Partnerships Drive Synergy for Global Success

No matter how advanced our technology has become, the size of the world has not changed. People and businesses still stretch across continents, some separated by thousands of miles.  The Cloud and the internet helps build bridges across these distances, but not even the most sophisticated of mobile applications can completely fill in the gaps left by differences in locations. To make matters even more complicated, each business has its own niche that it occupies. As everyone knows, there are hundreds of competitors for each runway, and each business races to stay on top. During this struggle, a business “runner” aims for the quickest and most efficient way of getting things done, but this approach can sometimes cause them to miss out on benefits they would have if they slowed down; or just had a helping hand.

Partnerships can do wonders for your business. Not only can a partnership help you make that decisive leap across the chasm of international affairs, but partners can also assist your business in a large variety of ways. Where some partnerships are based purely on the sharing of sales and profits, others are based on boosting each partner’s strengths and eliminating their weaknesses. In this case, the saying of “two heads are better than one” applies literally. One company only has so many hands. Despite the fact that reaching out in hundreds of directions is the best way to make sure that one stays ahead of the game, that reach is limited unless one has friends, colleagues, and business partners as their side.

So, what is a Partnership?

Partnerships are formed when two or more companies with the same goals come together to form a mutual beneficial relationship. Perhaps they have a common set of ideas or a specific set of needs that they feel could be addressed better with cooperation. Forming this type of relationship is often the most logical and efficient way of problem-solving on a higher scale. Two partners working jointly can create a better, combined environment that benefits their mutual customers and bottom lines. Not only does creating a partnership build firm trust between companies all across the globe, doing so also helps create synergy – a key factor in continuous growth and improvement of a business.

Here with ZAP Technologies, we’ve recognized this need and have joined with many partners in recent years to help make our solutions and services well-rounded, solid, and dependable. Some of our partners help their customers implement our tools to their customer base. Others use their extensive knowledge of business development to help make more users aware of our products and how they can help drive their own company needs. Still others work more closely with us at a technical level. Every day, we collaborate to address the complex system of technological needs of the growing software testing market ecology. All of us recognize that, with the help of our partners, we can accomplish much more.

Having 100 friends is often better than having $100!

Multitasking in a World Ruled by Mobile Applications!

In a few short years, mobile application downloads have skyrocketed from a relative 30 billion to an estimated 200 billion in 2016. As we’ve noted in previous blogs, the mobile industry has transformed not just our lives but the living market and business ecosystem we work in every day. Multitasking is no longer a bonus; it’s a must. Just like consumers need to browse the internet, make a phone call, and possibly pay their credit card bill at the same time, we – as testers – have to be able to cater to multiple venues of our profession. But, the “mobile explosion” hasn’t just affected developers and testers. The strain of a fast-paced environment has greatly altered the way other departments within development companies think and act. Marketing and sales teams, in an attempt to hurriedly release the “new product”, want everything done yesterday and this often leads them to bypass critical steps from testing phases in order to meet their deadlines. They cut corners with budgets for testing tools and sometimes leave developers at a large disadvantage. 

The most important concept that these marketing and sales teams have to adopt is that developing a revolutionary or popular app isn’t enough. Testing said app for errors and glitches is a living, breathing, and essential part of the entire lifecycle. Without it, no matter how great the product is, projects will have trouble staying afloat. No consumer wants to use an app that crashes frequently or loses their data. The key to success is functional and performance testing of web-based and native mobile applications.

Functional testing can identify trouble within devices themselves that may cause an app to fail. Making sure the app works on all devices is necessary to ensure that the product reaches the maximum number of consumers. This brings about the necessity for services that allow developers to use their devices for mass testing both physically and in the Cloud. This may seem like a tremendously difficult task, but it doesn’t have to be when developers invest in the correct instruments to help them multitask in a world that accepts nothing less.  

Even more crucial is test automation to save time and resources. Taking a drastic shortcut here is a mistake that many non-developers (such as sales and marketing teams) make. Enough time must be allotted to testing of an application to catch any and all bugs before their have a negative effect on customer experience. Using the right tools at the right stage in development will set any project on the right track and keep it there, including setting an efficient pace that even non-developers can accept.

The most popular product for application testing currently on the market is the HP ALM Suite. This product is a well-rounded, advanced, tool for developers to use that helps identify errors and malfunctions early on in the test phase. However, as advanced as HP ALM is, it still lacks a few features that can be supplemented with solutions like ZAP-fiX. ZPX plugs seamlessly into the HP ALM Suite and works side by side with developers and testers from start to finish.