Testing should be considered as equal the development process. Each step during an engineers programming activity has a corresponding testing activity. While each logical module adds to the growth of the software, these parts and integrations must be tested in different ways, following different approaches. The first part of the “Testing Life Cycle” series covers component and integration tests. more »

As software development techniques have advanced during the last decades, some basic principles of testing have also been established. Describing theoretical ideas and practical hints, these principles can be seen as a basic guideline for both, testing and coding. more »

The iPhone and Android OS have created a huge market for mobile applications and services through the last two years. If you take a closer look at the most successful Apps (games not counting) you can see that there are six major characteristics they have in common. These attributes are based on a service design level and, if used with thought, make the difference between some playful stuff and a real useful App covering the users needs. more »

Google Analytics is quite the most popular analytics software available. It offers a lot more than just an overview about the number of visitors and pageviews. Getting an expert on the topic requires some time for reading and playing around with all the functionalities the tool has to offer. Event Tracking, Site Search, Ecommerce Tracking and Custom Variables are features that make Google Analytics more customizable and help to fit the report to a sites special needs. more »

The classic and often discussed PageRank isn’t the only factor that is used by search engines to evaluate links. There are many aspects involved in determine the value and some influence a link’s value more than others. Within the SEO community, there are 10 factors that are commonly regarded as important when talking about how search engines judge links. more »

Whenever the user hits the search button on Google, Bing or Yahoo, the search engine returns a bunch websites that fit the user’s search term. In order to determine these results, the search engine needs to scan through its datastore of billions of websites and do two things: find those results that are relevant for the user and his term and rank those pages by their perceived importance. more »