td>21 sec</td><td>35 sec</td><td>100 sec</td><td>2434 sec</td></tr></tbody></table></figure>Load test analysis – Final results<h3 style="margin-left:0px;">Conclusion</h3>Based on the tabular display and the HTML report, we can conclude that the system performs as intended in the given conditions. We can see that 80% of requests to the server have succeeded and 16% have failed, which means that the system can support multiple users at once. Make sure to inform your team of the results in order to clearly define if the system works and is in line with the expected behavior. Next, when we compare the expected results with the final ones, we see a big difference in the test cases when we have 200 users at a time. The system is expected to be slower, as the server is busier with requests and responses.&nbsp;For our example test, we used the Google website, which is a great system and must be able to receive many requests and send many replies. This shows how important the load test is for large systems and for systems visited by many people. After completing the load test, you will understand how your app performs, as well as how it will behave if loaded with a large number of users, i.e., a large number of calls and responses at the same time.&nbsp;I hope you found something new and will use this guide to create your own loading test. If you have any problems or have any other questions, please feel free to contact me.&nbsp;Good luck!

How to perform a JMeter load testing in 3 simple steps

Project „Business internationalization of company Undabot d.o.o.“ (KK.03.2.1.16.0121) will contribute to the development cycle of internationalization on target markets. The company will exhibit its portfolio of services at international ICT fairs.<h3 style="margin-left:0px;">Project objectives:</h3>The project objective is to strengthen the business internationalization which will be achieved by exhibiting and presenting the company’s services at internationally recognized fairs. It will result in an increase in total sales revenue and an increase in export revenue.Implementation period: from June 2019. to November 2020.Total project value = 1.008.677,04 knTotal eligible cost = 886.947,20 knGrants = 753.905,09 knContact person for more information:&nbsp; Hrvoje Kapetanović, <a href="mailto:hrvoje.kapetanovic@undabot.com">hrvoje.kapetanovic@undabot.com</a>&nbsp;<hr>More about structural funds at:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.strukturnifondovi.hr/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">www.strukturnifondovi.hr</a>Find out more about the Competitiveness and Cohesion Operational Program at: <a href="https://strukturnifondovi.hr/eu-fondovi/esi-fondovi-2014-2020/op-konkurentnost-i-kohezija/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://strukturnifondovi.hr/eu-fondovi/esi-fondovi-2014-2020/op-konkurentnost-i-kohezija/</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/EU_funds_8df86a4e1c.png" alt="EU funds.png" srcset="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/thumbnail_EU_funds_8df86a4e1c.png 245w,https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/small_EU_funds_8df86a4e1c.png 500w,https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/medium_EU_funds_8df86a4e1c.png 750w,https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/large_EU_funds_8df86a4e1c.png 1000w," sizes="100vw"></figure>&nbsp;

Business internationalization of Undabot.jpeg

Business internationalization of company Undabot d.o.o.

GP3-chat-BA-assistant.jpeg

GPT-3 - your own, personal AI-powered BA assistant

After a successful 2022, where we brought home 6 international awards, Undabot team has received a new one – the Web Excellence Award for redesigning <a href="https://showbuzz.hr/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">showbuzz.hr</a> website! The award is given to projects promoting creative ideas, new business models, and innovative web technologies.Over 1200 projects competed for the <a href="https://we-awards.com/winner/redesign-of-showbuzz-entertainment-and-lifestyle-portal/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Web Excellence Award</a>, and the first place in the Website/Lifestyle category proves the quality of the showbuzz.hr portal redesign is recognized at the international level.The new user interface design, interactive content presentation, and optimized integration with social media drew attention from the web design community, and the updated look of the website has gained the trust of many readers, which confirms that the portal raises the standards in bringing the best entertainment content in a modern way.<blockquote>“We are pleased that showbuzz.hr is visually more attractive and functionally more accessible after the redesign. It continues to bring the best from the world of showbiz to its readers through daily rich content. We ended the last year with a record number of readers, and we begin the new year with this international recognition. It is a great honor that the design community has recognized the redesign quality. This success is an additional motivation for us to continue to lead in trends and push the limits in the media industry,”&nbsp; &nbsp;Domagoj Repač, the Head of Project Management at Nova TV.</blockquote>Client satisfaction and the quality of project creation are always our priorities at Undabot. We insist on the best solutions, organisationally and project-wise, which can be seen in the quality culture integrated into our everyday business activities – from the first contact with the client to the application maintenance phase. This award confirms that our focus on excellence and creating the optimal user experience is the right approach to developing innovative digital products that are globally competitive.<blockquote>“I am very proud that the high quality of the user interface done by Undabot was recognized in the design community. I want to say a huge thank you for trusting us with this project and sincere congratulations to our dear client, Nova TV. Last but not least, this award is a tribute to our excellent team’s hard work and dedication to excellence,” concluded Hrvoje Kapetanović, our Chief Executive Officer.</blockquote>

Webe exellence award

Undabot wins Web Excellence Award for Showbuzz portal redesign

Jelena

Design trends are more varied than ever, and clients are more willing to experiment — often at the cost of placing distractions in primary focus while ignoring the very basic principles of UX.<hr>Designing and developing a website isn’t an act; it’s a journey. And like any journey, it starts with decisions. Designers need to decide with the clients on the style they want to see in the future website, which often means figuring out how to reconcile a personal need for aesthetically pleasing, innovative solutions, with demands for usability and clarity. This dilemma is especially evident in cases where designers choose to follow a certain trend. But should there even be a dilemma?<h2 style="margin-left:0px;">Do we design for humans or awards?</h2>If you visit a newly created website that follows the latest design and technology trends, you will likely be greeted with an animation that disorients or test your patience. The website might hijack your mouse or ability to scroll. The content may come from unexpected directions, and headings might appear huge on devices larger than laptops, forcing you to move away from the screen to read them. Since these far too large captions often appear hand in hand with tiny labels, it would be a good idea to keep a magnifying glass in your pocket — one you can also use to look for the navigation, often hidden somewhere on your screen.It seems many things we have come to understand about users are easily forgotten. Simple principles, such as giving the user information about where they are on the website, or allowing them to navigate with ease, don’t seem to be relevant anymore. What does seem to matter is having the “WOW” factor that might impress clients or even pick up an award or two. However, to some of us, this is more concerning than inspiring.Where is UX in today’s trends?<h2 style="margin-left:0px;">Is UX still the Holy Grail?</h2>UX has become more than just a buzzword over the last couple of years, with agencies putting effort into continually evolving their UX process through workshops with clients, various user research methods, user personas with emotions and interests, user journeys, user flows, wireframes, prototypes, and usability tests. There has been so much focus on acquiring specific metric data regarding UX, yet we still decide to sacrifice good UX for a “prettier” and “trendy” UI.Of course, when designing a new website, we want to be different, use the latest technology, and show off our design skills. Still, we should ask ourselves if it’s worth changing proven UX models for a new trick that ignores existing user behaviors and creates unnecessary challenges.<h2 style="margin-left:0px;">Content — a king without a throne</h2>When talking about the topic of UX, you often hear the phrase “content is king”. But is it really? When creating new websites, do we place content at the center of the user’s attention, or are we more focused on following the latest design trends?When users need to focus on the content, the last thing you should do is distract them with mindless animations, aggressive backgrounds, and text color changes. We should think carefully about possible distractions and use them only when we want to shift the user’s focus in a new direction, yet new trends often have plenty of those distracting elements.Miniature additional text, random elements across the screen, weird unexpected behavior, bright unreadable colors, aggressive animations, and wild color changes… Most such things bring no value to the user outside of being trendy.<h2 style="margin-left:0px;">Hijacking the experience</h2>Making users feel safe and welcome is one of the <a href="https://undabot.com/blog/ux-for-beginners-learn-the-basics-principles-and-processes/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">best approaches of UX that even beginners know</a>.In an online experience, that feeling of control and safety stems from knowing where you are and how to navigate away from your position. Therefore, changing classic actions like scrolling or implementing mouse pointer modifications could potentially irritate users. If they aren’t comfortable with the newest technology, this could even lead to feelings of confusion and fear — the last thing we want the users to feel.Here’s a quick example: the built-in browser scroll position is useful implicit information that users are accustomed to. When switching to horizontal scrolling, this information usually isn’t displayed, which adds to the users’ confusion. Scrolling in a different direction than accustomed to while not being able to understand the progress of scrolling sounds like an unneeded hassle.Users are accustomed to scrolling vertically, they like to know where they are at any given moment, and they expect to intuitively know the browser works. This shouldn’t be broken because of a trend — unless it mimics real-life behavior that the user can relate to.What would be a case of mimicking real-life behavior?Horizontal timelines! Users are accustomed to seeing a timeline starting with the earliest or current date, then moving forward horizontally to further dates, or backward to past dates.This means that changing the scroll from vertical to horizontal could work because it mimics real-life experience. Although timelines can be in different shapes, we all saw this format during our early education, so this representation became the most common and natural one. And there aren’t any intuitive obstacles: since it’s a timeline, users know where they are and are probably aware of when and how it will end, so their current position is clear to them.This is one of the arguments for implementing horizontal scroll, but we still need to make sure the rest of the content can follow this new set of rules and we can justify hijacking the most common scrolling experience. Also, if we do decide to implement a behavior change in a product, it has to be consistent in all variations where that behavior is repeated.<h2 style="margin-left:0px;">Stepping into trends</h2>As a designer who has been in this profession for many years, I feel like we’ve seen a lot of trends come and go.Trends are an interesting phenomenon and worth exploring because any design idea can be great if it’s implemented with a user-centric approach. When choosing the right style, ensure it suits the target audience and the theme, and don’t decide on an idea only because it’s trendy. Finally, even when you do make the final decision, you need to be conscious of its possible flaws.For example, brutalism can be grandiose if we can achieve high resolutions while maintaining readability, and consider how many bright colors we actually need to get the desired look; or how much lack of color is acceptable for the product to be usable. Also, always try to focus user attention on the content that guides them in the wanted direction, instead of possible distractions.In short, following a trend isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but it shouldn’t be done at the cost of UX. Good UX is the foundation on which we build a story, and it’s time to stop looking for excuses to justify ignoring those foundations. Trendy and usable aren’t mutually exclusive!<h2 style="margin-left:0px;">Finding the middle ground</h2>Of course, there is an exception to every rule. If users are motivated enough, sometimes their time invested into learning how to navigate a website or an app can pay off in the end and provide a more interesting, innovative user experience.Still, it is important to weigh whether the user really gets additional benefits, if we are taking away their learned behavior or confusing them with distractions. We would need to thoroughly test the new design solution with the target group of users. A/B testing would be perfect for this situation, but it requires additional time and resources to come up with two design solutions. And of course, we would need to emotionally distance ourselves from the preferred solution and maintain objectivity. In fact, the default presumption should be that the simpler, “already seen” solution is probably the one that the test group prefers.Beware: not taking all of this into consideration can lead you to become a development company that only boasts about the UX conferences it attends or articles it reads and publishes, but in fact doesn’t practice what it preaches.In conclusion, design trends are exactly what their name implies: styles that are popular at the time. Whether or not you follow a trend shouldn’t be imperative while building a digital product, but if you choose to do so, it should be carefully balanced with our existing knowledge of UX. Our hope is that the world has more designers that focus on user experience and high product usability than design trends.If you are like me, a person for whom the user experience and long-term contribution of a good UX are more important than trendy design elements, I must cheer you up with the fact that there are companies like Undabot, where we as designers, place top priority on high usability of our products and data that confirms it’s a success.

is-ux-missing-in-todays-design-trends.jpg

Is UX missing in today’s design trends?

Croatian IT company Undabot won first place in <a href="https://undabot.com/blog/undabot-wins-web-excellence-award-for-showbuzz-portal-redesign/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">the Website/Lifestyle category of the Web Excellence Awards</a> at the beginning of the year. That award is given to projects promoting creative ideas, new business models, and innovative web technologies. Undabot won it amongst more than 1200 projects that applied from all over the world. That continued a successful series. The company won six awards last year, and the platform Clutch included it in the top one percent of the best global companies. <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/hrvojekapetanovic/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Hrvoje Kapetanović</a>, Undabot’s Chief Executive Officer, explains that they deserved that status and the awards and announces new business plans and cooperations.<hr><h2>Why did Clutch include Undabot in the one percent of the best global companies in 2021 and 2022?</h2><a href="https://clutch.co/profile/undabot#portfolio" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Clutch</a> is the biggest global platform for ranking IT companies, and every year they make a list of the best, globally and locally. Along with being included in the list of the best companies in Croatia, for the second year in a row, we have been included in the top one percent of the best IT companies in the world. Seeing that tens of thousands of IT companies are in the world, this is a fantastic accomplishment for a company of our size. All 27 of our references on the Clutch platform have the maximum five-star rating, alongside great reviews of the projects themselves, which is the best validation of our commitment to quality.The backbone of doing business in the IT industry is the client references and their satisfaction which we, among other things, maintain through constant improvement of the processes and employee education. In 2022 alone, we invested around four thousand hours in employee education, participated in 43 educational programs, and held 27 education ourselves.<h2 style="margin-left:0px;">How did Undabot develop within ten years of its existence, and how did you conquer the market?</h2>Like most tech companies from this side of the world, Undabot was started by a few enthusiasts that wanted to make advanced digital solutions. In that far 2012, the demand for mobile solutions was especially high in foreign markets, and Undabot made its first digital solutions for clients in Western Europe countries, mostly Austria.With quality products and recommendations and by participating in international conferences, we also conquered other markets. In 2018 we added web development to our portfolio, and we started offering integrated solutions. As the IT industry developed and the market transformed, we developed new departments, improved processes, and the quality of our end products.Now we can say that we offer end-to-end service, from initial defining to maintaining complex digital solutions.<h2 style="margin-left:0px;">What is the added value of Undabot’s services?</h2>Undabot is a tech company that develops complex web and mobile custom software solutions. We specialize in Android and iOS technologies, while, in the web domain, we primarily work in PHP programming language. Even though in the world of IT, new programming languages are constantly being developed; we think that working with tested technologies contributes to the project stability, especially in upgrading and maintenance.Seeing that we develop custom solutions for clients, we had a chance to develop various B2B and B2C self-service and m-commerce mobile applications, web, and mobile platforms for sharing content and connecting digital transformations through special ERP systems, technical, functional, and design consulting and other services that help the clients in the process of introducing digital solutions for improving their business. By developing digital solutions for clients from various industries, we gained specific knowledge that helps us better understand the needs of our clients and end users’ needs.We are certain that, with the knowledge and experience our experts have, we can make almost any digital solution based on clients’ demands and be competitive in the global market.<h2 style="margin-left:0px;">Who are your clients, and where do they come from?</h2>Most of our clients are foreign, mainly from developed Western Europe countries, the United Kingdom, and the USA, but, of course, also from Croatia. Seeing that we develop digital products custom-made to a specific client’s needs, we had a chance to work with clients like Coca-Cola, Österreichische Post, <a href="https://undabot.com/case-studies/cliq-digital/">Cliq Digital</a>, <a href="https://undabot.com/case-studies/showbuzz/">Showbuzz</a>, <a href="https://undabot.com/case-studies/austrian-post/">Austrian Post,</a> <a href="https://undabot.com/case-studies/A1/">A1 Telecom Group</a>…Most of our clients come to us through recommendations, and personal contacts, which confirms that client satisfaction and building transparent and honest relationships with clients are immensely important in current and future projects. We strive to give all our attention to every client, from the first contact until the maintenance phase, so most of our clients have been with us for several years.<h2 style="margin-left:0px;">How many employees do you have, where do you find the staff, and what type of experts do you most need?</h2>Our broad spectrum of services is supported by expert teams that grow qualitatively and organically. Undabot currently has 70-ish experts from different areas. We mostly employ mobile iOS and Android engineers, web backend and frontend engineers, business analysts, software architects, UX/UI designers, project managers, QA experts, and other digital experts. Our team also has colleagues from the economy and psychology branches.We are proud of the fact that 40% of our team are women and that that number continuously grows. In addition to hiring through open tenders and direct candidate recruitment, we love to talk with candidates that send us an <a href="https://careers.smartrecruiters.com/Undabot" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">open request</a> or with candidates that want to hear more about us because we believe that everyone has unique competencies that can contribute to the development of our team. We see selection as a two-way process in which the candidate and we assess how much our expectations are aligned.We find it essential that the person gets all the information important for deciding on a long-term collaboration through the interview. Through the years, we have grown so much that we can work on big, complex projects, but we kept the spirit of a small team and nurtured an individualized approach and open communication. It is important for us that our employees develop in the direction they find interesting. Everything else can be programmed, but we invest a lot of effort in making and building our own top-notch IT experts. Undabot is based on a continuous learning culture – we learn from each other through group work, regular feedback, transparent communication and collaboration, and various forms of professional training and personal development.We focus on quality and love challenges because they nurture our inquisitive spirit and creativity and enable us to progress. Together we create an environment in which we feel happy and accepted, and with the benefits we offer, we strive to create a good balance of private and personal life for our team members.<h2 style="margin-left:0px;">You increased your revenue last year; what do you expect this year?</h2>In 2022 we increased our revenue by 30% with regards to 2021 revenue (when the revenue was more than 2,2 million euro), and we expect to, at least, increase our revenue by that much in 2023. As we are focused on organic growth and stability, we set our financial goals reasonably, considering world trends. That approach enables us to keep the same quality level of our processes and end products and maintain the existing company culture.<h2 style="margin-left:0px;">Do you feel the consequences of inflation and economic crisis, and how is that reflected in your business dealings?</h2>I believe no company in the world does not feel the consequences of inflation and economic crisis. Still, we have to say we have managed to alleviate the negative aspects of the crisis and get the maximum out of a difficult situation. Yes, inflation did contribute to the rising prices of all the services, which directly generated higher costs, but the crisis also brought some good changes, especially in the IT sector. Accelerated digital transformation in all industries had the biggest influence on IT companies’ business and the increased demand for digital services. In today’s day and age, it is hard to imagine any business without digitalization, especially if you want to be competitive and sustainable in the long run. The number of modern consumers is steadily increasing; the consumers have quite a degree of digital literacy and demand suppliers’ personalization and efficiency, whether we are talking about the B2B or B2C sector.With everything already mentioned, it is essential to point out that our projects are long-term, adding stability to business dealings. On average, our projects last six months and upwards, which is the key to planning resources, direction, and degree of further development. We are aware that the systematic development of a stable company with a clear focus on goals and insisting on quality is not the easiest way, and that it does not secure the fastest growth, but that type of approach gave us the foundations resistant to adverse economic conditions and big fluctuations in the local, as well as the global market.<h2 style="margin-left:0px;">Do you intend to change the business model, and what would make you do that?</h2>The IT industry is one of the biggest actuators of change in the global economy and the way of working. All of us who work in IT are ready for adaptations and development to keep up with modern global trends. That is why we, for years, have had the option of remote work for our employees; we invest in various technical and soft-skill education and constantly improve our processes and methods of working.Those changes are welcome, seeing that, through constant development, we are “keeping it fresh,” we are competitive on the global market and enable our employees to have better working conditions. What we don’t want to change is the focus on project excellency and high client and employee satisfaction. We won’t change as long as our current business model enables us to have that. I won’t exclude the possibility of the future bringing new challenges, which will mean our business model has to change, and if that happens, we will adapt and grow, as we have in the last ten years.<h2 style="margin-left:0px;">What are your long-term business plans?</h2>2022 has, in many things, being one of the best years in Undabot’s history, and we believe 2023 will be even better, especially judging by the beginning of the year. Currently, we are in the last phase of building a robust commercial mobile and web platform for streaming audio-visual content, books, and video games that we have developed for an innovative company in the Netherlands. The platform will soon be available in the German market, but we won’t reveal all the details since the client is preparing a large campaign to announce the product.We are also planning additional expansion to the targeted Western European markets, but also an expansion to the USA market. Of course, such intense growth brings additional hiring and upgrading, creating new services and departments, which I am especially happy about. In the long run, we want to position ourselves as a serious player in the global market. Even though the competition is fierce, we are confidently striving towards that goal because we know that we can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the strongest companies doing the most complex projects.<hr>Lider Media published the <a href="https://lidermedia.hr/tvrtke-i-trzista/hrvoje-kapetanovic-undabot-planiramo-dodatna-sirenja-na-trzista-zapadne-europe-i-ekspanziju-u-sad-u-148607" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">original version of this interview</a> on February 6, 2023.

Undabot_Hrvoje-Kapetanovic.jpg

We're planning an expansion to Western Europe and the USA market

Private

Privacy Policy.jpg

Privacy and Cookie Policy

Željka

Writing-unit-tests-by-using-ChatGPT-as-your-own-J.A.R.V.I.S-scaled.jpg

Writing unit tests by using ChatGPT as your own J.A.R.V.I.S

Alongside awards for excellence and work on foreign projects, we have been recognized as a “Family Friendly Employer.” The Central State Office of Demography and Youth awards the acknowledgment to support socially responsible employers who recognize the connection between a balanced personal life and their employees’ work potential and performance.<hr>55 companies competed for the “Family Friendly Employer” acknowledgment in 4 categories – micro, small, medium, and large companies. Undabot got the acknowledgment in the medium company category, which confirms our focus on creating a productive and pleasant work environment with an emphasis on balancing private and business life.We are especially fond of this acknowledgment, and our key ingredients for creating a successful relationship between the employer and employees are mutual respect, listening, and appreciation.<figure class="image image_resized" style="width:50%;"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Martina_Bastasic_i_Hrvoje_Kapetanovic_8a61b96cc1.jpeg" alt="Martina-Bastasic-i-Hrvoje-Kapetanovic.jpeg" srcset="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/thumbnail_Martina_Bastasic_i_Hrvoje_Kapetanovic_8a61b96cc1.jpeg 137w,https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/small_Martina_Bastasic_i_Hrvoje_Kapetanovic_8a61b96cc1.jpeg 438w,https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/medium_Martina_Bastasic_i_Hrvoje_Kapetanovic_8a61b96cc1.jpeg 657w,https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/large_Martina_Bastasic_i_Hrvoje_Kapetanovic_8a61b96cc1.jpeg 876w," sizes="100vw"></figure><blockquote>“We are happy to see the ‘Family Friendly Employer’ acknowledgment in our office. This acknowledges our efforts to create a healthy and good balance between personal and business life for all our employees. We strive to show maximum respect to our employees and their families. Our goal is that every workday, for our employees, starts with feeling good,” said Hrvoje Kapetanović, Undabot’s CEO.</blockquote>In addition to top work equipment, flexible office hours, and the possibility of hybrid work, we offer other benefits to our employees, including team and family gatherings, paid sports and recreational activities, annual physical exams, and additional health care activities. We enable our employees to learn and work on exciting projects; we regularly monitor the progress of our employees and, according to that, revise the salaries and enable them to develop their careers in the direction they want to.<blockquote>“At Undabot, we are guided by the principle that people come first. Our priority is to ensure employee satisfaction, so we continuously improve the working conditions and strive for excellence and quality in everything we work on. We emphasized open communication, the ability to grow personally and professionally, and on fair attitude towards every employee,” concludes Martina Bastašić, Undabot’s Head of Human Resources.</blockquote>

Poslodavac-Prijatelj-Obitelji

Undabot recognised as a “Family Friendly Employer”

The-functional-design

Solution design first! Part 2 — The functional design

Mateo

Working on a variety of products targeting specific locales and looking to expand to new ones, I’ve caught on to the importance of internationalization and localization early in my career.&nbsp;In this blog post I’d like to share the knowledge acquired and show you why it’s important to translate your application and how you can do it using the Symfony translations package.<hr><h2>What is i18n and l10n? &nbsp;</h2>Before embarking on the adventure of exploring the vast world of the Symfony translations package it is important to understand the terms internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n). Let us begin.Internationalization is a process with the intention of designing and developing the software architecture, i.e. product, adaptable to various cultures, regions and languages. The end result should be a product that can cover any number of languages with minimal effort on the engineering level.Fun fact: the term i18n is coined from the number of letters between “i” and “n”.Some of the processes internationalization covers:<ul><li>Designing placeholders for translations instead of hardcoded values per language</li><li>Cultural formatting for: numbers, time zones, currencies, etc.</li><li>Organizing source code</li></ul>Localization might be considered the younger brother of i18n. It is a process of adapting the given product to meet the cultural, regional and language needs of a specific target market. The target market is also known as locale. Adaptation for the locale is done through adding resources and translating content.Fun fact: just as it’s older brother, l10n is coined from the number of letters between “l” and “n”.Some of the processes localization covers:<ul><li>Localizing date and time differences</li><li>Currency, accounting standards</li><li>Culturally appropriate images, symbols and hand gestures</li></ul><h2>Why should I translate my product?</h2>This is a question worthy of a separate blog post, maybe even a series of blog posts. In order to follow the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">KISS</a> principle, here are just a few strong points:<ul><li>Targeting a larger audience - good for business expansion; costs but has a long-term benefit</li><li>Improve SEO - translated content ranks better on locale specific search engines</li><li>Reality check: the world doesn’t just speak English (<a href="https://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users-by-country/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">internet users by country</a>) - a localized app allows the user to consume its content easier making it more trustworthy in the long run &nbsp;</li></ul><h2>Enter: Symfony Translation</h2>Symfony has been around for quite some time now, providing the world with i18n capabilities all the way back from version 2.7 (latest stable release is 6.0 at the time of writing). 1. The translation process is pretty simple and consists of 4 steps: Installation and configuration 2. Abstraction of messages using the Translator component 3. Creating translation resources/files per locale 4. Determining, setting and managing the user’s locale<h3>Installation and configuration</h3>To prepare your translating field, install the symfony/translation package by running:&gt; composer require symfony/translationThe installation process will create a translation.yaml file where all the configuration is stored. After configuring the original translation.yaml, the file should look similar to this:<figure class="image"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2023_05_05_at_09_10_22_60da8f23ff.png"></figure>The %default_locale% represents your default app supported locale defined in parameters.yaml. Symfony will look for translation files in the default path or Resources/translations of any bundle.The locale is stored on the request, typically via the _locale attribute set on the route as shown in the example below<figure class="image"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2023_05_05_at_09_11_08_7a53a2875c.png"></figure>In case your Backend needs to provide the client with multiple translations on the same endpoint it is necessary to create a kernel request listener where the locale can be determined before going through with the rest of the request.&nbsp;The following example resolves the locale using the Accept-Language header to negotiate which translation to provide the client.<figure class="image"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2023_05_05_at_09_11_39_a2ce825c92.png"></figure>Note: if you run `bin/console debug:event kernel.request` you will notice Symfony has a listener for determining the locale from attributes (_locale). Your listener has to be set with a higher priority to run first as illustrated in the example below.And that’s it! You’re ready to start internationalizing your application. Let’s explore how you can do that. &nbsp;<h2>Supported formats and different approaches</h2> All of the translations are being handled by the Translator class provided. As seen before, it is possible to translate whole URL paths. We will now cover how to translate the content of the application.<h3>Supported formats</h3>First of all, it is necessary to define placeholders for translations. These placeholders are defined in the translation path using the following format for naming files: domain.locale.loader.<h3>Domain</h3>Represents a way to organize messages into groups. The default domain is messages and is usually sufficient unless there is a need for chunking messages. Example:<ul><li>Backend provides translations for a client web page and administration system or CMS</li><li>Client web page uses the domain front</li><li>CMS uses the domain admin</li></ul><h3>Locale</h3>Covers the locale that the translations are for (e.g. en, de, hr, etc.) LoaderTells Symfony how to load and parse the file. Symfony supports a number of loaders where the most commonly used ones are: .yaml (YAML) and .xlf (XLIFF). It is recommended to use YAML for simple projects and use XLIFF where it’s necessary to cooperate with translators using specialized programs.<figure class="image"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2023_05_05_at_09_12_20_3f97e957a1.png"></figure><h3>Approaches</h3>With translations defined in domains, locales and loaders, they can be used in code and/or templates through the Translator class with the trans method.<h4>Use translations in code</h4>To use the translations in code, inject the TranslatorInterface service using Dependency Injection. The trans method provided by the interface takes the following parameters:<ul><li>key - the key of the message defined in resources</li><li>parameters - an array of parameters defined in the message under</li><li>key, wrapped with % in the message definition</li><li>domain - group under which the key is stored</li><li>locale - locale determined from Request, can be forced if necessary</li></ul><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2023_05_05_at_08_57_38_aae529ad39.png"> Other than parameterized messages, the Translator also supports pluralization. Just pass in the count as a parameter and define the message boundaries for count. &nbsp;<img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2023_05_05_at_08_58_28_d829267254.png">The problem with pluralization might not be obvious in English, but other languages have various forms of words when pluralized and this would have to be resolved programmatically because of the limited support in message formatting. The problem can be resolved using the ICU message format which is described below.<h3>Use translations in templates</h3>Aside from translations in the application code, translations can also be used in Twig (the default rendering engine for Symfony) templates (e.g. email templates sent via Backend). Symfony provides two ways of translating content in templates. The first one is by using the Twig trans tag: <img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2023_05_05_at_08_59_47_f1272ec2e9.png">The other, more commonly used approach, is by using the Twig trans filter:<figure class="image image-style-block-align-left"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2023_05_05_at_09_00_26_5368a30a52.png"></figure><h3>ICU message format</h3> Starting from <a href="https://symfony.com/blog/new-in-symfony-4-2-intlmessageformatter" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Symfony 4.2</a>, a new IntlFormatter class was introduced. It’s goal: resolve the complexity behind pluralization and other variable translation use cases. It takes advantage of the <a href="https://messageformat.github.io/messageformat/guide/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">ICU message</a> format and the <a href="https://www.php.net/manual/en/book.intl.php" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">PHP intl extension</a> which is a wrapper around the International Components for Unicode library.To use the ICU message format, all the translation resources need to have their domain appended with the +intl-icu suffix, e.g. messages.en.yaml becomes messages+intl-icu.en.yaml.Pluralization issues are then resolved like so: <img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2023_05_05_at_09_03_22_f2ef80776b.png"><figure class="image image-style-block-align-left"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2023_05_05_at_09_03_44_261405f7b4.png"></figure>Notice the difference in definition of pluralization rules for the hr locale. These rules can be examined on the <a href="https://unicode-org.github.io/cldr-staging/charts/37/supplemental/language_plural_rules.html#hr" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">language plural</a> rules provided by the Unicode organization. Other than pluralization, gender and similar variables can be used to provide correct translations for various locales.<img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2023_05_05_at_09_05_09_d6314ab74c.png"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2023_05_05_at_09_05_30_f8eb555381.png">Other examples where ICU message format comes in handy are: numbers, currencies, percentages, date and time, etc.<figure class="image image-style-block-align-left"><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2023_05_05_at_09_06_34_a657c5469c.png"></figure><img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2023_05_05_at_09_06_27_447d901c76.png"><h2>Conclusion</h2>Internationalization and localization can be hard to achieve, but they are worth every penny. By establishing these processes early on in your application you will be able to represent your product appropriately for the user’s locale - allowing the user to identify with your product in their own language is a game changer. By using Symfony, you’re already halfway there. The translations package offers support for a wide variety of formats making it possible to include translators easily into the process, including pluralization and similar translation challenges. Additionally, the support for ICU message format covers even the most complex translations and automates a lot of manual labor per locale.To wrap this up, a warm recommendation for teams: standardize the translation structure - you will reap the benefits in the long run. I believe you will have lots of fun translating your product with Symfony now that you’ve seen some of its superpowers.&nbsp; &nbsp;

Nuts & bolts of internationalization and localization with Symfony

Nuts & bolts of internationalization and localization Symfony

Ivan

A lot of our work as iOS developers comes down to presenting data. In an effort to simplify the process, we often separate the data into small, workable chunks that we present in views called cells. We then present cells using table view or collection view, depending on our needs.To update the data we can call reloadData()on the containing view. The problem with this approach is that it does not animate the changes.To do the animations we need to manually determine which items need to be animated. This means calculating which items have changed and calling the following methods:<img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_03_49_ffbd22e22a.png" alt="Screenshot 2023-04-27 at 16.03.49.png" srcset="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/thumbnail_Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_03_49_ffbd22e22a.png 245w,https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/small_Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_03_49_ffbd22e22a.png 500w,https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/medium_Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_03_49_ffbd22e22a.png 750w,https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/large_Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_03_49_ffbd22e22a.png 1000w," sizes="100vw">What if we could skip this part and use something as simple as reloadData() and be sure our cells are animating nicely? We’ll try to accomplish just that!<h2 style="margin-left:0px;">Without animations</h2>Let’s start with a simple example. We all love Bruce Willis, so let’s make an app showing a list of his most memorable movies. To simulate content change I will add an option to delete movies and an option to reset the whole content to its original state. The full example is available at: <a href="https://github.com/Rep2/BatchUpdatesExample_Swift.git">https://github.com/Rep2/BatchUpdatesExample_Swift.git</a>I will use a view controller — presenter architecture to better demonstrate the problem.The view controller presents movies and passes user actions to its event handler, i.e. presenter. The presenter implements the event handler protocol and updates the view when needed.<img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_03_59_c47ef006c9.png" alt="Screenshot 2023-04-27 at 16.03.59.png" srcset="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/thumbnail_Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_03_59_c47ef006c9.png 245w,https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/small_Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_03_59_c47ef006c9.png 500w,https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/medium_Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_03_59_c47ef006c9.png 750w,https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/large_Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_03_59_c47ef006c9.png 1000w," sizes="100vw">Basic implementation of the MovieViewController takes an array of movies and reloads the table view, while Async call is needed if the method gets called from the background thread.<img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_04_08_c960d7d5f4.png" alt="Screenshot 2023-04-27 at 16.04.08.png" srcset="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/thumbnail_Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_04_08_c960d7d5f4.png 245w,https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/small_Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_04_08_c960d7d5f4.png 500w,https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/medium_Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_04_08_c960d7d5f4.png 750w,https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/large_Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_04_08_c960d7d5f4.png 1000w," sizes="100vw">With manual animationsLet’s try to implement animations using the methods mentioned above.To delete a movie we can use func deleteItems(at: [IndexPath]) In order to access it, we need to expose it in the MovieViewController protocol.But what about resetting the list? We could keep track of all deleted movies and then use func insertItems(at: [IndexPath]) to put them all back in. Again, we need to expose the method so that it can be called by the presenter.We need to add two new methods to the MovieViewController protocol:<img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_06_23_562c4bcc36.png" alt="Screenshot 2023-04-27 at 16.06.23.png" srcset="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/thumbnail_Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_06_23_562c4bcc36.png 245w,https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/small_Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_06_23_562c4bcc36.png 500w,https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/medium_Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_06_23_562c4bcc36.png 750w,https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/large_Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_06_23_562c4bcc36.png 1000w," sizes="100vw">and change the presenter so that it tracks which items it needs to animate:<img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_06_31_3f80b0e115.png" alt="Screenshot 2023-04-27 at 16.06.31.png" srcset="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/thumbnail_Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_06_31_3f80b0e115.png 228w,https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/small_Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_06_31_3f80b0e115.png 500w,https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/medium_Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_06_31_3f80b0e115.png 750w,https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/large_Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_06_31_3f80b0e115.png 1000w," sizes="100vw">Quite a bit of work, but we got our animations. The results are shown below, without animations on the left, and with animations on the right.<img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/1_G90_Wkg9_Wp_Mn_N39_NC_Hde_2_A_76d4532ef9.gif" alt="1_G90Wkg9WpMnN39NCHde-2A.gif">The main problem is, in my opinion, that we need to expose the inner implementation of view controllers data presentation. We are clearly stating that we present data in rows and we leave it to the presenter to animate these rows.<h2 style="margin-left:0px;">Finally, using batch updates</h2>Is there a better way to do this? This is where batch updates come into play. Instead of manually determining which animations need to be done, ideally, we should try to find a way to get the work done for usLet’s take a step back in the whole process. In the most basic terms, what are we doing? We are switching one data set with another. Whether we are deleting an item, inserting new ones or initially presenting data, we are switching one data set with another one.If we can compare these sets, we can calculate which changes were made and we can animate those changes.To calculate changes I use the function below. It calculates the difference between two arrays containing values implementing the Equatable protocol. The complexity of the function is O(n²) and it can be improved if the values also implement the Comparable protocol. So far we haven’t detected any performance issues while testing, but the function could probably be improved so please comment down bellow.<img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_06_50_dadf3cc4db.png" alt="Screenshot 2023-04-27 at 16.06.50.png" srcset="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/thumbnail_Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_06_50_dadf3cc4db.png 129w,https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/small_Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_06_50_dadf3cc4db.png 415w,https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/medium_Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_06_50_dadf3cc4db.png 622w,https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/large_Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_06_50_dadf3cc4db.png 830w," sizes="100vw">The function returns the BatchUpdates structure used to perform animations. The extensions bellow implement animations for the UICollectionView and UITableView using given the BatchUpdates structure.<img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_06_58_f91ced9923.png" alt="Screenshot 2023-04-27 at 16.06.58.png" srcset="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/thumbnail_Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_06_58_f91ced9923.png 140w,https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/small_Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_06_58_f91ced9923.png 449w,https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/medium_Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_06_58_f91ced9923.png 674w,https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/large_Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_06_58_f91ced9923.png 898w," sizes="100vw">Now, instead of manually inserting and deleting items we can just call present data and the view will animate the changes by itself. In fact, we can use the same code we used in the first example. The only thing that we need to change is the present method.<img src="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_07_05_cbbeb51f0f.png" alt="Screenshot 2023-04-27 at 16.07.05.png" srcset="https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/thumbnail_Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_07_05_cbbeb51f0f.png 245w,https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/small_Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_07_05_cbbeb51f0f.png 500w,https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/medium_Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_07_05_cbbeb51f0f.png 750w,https://undabot-web.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/large_Screenshot_2023_04_27_at_16_07_05_cbbeb51f0f.png 1000w," sizes="100vw">We even got rid of the async call. Even better, this method works on any data change, as long as the elements we present are comparable. No matter what operation we do or how we change the data we can simply call the present method.Thank you for reading, I hope you liked the post and found it useful. Feel free to comment or add suggestions for improvements.

AI prompts are just requirements written for a robot’s eyes

Solution design first! Part 2 — The functional design