Blog Directory

How to Optimize Facebook Business Page

How to Optimize Facebook Business Page

Facebook is the best platform to promote your brand and reach the masses. Being the pioneer of social networking sites, Facebook has established an identity of adding value to any small venture. For marketing of any brand, this is the most important ingredient. While some techniques can be costly for a business, Facebook promotes brands and earn big profits without having to spend too much.

To help achieve this, a Facebook business page has to be perfectly optimized and it takes great SEO power to accomplish the correct optimization. Here, you will learn how you can optimize Facebook business page for your profit.

1.    About Us Section

The About Us section on your business Facebook page is your introduction to the audience. It tells them where your office is, what services you offer, when your services are available, and more. It is a good place to explain your values, your business’s vision, and how you can benefit your audience with your services and products. With a strong story of your brand, using accurate wordings, including keywords in the About Us section, you can attract many potential customers and optimize your page the right way.

2.    Right Keywords

For optimization of your business page, there has to be appropriate integration of keywords even when it comes to social media. Place your targeted keywords in the most strategic parts of your page; it is crucial but very important.

Place your keywords in the URL, About Us section, page titles, on the home page, and in positions where they appear in top search results.

3.    Up-to-date Profile

You must have a complete set of required information updated on your profile. Your cover photo, bio, profile picture must contain complete information. When your profile is up-to-date according to the latest trends in the industry, it shows your professional attitude. Additionally, consistency matters through all platforms, especially the main visual match. Make sure the cover photo is optimized in a size that fits the requirement.

4.    New Features

Facebook introduces new features from time to time to help business pages. It also allows page optimization for businesses to run easily. There are a few features you can add to your Facebook business page such as Call to Action (CTA) which are meant for driving action on the page and enabling users to reach their desired destination. Some of CTAs include Sign Up, Click Save, Download, Contact Us, Shop Now, Book Now, and more.

You may also incorporate a payment feature via the Messenger app for mobile and desktop where payments can be made using a debit card without paying for service charges.

5.    Pin Important Posts

To highlight important posts on your page, you can pin them so that they stay at the top of your timeline. This means that even when your posts get older, they won’t move down. This feature helps promote the content that needs to have a long lifespan. You can pin different posts such as lead magnets, live video, necessary information, welcome video, testimonials, and more. All you have to do is manually select the post you want to pin and that’s it.

The Bottom Line

Business pages need extra attention especially as they can help you generate revenue. You may also research your competitors to identify the latest trends and formulate strategies that suit your business. Remember, your purpose is to stimulate engagement and receive desired results using correct Facebook strategies.

Saima Naz

Jan 14, 2022

Importance of E-Commerce Websites

Importance of E-Commerce Websites

Choosing a platform to sell your product can be very tricky. Online marketplace vs e-commerce website -each set of options has its pros and cons. Companies can greatly benefit from e-commerce websites of their own as it offers convenience in this competitive industry. Nowadays, people do not want to leave the comfort of their home to come out and purchase anything. In this case, an e-commerce website comes in very handy for them, which ultimately benefits businesses.

If a business has its own e-commerce website, it shows its seriousness to offer a flexible solution and gain a good profit. If you are still on the fence as to why an e-commerce website can be useful for you, keep reading.

1. It’s Easy

These days people do what’s easy for them and sitting at home scrolling down the website is easy. Instead of going to the shop, when they get to purchase anything they like with just a click, that’s very convenient. When a wide range of choices are available on one platform, people tend to choose this option instead of taking out time to physically go out and get them.

2. Total Control Over Brand

When you run your e-commerce website, you are the boss who makes the decisions. Your website stays totally under your control and you can choose what it looks like, how it works, what message it conveys, and more. Simply, it is your empire that works with your orders and you can create the shopping experience how you want it for your customers. The best part: you can directly access your customers.

3. Retarget Shoppers

The ability to have direct access to your customer is that you can retarget those who visit your website with ads and those who have already shopped from you, and reach out to them in the future with bigger upsell possibilities.

4. Personalization

Running your own website gives you freedom of setting up personalized content for your customers such as recommendations, discount offers, promotion, and customization of products. Through this, you can add value to your services which is not possible when shopping in the marketplace. This is also the reason e-commerce web development is very important.

5. Increases Reach

All you need is an internet connection for your business to reach masses all around the world at any time. It allows your business to expand on a bigger scale and gives more opportunities than a traditional marketplace. If you compare the number of people who know your brand via e-commerce website to those who know about it through local advertising, you will see a considerable difference. The extensive reach allows your business to grow without having to worry about moving locations.

The Bottom Line

Traditional marketing and shopping on the marketplace are absolutely fine; however, it restricts you in a lot of ways. Having your e-commerce website is a necessary element for your e-commerce strategy. It helps you grow your brand and earn customer loyalty. However, you must not rely on one channel forever; you must diversify your sales according to the platform that suits your business the best.

 

Saima Naz

Dec 30, 2021

Role Of AI and ML in SQA

Role Of AI and ML in SQA

Software testing is an integral part of software development that ensures the efficiency of a test strategy. To guarantee perfect results, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are essentially made important parts of the process. AI and ML assist in minimizing redundancies, detect possible defects, examine user experiences, and much more.

AI identifies redundant test cases in portfolios that are logically the same and minimizes the duplicity. The duplicates that do not profit business and add no value are taken down. On the other hand, we all know machine learning is the basic element of any software system which have trained models that allow them to make human decisions.

Salient Benefits of Artificial Intelligence in SQA

1.  Tracks Bugs

The bugs and errors are the culprits that can destroy any software program. In traditional testing, these bugs and errors go unnoticed and unfixed which later on creates problems in the development. Artificial Intelligence helps in the immediate detection of bugs. It takes seconds for AI software to catch the errors your software may have.

Artificial intelligence automates processes in a way that corrects the flaws automatically which allows software teams to perform bug tracking. It also uses fingerprints to detect similar bugs.

2.  Script Automation

Artificial Intelligence minimizes the need for script automation because it is executed automatically by an AI algorithm. AI sorts the log files that help make test cases stable so they do not crack when the locators change.

Artificial Intelligence has scripts that contain self-learning skills. It is efficient at learning page load behavior to create mock responses that a server has.

3.   Testing Time

Manual testing is a gradual process that eats away at your resources and costs. The alteration of codes needs new tests and AI automates test processes that allow the testing to be concise and continuous with a quick speed. The tools of AI give the actual precision for the number of tests needed to change the code.

4.  Visual Tests

Artificial Intelligence can detect visual bugs by using image and pattern recognition of visual testing. The web pages are validated and AI tests a variety of contents on a different interface. AI tools take screenshots and evaluate the load time. It eliminates the human effort and updates Document Object Model (DOM).

5.  Improved Accuracy

Normally, manual testing is correct but it still has errors. At times, the errors are overlooked by QA engineers and that’s when Artificial Intelligence comes in handy. AI does not miss any details in performing a series of similar actions because automated software programs are used to execute the ongoing tests.

6. Failure Cause

Failure is part of the testing process. More often, when a failure occurs during software testing, the cause of failure is unknown. Team of developers and testers then have to spend time in finding out the reason for failure for which every line code has to be examined to spot the errors.

To avoid the manual search of thousands of lines of codes, Artificial Intelligence helps in sorting the log files, detection of errors, scanning of codes in a matter of few seconds. In this way, AI helps in saving hours. Through this, a developer gets enough time to indulge in fixing problematic parts of the code.

7.  Increases Over All Coverage

Artificial Intelligence’s test automation strengthens software test procedures. AI allows QA engineers to store files and content, monitors the memory, and data tables. AI discovers patterns and studies the behavior of a database with respect to the results. AI software testing performs test cases in testing that offers extensive coverage.

8. Development in Bots

The bots in artificial intelligence have progressed with time and practice application features. The power of AI is that it identifies every change made in codes and recognizes if there are new functionalities. When the tests run, AI algorithms start to update continuously. Hence, AI bots evolve and efficiently enhances product quality.

How AI and ML in Software Testing helps

The manual work exists and is quite functional but when you incorporate AI/ML in software testing, it enhances the QA testing of a company. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the purpose of AI and ML in QA testing before you start to use them. Application of human logic in a particular scenario testing doesn’t work well in AI and ML parts. However, if you wish to understand user behavior, the collection of analytics will create appropriate cases.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning define patterns, settles the test scripts, and constructs test environments. With all these features, AI and ML help a company to use time wisely on developing new products instead of wasting it on testing.

Bottom Line

AI and ML in Quality Assurance have created a buzz as it helps bridge the gap between technology and reality. You may think that it will not have a great impact on testing but AI-based testing will give a successful future in the long run.

Saima Naz

Dec 22, 2021

All About Data Management Platforms

All About Data Management Platforms

Every action that is virtually performed on a website or mobile app produces data. And, do you know that this data can be used for making strategies and increasing conversion rates? Both of them are required for storing and using the source of data, which is why we need a Data Management Platform (DMP).

What is a Data Management Platform?

Data Management Platforms collect essential digital data such as a cookie, mobile identifiers, IDs, and campaign data. These are the tools that enable marketers and advertisers in creating customer segments for the enhancement of their performances. Moreover, these segments are based on location, demographic data, device, past browsing history, and so on.

Data management platforms are also known as Unified Data Management Platforms (UDMPs) and are aimed at developing a centralized system for gathering and analyzing a big number of digital data sets that are originated from disparate sources. DMPs also help organize the data to allow access to the insights for data-driven parts of the business: advertising and marketing campaigns.

What are the Benefits of Data Management Platforms?

The importance of DMPs is not known to many people; however, it has a wide list of advantages including:

1.  Consistent Result

The result of DMPs is consistent, as they are not just one-off solutions. In fact, they are the platforms that give long-term strategies for continuous reporting.

3.  Data Unification

Data management platforms gather all data on one platform and allow you and your team to get a cohesive view of your customers.

4.  Audience Identification

DMPs offer great features such as audience extension and modeling techniques. DMPs allow you to discover new targets and customer groups.

List of Data Management Platforms

Here, we have a list of top data management platforms.

1. Lotame

Lotame is one of the leading data management platforms where users get information from sources such as CRM tools, blogs, email, mobile, campaign data, social websites, and more. Moreover, users have access to some of the manual and fully automated suite of optimization tools.

This platform comes in handy for marketers, digital agencies, and publishers as it boosts engagement on the relevant site and unifies data.

2. OnAudience.com

OnAudience.com is a well-known DMP in the advertisement industry. It helps users construct audience-based attributes such as age, interest, online behavior, and more which hold supreme importance to online advertising activities. With the growing demand for this DMP, it has expanded support implementation and provides help to 12 billion profiles.

3.  Salesforce DMP

Salesforce is the most commonly used CRM software and is considered as a gem. However, many people are not aware that it is also a data management platform. Salesforce DMP suits those marketers’ needs who are always on the lookout for capturing, unifying, and collecting data across multiple touchpoints. This DMP utilizes artificial intelligence, machine learning in the best way to complete customers’ data profiles and enhance their channel engagement.

The Bottom Line

The efficient use of a data platform can help you gain some profitable results. With new technologies and evolving landscape of data management platforms, businesses have seen immense development especially in data analysis of large volumes. While this system has to be well-planned for use, its growth surely signifies a brighter future for data management platforms.

 

Saima Naz

Dec 17, 2021

Augmented Reality and its Applications

Augmented Reality and its Applications

Technology keeps surprising us with innovations every day.

Things that seemed nearly impossible in the past are just a tap away thanks to the latest gadgets and amazing tech-driven trends. Smartphones have become more accessible with state-of-the-art features, making lives much more exciting and easier.

Similarly, augmented reality is one of the exciting trends that has captivated everyone. It lets us feel the reality and enhances it with the hint of technology.

What is Augmented Reality?

Augmented Reality (AR) gives users the feel of reality and the enhancement of the physical world and its objects. Designers strengthen the inserting parts of computer-generated input. Augmented reality is not magic; designers don’t flick their wands in the air to develop that experience. They create inputs from video, sound, graphics, GPS, and every necessary detail to make AR possible. As a result, digital content is created which works in real-time and alters the user’s movement and environment.

Augmented Reality makes your technology experience exciting and interesting. One of the examples of AR is when you can try clothes on an online app without physically going to the store. Or when the app lets you try the makeup without moving an inch from your couch. Also, some apps use augmented reality to create 3D characters.

How Does Augmented Reality Work?

Augmented reality augments the real images captured from the camera. It involves some basic elements.

  1. Registration tools
  2. Depth-sensing camera
  3. Computer vision
  4. Output device

1.      Registration Tools

Augmented Reality requires some tools such as accelerometers and motion sensors. These two tools enable the computer to give space in places where sensory information is required or where the focused objects have to be located around the AR user.

2.    Depth-Sensing Camera

A camera in augmented reality is required to create your desired object. The camera records visual information to add those visuals to existing objects and places. The purpose of the camera is also to distinguish the distance of the subject and its angle from afar.

3.    Computer vision

The camera captures the images from the world such as the beauty of nature or any preferable object. The images are then interpreted for reference by using the algorithm of machine learning (ML). ML algorithm brings creativity to the merged information that gives excellent results in the form of AR experience.

For instance, when you capture an image of a car, you train the camera to recognize objects that look like cars. It uses pixels of a car’s image which it uses as a reference for the recognition of similar objects. So, when the next time you take a photo of a car, the ML algorithm will use the previous reference to guess that this object is a car.

4.    Output tool

The output device displays the final result of the AR experience. It can be a mobile device, computer screen, or TV screen to see the image or the videos of the genius augmented reality.

Real-life Examples of Augmented Reality

1.     Education

With an advanced educational system, augmented reality allows the institutes to introduce dynamic 3D models in the class. 3D models offer a great deal of understanding to students with the fun facts that help them learn better. It is the best approach for visual learners as the AR adds life to the concepts with the help of digital rendering.

2.    Online Shopping

Online shopping is always the best idea for shopaholics who like to stay home. One can buy anything from anywhere. Augmented reality adds fun to your online shopping spree. How? With conventional online shopping, you cannot check how a dress looks on you just by seeing its picture. That’s where AR comes in handy.

You can now check which color will suit your kitchen walls fine, you can check if the dress you are interested in buying, will or will not look good on you. Similarly, with AR’s implementation, you can virtually wear the make-up for trial.

3.    Healthcare

The healthcare field has progressed and introduced new high-tech tools to make surgeries simple and time-efficient. Augmented reality can take digital images of the critical parts for the surgeons in 3D view. This will help surgeons perform successful surgeries. Some of the examples of AR implementation in healthcare are 3D medical imaging and digital surgery.

For beginners, they can use AR implemented apps that help them practice surgery on a virtual body, for better learning to avoid mistakes on the advanced level. Indeed, it will not give them the experience of real-life surgery, but it takes them a step ahead on the learning ladder.

4.    Navigation apps

We all know how important safety is and augmented reality is now here to ensure that your navigation apps are secure and reliable. With AR features, the safety of the navigation apps is correctly handled. Smartphone GPS is combined with AR which provides instructions to the driver of the virtual path. All iOS and Android devices now have this feature.

The Takeaway

Augmented reality has been around for quite some time as a part of business, entertainment, education, and security purposes. And the technology shows considerable promise for years ahead. Some of the applications of AR are already common and, within the next few years, the technology will be providing ease in dealing with more complex and multifaceted real-life problems.

Saima Naz

Nov 22, 2021

A Detailed Overview of Personal Branding

A Detailed Overview of Personal Branding

Branding has always been a business-oriented concept for us.

We have heard people talking about branding as a medium to establish their name in the world. That’s true. But this idea is not limited to businesses only.

In today’s world, anything can be a brand. You, as a person, can become a brand if you know the right way of doing it. A brand can be a place like Disneyland or a person like Elon Musk or Imran Khan. Do you know what has worked in their favor? They know the art of personal branding.

What Is Personal Branding?

Personal branding is the practice of marketing yourself in a way that gains you recognition. With the help of personal branding, you become a household name if you stick to the reputation and impression you have created.

KFC was originated in 1952 and, to date, it is the name everyone in the world is familiar with. Yes, it is due to the quality of the food they have worked on but also the how they have branded themselves all these years.

Have you ever thought what is that one thing you want to be remembered for?

Even if there is one thing that comes to your head, you may work on it for your personal branding. Personal branding is a combination of your skills, experience, and how you promote yourself. All of these properties combined can bring you or your brand into the limelight.

You do not necessarily have to own a business to initiate your personal brand. You can use your personal story or what inspired you into going big. It is the online world and all you need are smart strategies and a sense of creativity to brand yourself in a huge way. It is a slow process but it is worthwhile.

Why Is Personal Branding Necessary?

1.    Builds your audience

With the help of personal branding, you gain a larger audience that you or your brand requires. How can you do it?

You may start by making Facebook ads, create videos that promote you or the services your brand provides, and so on. Make the best use of content marketing to win in the digital world; this alone can help you earn a larger audience.

2.   Helps you gain recognition

The purpose of personal branding is to gain recognition. Marvel Cinematic Universe, Justin Trudeau, Titanic, Game of Thrones, Roger Federer. These are some of the countless names everyone knows of. Although they are different in every way, their agenda, their profession, their idea, their genre, all have probably nothing in common. But everyone knows them.

They have created awareness about themselves. They have worked hard on personal branding for people to know that they are the big shots. Your objective, your stance, and your agenda are some of the few things that will set you apart and give you the recognition you truly deserve.

3.   Makes you easy to find

Personal branding increases your reach and allows you to be found by the audience.

It helps your audience reach out to you and avail your services or understand what it is for them to learn from. Even if the world knows who you are, and the people do not know how to find you, indicates that you have not touched the finish line.

Take personal branding as a tool to let people connect with you, understand your objective, pay attention to you, and get inspired.

As much as personal branding is imperative, there are myths are surrounding the idea of personal branding that prevents people from practicing it. Let’s discuss a few myths about personal branding and bust them to empower you to go for it.

Myths about Personal Branding

1.    Personal branding being famous

There is a misconception that everyone’s objective is to get famous via personal branding. It is not like that; you do not become a celebrity by personal branding. It just helps you achieve your respective goal. You can influence people and keep your privacy intact.

2.   It is unnecessary

Some people believe that skills alone are enough and you do not have to promote yourself. Well, this is not how the world works now.

Skills alone are the half-won battle. People must be aware of your skills or what you have to offer and personal branding enables you to achieve that. When people talk about you or your brand behind your back, that’s when you know how important it is to educate people about you or your brand.

3.   It’s a hype

If you believe that personal branding is a new trend in the market that will die down with time, you need to recall a few names such as Charlie Chaplin, Elvis Presley, or a historic event such as World War. These names are even older than you and I are but people know about them. Why? Because they have been planned and branded this way.

In a nutshell

Like every other job, building a personal brand is not a piece of a cake. But if you do it right with the right intention and planning, you can achieve your desired goal through it. Stay focused as to what you want out of your personal brand and work on it; you will certainly get there.

Saima Naz

Nov 22, 2021

How to Build an E-Prescription Software

How to Build an E-Prescription Software

Automation is the new norm in today’s tech-driven world, and the healthcare industry is no exception. Gone are the days when the database of the entire hospital was recorded in a diary. Today, everything in a healthcare setting has gone completely digital and automated, with hospitals switching their systems to e-prescription software to streamline their processes and facilitate their staff and doctors.

What is E-Prescription Software?

Software development companies create e-prescription software for physicians to generate an electronic prescription which is sent to the pharmacy stores at the same time. This software offers many advantages such as:

  • Reducing the possibility of medical dosage errors;
  • Helping doctors and pharmacy stores keep a record of all your prescriptions;
  • Allowing visibility at the time of treatment;
  • Offering a single platform for workflow prescription that helps establish coordination between the store and the consultant;
  • Helping expedite the medical process;
  • Saving patients time and allowing pharmacists to improve their services.

How to Build an E-Prescription Software?

Here is a list of basic steps to build e-prescription software.

1.    Thorough Research

If building e-prescription software is important, its ideation is equally significant, which is why software development companies spend days on planning and research. Effective planning is the essence of this process; therefore, every element is taken into account during research. The key points are the challenges you might face to create an e-prescription software, how that is going to provide ease to your target market, platforms that can be easy for the people to use this software on, the highlights, or USPs of this software, and more.

2.    Required Features

Once, the basic research is completed, you have to decide the required features for this e-prescription software such as:

  • Patients: personal data, medicine information, payment details, prescription, and medical history, order history, and more.
  • Doctors: patient history, patient report, prescriptions, documentation details, medical records, availability of medicines, and more.
  • Pharmacists: order history, payment tracking, patients’ information, doctors’ information, and more.

You can add as many categories for the features as you want to your software program.

3.    Decide the Platform

After analyzing your target market, you can decide the platform for your desired e-prescription software. You can determine if a web application or smartphone application can be suitable for your audience.

4.    Right Software Development Company

In this step, you have to run your contacts and look for the right software development company that can assist you in developing your desired e-prescription software. Coordinate with the company that will bring out your vision and ideas to reality.

5.    Engagement Model

Once you have chosen the software development company, it’s time for you to decide on the engagement model that you think can work the best for your e-prescription software. If the scope of your project is pre-defined, you can opt for the Turnkey model. If you have dynamic work requirements, you may choose the Dedicated hiring model, or if you are unclear with the requirements of the software, Time and Material Basis Model is the best fit.

The Bottom Line

Integrating automation in the healthcare sector indicates progress because everyone wants fast processes and cost-saving and doesn’t wish to compromise on security and accuracy. The abovementioned steps for building e-prescription software can be advantageous for the team of professionals who are committed to establishing an efficient process in the health organization.

Saima Naz

Nov 19, 2021

Insight into the Fundamentals of QA Ops

Insight into the Fundamentals of QA Ops

Quality is at the heart of all software development projects because it enables you to make a mark in the market and impress your customers. When customers appreciate your product, that’s where the hard work pays off. It is essential for your business’s growth to keep a quality control check that ultimately impacts your reputation in the market.

The DevOps approach has made software development processes simpler and more effective. It shows the competency of the final outcome in the industry. Initially, development and operations teams worked individually but now QA and Ops have collaborated which led to the formation of QAOps.

So, what is QAOPs and how has it proven to be valuable in software development?

What is QAOps?

QAOps deals with enhancing the quality of the software with the help of the DevOps approach. As DevOps focuses on the relationship between development and IT operation, QAOps refers to the amalgamation of development and IT operations.

The objective of QAOps is to strengthen the association between the two business units. It allows the developers and IT engineers to develop and deliver high-quality software products. The process becomes faster and more stable without having to compromise on the website or the web application.

When the QAOps framework incorporates the QA processes into software operations, it gives a streamlined and perfect software operational model. It brings the essential components of the continuous testing of DevOps like CI/CD and consolidates to apply them to pipeline QA processes.

One of the ideas behind introducing the QAOps framework is to erase the probability of errors in the application of software development. It helps produce seamless collaboration between the two teams and everyone who is the part of CI/CD pipeline as they work closely to produce effective results.

Fundamentals of QAOps Frameworks

Some QAOps practices are introduced to eliminate the conflicts between the testing team and the quality assurance team. The names of some fundamental and high-quality practices are

  1. Automated Testing
  2. Parallel Testing
  3. Test Scalability
  4. Integrated Dev and IT Ops in QA

Automated Testing

Automated testing forms the strongest base for the QAOps framework.

Automated testing refers to using the help of technology and tools for performing tests. It requires the least amount of physical effort of a person. To make it happen, QA engineers have to get into a deep study of automation frameworks. The specifications allow them to understand the processes better.

QA engineers help decide the tests that can be automated which saves time and tests functionalities effectively.

Parallel Testing

In the QAOps framework, testing is supposed to run in parallel to the delivery pipeline. It has to be quick because if the testing runs slowly, it will have an impact on every delivery process. Indeed, automated testing enhances the process but if the testing is run serially, it is a problem. And to solve this concern, the testing engineers have to run many tests together at the same time instead of running them one by one.

For parallel testing, large hardware is required with infrastructure and CPUs to simultaneously run the test. It takes a little investment with a few CPUs, but it shows great results without causing any hurdle to the delivery pipeline and no loss of revenue.

Scalability Testing

Once the product starts to gain the appreciation and gives you the desired revenue, that’s when you have to scale it for the growth of the company. To scale any product, software, or app it is required to add innovative features and enhance the pre-existing ones. As the products scale, the testing has to necessarily scale as well.

Scalability testing tests the behavior of an application when you scale it up or down. Scalability testing allows you to understand the performance of the application and at any given time and condition that can invariably change by changing the testing loads. With the outcome of testing, you can determine the response of the application with respect to the differential loads.

To streamline the process by following the QAOps practice, the QA teams need to have scalable infrastructures that are designed to perform and improve the speed of testing.

Integrated Dev and IT Ops in QA

This practice involves the integration of the QA process in the CI/CD pipeline. It is considered a final practice for the QAOps framework.

The easy way to do this is by integrating development and IT operations and by making developers write test cases to make IT engineers detect the problems that are likely to be found in them. So, when the QA engineers and developers collaborate, they get the complete the conceptualization which helps in the QA process.

The QA engineers are as important as the developers in this process because together they can create the whole picture. The collaboration helps in making the development and testing process easy and efficient.

In a Nutshell

Every software company wants to develop the best web and mobile application and quality testing is the only way to ensure that. QAOps approach creates a smooth and effective process that helps the development cycle grow. All you have to do is make use of the basic practices and add additional and necessary features.

 

Saima Naz

Nov 19, 2021

Understanding the GraphQL Query Language

Understanding the GraphQL Query Language

GraphQL (QL stands for query language) was invented by Facebook in 2012. It was introduced when the team, while creating a mobile application, required a strong data-fetching API that could describe Facebook and a simple platform for the product developers to learn. That’s when the querying language came into being and became famous in the software industry.

What is GraphQL?

GraphQL is the query language and a server-side runtime for APIs (application programming interface) which enables to provide clients the data requests and helps them to prioritize. In other words, with the help of GraphQL, the client’s application gets the exact and accurate data that is required from an API. It also allows the client application to call a single endpoint for certain types of requests that are made.

Why is GraphQL used?

GraphQL is developed with the idea to enhance the APIs, make their speed fast and flexible. GraphQL makes the APIs developer-friendly and integrated within an IDE (integrated development environment). It is like SQL but for the front-end.

With the help of GraphQL, the flexibility of API stays well-managed by either adding or reducing the field without making any changes in the pre-existing queries. Developers can easily create APIs with the method they like by GraphQL specification that guarantees the perfect function to clients in an expected manner.

When you send a GraphQL query to the API, you get exactly what you are looking for. It has the ability to return the required and predictable results. When apps use GraphQL query, they function faster and stay stable because it is controlled by the data not the server.

The query process stays smooth with GraphQL as it asks you for your requirement in a single query. Then, it saves the bandwidth and decreases the waterfall requests which makes the functions faster. Moreover, it permits the clients to send across their data specifications.

In GraphQL, you can make your API requests smaller by specifying the preferable types and fields. In the case of client-side applications, the reduction of API requests relies on the data that comes from APIs. If the amount of data that is transmitted is improved, the performance essentially gets better.

GraphQL uses less time in the documentation and navigation of APIs because it is declarative for fields and types that cannot be declaratively stated. Therefore, GraphQL schema can also be documented.

Basic Components of GraphQL

There are four basic components of GraphQL

  1. Schema
  2. Query
  3. Mutation
  4. Subscription

1.     Schema

A GraphQL schema is here to define the functionalities the clients are able to make use of when they are connected to the GraphQL server. Basically, the GraphQL schema is the focus of GraphQL server implementations. The procedure is carried when the functionality is communicated to the clients.

Schema explains the nodes on the data graph and the relationship of nodes among each other. The syntax that is built to write schemas is known as Schema Definition Language (SDL). The key element of schema is a Type.

2.    Query

The query serves as the medium of communication between the client application and the GraphQL server. A request is created to communicate with the GraphQL serve for reading or retrieving the values. In simple words, a query is a request a client makes. The query is one of the fields that are there to support points and arguments to arrays.

The key elements of a query are fields and arguments.

3.    Mutations

Just like a query, the mutation also sends requests to the clients but the highlight is the data fetching. Like any other data platform, it requires a method of modifying the data on the server-side.

If the object type is returned by the mutation field, nested fields are then formed. This helps in getting the object’s new state once an update occurs.

4.    Subscription

Subscription is one of the components of GraphQL that the query language introduces for the real-time connection. It is offered to the server to get updated instantly about the necessary events and conditions.

The send request of data depends upon the occurrence of specific events. Every time a certain event takes place, the server utilizes the connection that helps push the event data to the client who is subscribed. When a client is subscribed to an event. It will help in the initiation and keep the connection strong and consistent.

Drawbacks of GraphQL

1.     Caching

The implementation of a particular cache with GraphQL is more difficult than its implementation in REST.

It is complex in GraphQL because of the different nature of every query. Every query is different although they can be part of the same entity and be codependent. Most of the libraries that are created on GraphQL have a competent caching mechanism.

Conclusion

GraphQL is a new technology introduced by Facebook and its implementation has been quite practical and beneficial for the users. It has proven to be the solution for many data resources; all you need to do is understand its underlying concept and benefit from this language.

Saima Naz

Nov 17, 2021