Application Development Archives

Accelerating IT Development with AI Paired Programming: A CIO’s Guide

Pair programming is a technique where two programmers work together on the same code, one writing the code and the other reviewing it. Pair programming can improve the quality, efficiency and creativity of software development, as well as enhance the skills and satisfaction of the programmers.

However, pair programming also has some challenges, such as finding a compatible partner, coordinating schedules and communication styles, and dealing with conflicts and distractions. Moreover, pair programming may not be feasible or desirable for some projects or tasks that require more individual work or privacy.

This is where Artificial Intelligence (AI) can come in handy. AI can act as a virtual pair programmer that can assist you with various aspects of software development, such as:

–Code completion: AI can suggest relevant code snippets or fill in missing parts of your code based on the context and your preferences.

–Code review: AI can analyze your code for errors, bugs, style issues, security vulnerabilities, performance bottlenecks, and best practices, and provide feedback and suggestions for improvement.

–Code refactoring: AI can help you restructure your code to make it more readable, maintainable, reusable, and scalable, by applying design patterns, renaming variables, extracting methods, simplifying expressions, etc.

–Code testing: AI can generate test cases and test data for your code, run automated tests, and report the results and coverage.

–Code documentation: AI can generate comments and documentation for your code based on its functionality and structure.

–Code generation: AI can create new code from scratch or from natural language specifications or examples.

By using AI as a pair programmer, you can benefit from:

–Increased productivity: AI can help you write code faster and more accurately, by reducing the cognitive load and the need for manual work.

–Enhanced quality: AI can help you improve the quality of your code by detecting and fixing issues early and enforcing standards and best practices.

–Improved learning: AI can help you learn new skills and technologies by providing guidance, feedback, and examples.

–More creativity: AI can help you explore new ideas and solutions by generating alternatives and variations for your code.

–More flexibility: AI can adapt to your preferences and needs, and work with you anytime and anywhere.

Using AI as a pair programmer can be a rewarding experience that can boost your software development skills and outcomes. However, you should also be aware of the limitations and challenges of using AI in this context. For example:

–Trust: You should not blindly trust the suggestions or feedback from AI without verifying their correctness and suitability for your project. You should also be aware of the potential biases or errors that may affect the performance of AI.

–Communication: You should communicate clearly and explicitly with AI about your goals, expectations, and preferences. You should also provide feedback to AI to help it learn from your behavior and improve its service.

–Ethics: You should respect the ethical principles and guidelines for using AI in software development. You should also consider the social and environmental impacts of your code and how it may affect other stakeholders.

Using AI as a pair programmer is an exciting opportunity to leverage the power of AI for software development. By following some best practices and precautions, you can enjoy the benefits of using AI as a pair programmer while avoiding the pitfalls. Happy coding!

Take the Next Step: Accelerate IT Development with AI

Looking for ways to accelerate your IT development process? Let us show you how AI paired programming can help – get in touch with us today.

Start Your Cloud Journey

April 14, 2023 Ganesh Babu Vasantha Rajan Application Development, Application Maintenance, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Devops, Enterprise Digital Transformation, Mobile App Development No comments yet

6 Important Benefits of an Extended Team Model

What is Extended Team Model?

Extended Team Model (ETM) is a form of outsourcing strategy wherein the offshore in-house team is augmented or extended by a virtual team of developers. The key competency remains with the core in-house team and any skill gaps in the core staff are bridged by the extended team.

How ETM is different from other models?

ETM complements the in-house staff, rather than replacing it. It is aimed at filling the gaps in expertise of the core team to enhance its overall potential.
The responsibilities are distributed evenly among all team members in the in-house and offshore team. All the team members are equally responsible for the success of the project.
It’s not necessary that the extended team is dissolved after the project is completed, rather they may be considered for long-term collaboration.

Key Benefits of ETM

1. Efficient team work

Extended Team model enables dynamic development process and the team has greater synchronisation since all the team members are on the same page. The team members directly communicate with each other, and this eliminates the middlemen, resulting in streamlined communication.

2. Increased transparency and control

The company has complete control over the processes as the extended team is incorporated into the in-house team. The teams share unified repositories for source code control and bug tracking, which gives the client or the product owner complete transparency and updated information on the project development.

3. Shared accountability

Increased synchronisation between the teams leads to shared responsibility and accountability for the overall quality of the project and promotes a collaborative approach.

4. Improved scalability and agility

ETM allows the company to scale the team depending on the current project needs, without having to deal with recruiting and other administrative work. It helps to add team members, while enabling the company to focus on its core business needs. At the same time, it enables the project teams to respond better to changing customer needs, hence improving the agility of the project team.

5. Best talent and motivated developers

The developers are assigned to the project full-time and the team members are highly motivated, working towards a common goal.

6. Cost savings

Adopting ETM results in substantial cost savings for the company, as it helps to choose from an international resource pool according to the desired skills and rates. It also avoids spending effort, money and time in the continuous recruiting and training of staff.

Thus, ETM provides an easy start with high scalability and enhanced effort cohesion in the team, as well as a faster time-to-market for new products. However, this model requires good and clear communication between the team members and the various communication channels must be identified and kept open always.

When should you consider ETM?

It is the most convenient option when your own in-house team already has developers, but there are some limitations in the in-house talent pool.
Ongoing projects that expand gradually over time and substantial manpower is required to maintain.
Long-term projects with an evolving set of requirements wherein the required technologies are not available.
Projects which have secondary projects within them, and you prefer the extended team to work on the secondary projects, so that the in-house team focuses on the main project in core business.

Is Extended Team a good option?

Extended Team Model can be considered as a reliable go-to outsourcing model when you want to scale your in-house team of developers efficiently. We, at AgilizTech, can help you to expand your team with a hassle-free setup and take care of all operational tasks.

April 20, 2020 Anitha Rajamohan Application Development, Enterprise Digital Transformation No comments yet

How important is it to hire a full stack developer? (5 best reasons)

Importance of a full stack developer

Technology today is an ever-evolving field especially when it comes to development, where a developer plays a key role and is required to upgrade his skill sets regularly to beat the competition.

And a full stack developer is important.

First let’s understand that a full stack developer is one with a knowledge of both front and back end. A full stack developer can handle both the client and server software. They can combine technologies and work in co-ordination with others in providing the desired results.

Prior to the hiring of full stack developers, specialized work force like front-end developers, back-end developers, database engineers, testers, site reliability engineers etc. worked on Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), but the rise of multiple frameworks, tools and libraries has given an opportunity to developers in dealing with end to end software application development, including the testing, building and deploying applications.

Here are some facts on full stack developer

According to Wikipedia 710 coding languages are available globally
The Evan Data Group claims a whopping 23 million developers are currently present and will be 27.7 million by 2023
BLS reports suggest a 27 per cent rise in web developer jobs by 2024
In 2008 on June 3rd the first full-stack development definition emerged
Coderhood claims there are 19 varieties of stack developers.

What a full stack developer should be equipped with?

Many of the organisations are looking for full stack developers who can implement agile projects with skill and proficiency. To make best use of the opportunity, a full stack developer must possess certain skills:

A full stack developer must be adept with the programming languages like Python, Java, C++, Javascript, Perl, etc to effectively communicate with the machines.
The developer should have knowledge on the key components of a microservice architecture like presenting an API, load balancing, distributed cache, containers, data offloading.
A full stack developer should have end to end understanding on the frontend technology which includes HTML5, CSS3, and proper knowledge on front end frameworks like JQuery, LESS, SAAS, Vue.js, React, Angular.
A full stack developer should be able to handle a project end to end, from conceiving a project, wireframe and prototype design (UX), visual design (UI) and development.
Web architecture is one of the key skill requirement of a full stack developer as they must know how to structure the code and data in the database.
Should have a first hand knowledge on Version Control System or VCS that helps in managing changes to the source code. Git is a popular VCS that helps developers in tracking codes, update parts of the code, make changes in other developer’s code without breaking things. They should know to implement DevOps tools like Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins, Chef for CI/CD.
A full stack developer should also possess knowledge on automated testing tools like Selenium, TestingWhiz, that helps in checking the quality of product or service simultaneously to developers making changes in code.

Benefits of hiring a full stack developer

Now we know that full stack developers have expert knowledge and experience on various software technologies. So, why it is good to hire a full stack developer? 5 best reasons:

Dexterous skills

A full stack developer is a professional with intense knowledge on front end and backend technologies. Front-end developers build codes (using HTML, CSS and JavaScript) that manages the appearance and interactivity of a site in a browser. Back-end developers write prototype codes connecting your website to other content management systems.

Extensive know-how

Full stack developers working on various projects, their experience is endowed with a deep knowledge on various technologies. Handing over the ownership of a project is simple and easy to a full stack developer as they can take end to end accountability of the project due to their knowledge and experience.

Cater to the design structure

A full stack developer not only deals with the development of the code but is well versed in structuring the code and the User Interface designs. They go one step ahead in optimizing and maintaining the existing systems.

Problem solving capabilities

A full stack developer being well versed in each of the development stages, and a thorough knowledge on technology will be able to identify the root cause of any issues and deploy long-term solutions. Professional full stack developers have multi skills across various domains.

Project delivery to be better and faster

As full stack developers work in a team, they can work in collaboration and segregate the work responsibility better delivering maximum results with better quality and on time delivery for a project.

Full stack developers offer huge benefits for an organization as they are proficient in various technologies and capable of solving the problems across various streams of web and app development. Hiring full stack developers can help companies create apps from basic and actively engage in the entire journey of application development.

AgilizTech, a leading award-winning company are IT product and service providers offering excellent, innovative and agile technology that suits our customer needs. We cater to various industries which includes Healthcare, Manufacturing, Retail, Telecom and more. If you are looking for skilled full stack developers, we can help you out with the best that suits your business requirements.

September 17, 2019 Gayathri Avinash Application Development 3 comments

Solved – Angular router outlet appended the view instead of replacing it

Recently while working on an Angular project, we faced a very weird issue while working on one of the third-party plugins recently – the Angular router outlet appended the view instead of replacing it. We spent considerable amount of time searching for solution, before finally cracking it. We hope this article saves your time.

Problem

The router outlet did not load the component that we had asked it to load, instead it appended the view on top of the previous view.

Structure of our component looked something like this –

<app-header></app-header>

<router-outlet></router-outlet>

<app-footer></app-footer>

From the dashboard component (for which the route is ‘/dashboard’) we asked the router to replace the view with home component (for which the route is ‘/home).

This is how the navigation code looked like,

import { Router } from ‘@angular/router’;

…

constructor( private router: Router) {}

…

this.router.navigate([‘/home]);

But this did not work as expected. The layout after the router navigation looked something like this –

Instead of replacing, it placed the Home view above the Dashboard view!

Solution

We dug deeper to understand why this happened. Here’s what we found –

The plugin we used took the application out of Angular’s ecosystem (which is good as it optimizes performance when starting a work consisting of one or more asynchronous tasks that don’t require UI updates or error handling to be handled by Angular).

In the handler function of the plugin, the ‘this’ keyword that we had used did not hold proper value for the router object.

To force the chunk of code to execute back in the required and necessary “Angular ZONE” we just replaced the navigation code with the following lines,

import { Router } from ‘@angular/router’;

import { NgZone } from ‘@angular/core’; // do not forget the import 🙂

…

constructor( private router: Router , public zone: NgZone) {}

…

this.zone.run(() => { this.router.navigate([‘/home]); });

That’s it! 🙂

Happy Coding!

References

For more information on ngZone check out Angular docs at https://angular.io/api/core/NgZone

June 15, 2018 Meghana Manjunath MEAN Stack 6 comments

Resolved – Worldpay payment gateway redirection issue

Worldpay is a global leader in payments processing technology and solutions for businesses. One of their key offerings is the payment gateway, which businesses integrate with their websites to enable online payments for customers. While building a solution for one of our UK clients, we encountered the Worldpay payment gateway redirection issue, that is, once the payment was completed, the user was not getting redirected to the website.

We searched high and low to resolve this, looked up all sorts of documents, but the solution evaded us. We even tried calling the Worldpay Support staff but couldn’t get much out of them. In the end, through endless trial and error we hit upon this solution. We hope this article saves you time and effort and helps you resolve the issue quickly.

Here are the steps to fix the Worldpay payment gateway redirection issue.

Note: This is for the Worldpay Business Manager users

Worldpay Business Manager Settings Change

Log into Worldpay Business Manager and navigate to Setup > Installations
Click the Settings button next to your domain in Test
Ensure that the fields are filled as shown below

Click Save Changes button

Copy resultC.html and resultY.html from CPanel to PC

Login to CPanel of your domain (Siteground in my case)
Navigate to File Manager > Webroot > Wp-content > plugins > business-worldpay-gateway-for-woocommerce > Payment pages > required
Copy the resultC.html and resultY.html files to your PC

Add resultC.html and resultY.html in Worldpay Business Manager

Next, log into Worldpay Business Manager and navigate to Setup > Installations > Edit Payment pages
Under File menu, select File Management
Upload the resultC.html and resultY.html files here

Try a test payment

Now make a test payment in the website and check if it gets redirected

Copy settings to production

Copy the same settings to Production in Worldpay Business Manager

The Worldpay Payment Gateway redirect issue is now resolved!

April 2, 2018 Vinita Jagannathan Application Development No comments yet

Solving the AngularJS Social Share issue

AngularJS is an excellent front end framework for building web applications and hybrid mobile applications. But when it comes to social sharing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of our page, it is a major letdown. The AngularJS Social Share issue has been reported and resolved in the recent versions of Angular by server-side rendering feature, also called Angular universal.

Search engine or social media crawlers are designed to crawl and read basic HTML content. But with AngularJS we will have just one single HTML page which will be changing its view asynchronously based on our requirements. Accordingly, we will need to change the meta tags that Facebook, Twitter or Google crawlers can read and render our HTML page as we want.

Let’s discuss this and find the solution for the AngularJS Social Share issue.

The problem

Social Media crawlers like Facebook do not evaluate JavaScript while fetching the value of our meta tags. This is how our code would look for meta tags.

Even if we have all the Open Graph Meta tags placed and valued properly, this is how our page will appear on Facebook:

Solution

We will follow the conventional server-side rendering of the page using a small piece of PHP code. We are going to identify the requests from the crawlers and redirect them to our PHP code, which will generate a page to share with properly constructed meta tags.

Here’s a diagram explaining the solution.

Follow the steps given below and enable rich content sharing on social media:

Add the following tag in your index.html

If your Angular app uses html5Mode there will be no issues. But, if you are using a ‘#’ hash in the URL, replace it with hashBang by adding following code piece,

$locationProvider.hashPrefix(‘!’);

Add a .htaccess file with the following content for redirection,

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c/>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (facebookexternalhit/[0-9]| Twitterbot|Pinterest|Google.*)
RewriteRule ^.*$ autorender.php
</IfModule/>

And finally, the PHP code that will make a page. Here we will call the appropriate API to get the required details.

<?php

$APIBASE = “<your_api_base/>”;
$id;
if(isset($_GET[‘_escaped_fragment_’])){
$escaped = explode(“/”, $_GET[‘_escaped_fragment_’]);
$id = $escaped[1];
$jsonData = getData($APIBASE , $id);

}

function getData($apiBase, $id ) {
$rawData = file_get_contents($apiBase.”/”.$id);
return json_decode($rawData);
}
makePage($jsonData, $APIBASE ,”<your_redirect_url/>”.$id);
function makePage($data, $siteRoot, $redirectUrl) {

?>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta property=“og:title” content=“<?php echo $data->name; ?>“ />
<meta property=“og:description” content=“<?php echo $data->description; ?>“ />
<meta property=“og:image” content=“<?php echo $data->image; ?>“ />
<meta property=“og:url” content=“<?php echo $redirectUrl ?>“ />
</head>
<body>
<h2><?php echo $data->name; ?></h2>
<p><?php echo $data->description; ?></p>
<img src=“<?php echo $data->image; ?>“>
</body>

</html>
<?php
}
?>

Output

Test it out at https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/ and you are good to go 🙂

Happy coding!

References:

November 7, 2017 Meghana Manjunath MEAN Stack 3 comments

AgilizTech stirs a ‘racquet’ with the Passion League App

Techies by weekdays and racqueteers by weekends, that’s the Agilians for you! With our innate zeal for sports and passion for technology, we decided to combine the two and develop the best-ever app for sports management, Passion League. The journey flagged off last month and on Sunday, 18 Dec, we were able to put our web app to a pilot test, at the Bangalore Racqueteers tournament. The event was hosted by CoachDirect at Gopalan Sports Centre, Bangalore.

AgilizTech Passion League App

We decided that this was a prime opportunity to test our app in the real world, capture real-time data and get solid feedback from the tournament participants. And so, on Sunday, the AgilizTech team visited the arena armed with racquets, determination and, of course, the Passion League App.

Coach Direct had provided us with player information and seeding details previously, so we were set up pretty well to watch the action and quickly feed in the wins and losses. With our web app, the players could see the scores and the opponents’ details, right on their mobile screens.

Also, we gathered copious feedback.

While the participants were thrilled with our app, they suggested quite a few enhancements. We took extensive notes and will be working on them to improve our app, thus helping sportspersons manage their activities better with the PassionLeague app.

Our team had a great time at the court too. Agilians participated in large numbers at the Table Tennis and Badminton events. We made it to Round 2, but unfortunately couldn’t progress further. Nevertheless, what mattered is that we participated, learnt and had a whale of a time!

The A Team!

And you know what? We would love to meet you at the court. Game for a challenging duel of table tennis or badminton? Meet the Agilians in the next tournament then! You can find the details of all the upcoming tournaments here – http://passionleague.in/

Passion League Official Website

Game on? See you at the court then!

December 20, 2016 Ganesh Babu Vasantha Rajan Application Development 4 comments

Hacking the Agilian way, to build Stepout2Play

AgilizTech conducted a hackathon on 26 and 27 November 2016 to re-engineer the Stepout2Play site.

At AgilizTech, one of our initiatives is to combine our passion for sports and technology, and create new avenues for individuals to actively pursue their favorite sport. And our upcoming flagship product, Stepout2Play, is the one-stop shop for all things sport.

With this, individuals can stay tuned to the latest happenings in the world of sports, enroll into clubs and actively participate in sporting events.

The Stepout2Play Hackathon is one such event conducted by AgilizTech.

stepout2play-hackathon-2016-agiliztech-1

The Stepout2Play Hackathon 2016 Team

Over a two-day time-frame, our team of programmers, consisting of Shyam, Kishor, Agilan, Meghana, Smita, Guddu, Niraj and Gowtham, collaborated to re-visualize and rebuild the website. The event was conceptualized and presided by the MD & CEO, Ganesh Babu.

The Hackathon was immensely fruitful, as the team effectively strategized and achieved major milestones in development. Also, as the event stimulated the creative-thinking abilities of the team and enabled AgilizTech to actively pursue its innovation-based agenda, the Hackathon was an all-round success.

November 28, 2016 Ganesh Babu Vasantha Rajan Application Development 1 comment

Stepout2Play: Time to ring in the Rio Olympics 2016!

The Olympic torch and the craze have been re-ignited after an interval of four years. This time it is the beautiful Brazilian city of Rio De Janeiro that is hosting the sporting mega event from 05 Aug to 21 Aug 2016. There are a record 207 countries participating in the Rio Olympics 2016. And the Indian delegation is at its strongest-ever, with a 100+ member team.

So, will India fulfill the dreams of a billion and own this Olympics?

We would like to find that out too!

Join us at Stepout2Play as we deep-dive into the world of Olympics and provide updates, medal tally and fun-facts every day!

August 4, 2016 Ganesh Babu Vasantha Rajan Application Development No comments yet