Bootstrap themes and plugins

In itself, Bootstrap is full of JavaScript components that are very useful, which cover a lot of use cases, be it for instance modal window or user login, alert messages to show an important message to a visitor, carousel for the homepage. However, in some instances one may need more than that. This is the time to find some of the Bootstrap themes and third party plugins. Usually, they are built on top of the current Bootstrap components and extend them in a lot of ways.

THEMES AND PLUGINS

The plugins and themes could be divided into few groups, such as:

1. Component package

2. Lightboxes and gallery plugins

3. Buttons

4. Navigations and Navbars

5. Forms

COMPONENT PACKAGES

More than a dozen reusable components built to offer dropdowns, iconography, input groups, alerts, navigation and many more.

Fuel UX – extends Bootstrap with more lightweight JS controls for the web applications. It includes combo box, checkbox, data picker, loader, infinite scroll, radio, placard, repeater, search, scheduler, spinbox, select list, tree and wizard. The complex library is truly worth checking out.

Jasny Bootstrap – Is a component package that many would find useful. Included are off-canvas menu component, fixed-top alerts, labelled buttons, input mask for text inputs, file input with image previews and a whole lot more.

LIGHTBOXES AND GALLERY PLUGINS

EkkoLightbox – it is a lightbox Bootstrap module that supports YouTube videos, images and galleries and built around the Modal plugin of Bootstrap. It could be styled easily, the same as Bootstrap modal, supports header and footer section. Working with it is very easy.

Bootstrap media lightbox – It is lightweight and borderless media lightbox Bootstrap 3 extension. It supports image galleries, single images, videos and frames.

Bootstrap image gallery – is a responsive, touch-enabled and customizable image and video gallery. It displays videos and images in the model dialog of the framework, mouse and keyboard navigation, features swipe, transition effects, full-screen support and on-demand content loading that could be extended to display more types of content.

BUTTONS

CSS3 Microsoft modern buttons – helps to easily re-create stylish buttons that are used by Microsoft on their sites. It is a nice addition to default Bootstrap buttons.

Social buttons – Social sign-in buttons made in pure CSS-based on Bootstrap and Font awesome. It is very easy to work with, it only requires adding one of the prepared classes.

NAVIGATIONS AND NAVBARS

Yamm – is another mega menu for Bootstrap 3. It uses standard navbar markup as well as fluid grid system classes from Bootstrap. It works for fixed and responsive layout and could include nearly any Bootstrap elements.

Bootstrap sidebar – is a responsive sidebar plugin or Bootstrap 3. If the menus are too large to fit in a horizontal menu bar, or a responsive sidebar is required, that’s compatible with the platform, then this is the plugin of choice.

Hover dropdown – It enables opening dropdowns only through hovering over them. A nice features is the possible setting of timeout.

Tab drop – it’s very useful when the tabs do not fit in one row. The script takes the not fitting tabs and creates a new drop-down tab. In the dropdown, there are tabs that do not fit.

Bootstrap tree navigation – it is a JavaScript plugin for Twitter Bootstrap 3. It helps create tree navigation menus, build and maintained by Morris Singer.

FORMS

Tokenfiled for Bootstrap – is an advanced tagging/tokenizing plugin for Twitter Bootstrap and jQuery with a focus on copy-paste and keyboard support.

JqBootstrap Validation – is a jQuery validation plugin for Bootstrap forms. It could validate number, email, min, pattern, max and a whole lot more.

Bootstrap markdown – is a simple markdown editing tool that truly works. It is designed to be integrated easily with the Bootstrap project. It exposes useful API that enables fully hook-in to the plugins.

Bootstrap Combobox – It is easy to implement to boost user experience with long select elements.

Bootstrap color palette – is a simple color palette plugin for the platform that enables a user to choose from the basic color palette or one that is defined by the user.

Bootstrap Maxlength – a visual feedback indicator for the maxlength attribute. It uses a Twitter Bootstrap label to reveal a visual feedback to a user regarding the maximum length of the field wherein a user is inserting text. Moreover, it uses the HTML5 attribute ‘maxlength’ to work.

Bootstrap Colorpicker – is indeed nice and customizable plugin for Bootstrap. The interface is great where one could choose from a complete color palette, which includes opacity option.

JQuery file upload – is a widget with numerous file selection, progress bar for jQuery and drag and drop support. It supports cross-domain, resumable and chunked file uploads. It also works with any server-side platform, such as Ruby on Rails, Python, PHP, Node.js, Java, Go and more that supports a standard HTML form file uploads.

Data Range picker – a JS component for selecting data ranges. It is designed to work with the CSS framework of Bootstrap.

Bootstrap select – is a jQuery plugin that uses Bootstrap’s dropdown.js to style. Moreover, it also brings more functionality to normal select boxes.

Each and every Bootstrap theme offers an extensive set of tools that are super easy to get up and running. It provides a great leg up when beginning a project.

How does QA fit into the Product life cycle?

THE LIFECYCLE CONCEPT

The product life cycle concept nowadays is about the state that the Copernican view of the universe was three-hundred years ago. Many people knew about it, yet, hardly anybody seemed to use it in any productive or effective way. Today that a lot of people know and in some way understand the product life cycle, it is about time to put it to work.

QA is the process wherein the entire software development activities would strictly adhere to the regulations and rules. The rules are called Standards, that’s followed in the development lifecycle. If the standard is not adhered to, then there is a possibility of errors in a lot of ways. These standards ensure that the process of development is free from bugs. Simply put, QA is very critical. QA testing is employed to minimize possible defects in each development life cycle stage. The focus of software QA is to continuously monitor all throughout the development life cycle for quality products. This needs monitoring both products and processes. The objective is to determine and eliminate defects as early as possible, thus lowering maintenance and test costs.

MAIN GOALS OF QUALITY ASSURANCE

The main goals of quality assurance during the software development are to develop software that is error free, determine if there’s any variation from the requirements, use the software in real-time and provide confidence in the product, among other things. The inclusion of QA in the product lifecycle could contribute to the reduction of billions invested on IT software project rework.

The life cycle process begins with requirements, and as it evolves inside the SDLC, more efforts are made to build or modify a solution, more people involved and the cost of the project rises. Bugs that are discovered at the end of the process have the tendency to need considerably more effort for fixing. The sooner the bug is determined, the cheaper it would be to fix. In testing, the cost of bug fixing could be represented by something around a logarithmic function, in which the cost could increase by over ten times as the project progresses via the life cycle phases. A bug that is identified during conception will cost something like zero. However, when the same bug is found only after testing or implementation, the average repair cost could get to something from ten to one thousand times more.

The advantages of QA Testing in the earlier phases:

1. A lot of problems are introduced to the system during design or planning. Testing anticipates future issues at considerably lower cost.

2. Testers would be more familiar with the software, since they are more involved with the product evolution in the earlier stages.

3. Since testing is involved with all SDLC phases, management would not feel like testing is the bottleneck for product release.

4. The test environment could be prepared ahead of time, anticipating risks as well as preventing delays.

5. Test cases written during requirements and shared with the team before construction could help developers think outside the box, evaluate more chances of code failure.

6. Involving QA in all product lifecycle helps in making a ‘quality culture’ inside the company.

7. The risk of short time testing is significantly reduced, boosting test coverage as well as the kinds of tests done.

Developers should be aligned with the expectations about the requirements. In most instances, to be able to keep pace with the schedule, developers don’t invest ample time for reviewing the specification. Often, they ignore vita documents or misunderstand some requirements. This type of ambiguity will generate more bugs to be identified at the end of the project and the repair cost would end up more expensive. Moreover, developers should also build unit tests and review code before commits. Together, the small day-to-day activities make great contribution to prevent defect during the construction stage. Additionally, some types of tests definitely worth the consideration of being automated and the automation team will get involved with the process. The automated tests execution, such as load, UI, performance, unit and more could be linked strongly to commits of developers in the construction phase. Preventing a defect is an integral investment with short-term return. The joint actions not just boost the quality of the product by anticipating problems, but reduce the cost of product maintenance as well, increase overall productivity and lessen the development time.

The bottom line appears to be that QA is integral and customers would opt to wait a bit longer for a quality product than receive a potentially flawed one faster. An organization is better off taking time to complete a project than not.

QA or Quality Assurance is an integral aspect in the software product lifecycle. This is particularly true for customers who choose to wait longer for a quality product instead receiving early a potentially flawed one.

Data analytics, the good, the bad and the ugly

Today, consumers are researching, comparing and buying online more than ever. Big Data and data analytics is here, has been around for some time and probably would be here for many years. Data could become one’s worst nightmare if it is just allowed to sit there, buried under boxes. On the other hand, it could be a best friend with the right analytics, fast and smart analytics for extracting valuable nuggets from the data an apply insight here, there and everywhere.

UNLOCKING THE FULL POTENTIAL OF DATA ANALYTICS

Successful organizations know how to unlock data’s full potential, transforming information into insight and insight into action and using it to competitive edge. Moreover, the organizations know how to democratize decision making as well as move it from the few elite to the empowered many, another major way of avoiding data hoarding.

DATA ANALYTICS, THE GOOD

Human judgment is the center of successful data analysis. This may appear at odds with the current frenzy in Big Data and the focus on data management and machine learning methodologies. However, while the tools offer great value, it’s necessary to keep in mind that they are just that, tools.

A company knows its goals, know the actions within the web space, which generate the most meaning to the business strategy. Consider the key performance metrics and create a holistic strategy around garnering data points. Keep the focus small, objective clear and construct an analytics implementation, which reflects the decisions. The strategy enables higher focus, maintaining accuracy within metrics. A marketing strategy is easier to develop. Strategy optimization is more precise with a major focus on conversions generation. The scope of data integrity maintenance is more impactful and less daunting when the ecosystem has 3-5 metrics in contrast to 10 or more.

Big data is good when trying to sell stuff. It helps build more sturdy models with more data, particularly when it has the characteristics, such as variety, volume, veracity and variability. Structure of unstructured, big data could provide greater clarity.

DATA ANALYTICS, THE BAD

More data does not always mean better information. Intelligence is a key component of national security and could be invaluable in wartime and peacetime. However, it’s just one security tool among many and there are considerable costs as well as limitations.

Tracking plenty of data across websites isn’t a bad thing. However, there’s a pitfall when a strategy morphs into tracking simply to track. This could cause a snowballing effect of bigger volume of data, less actionable understanding of the story the data points are telling and poorer integrity. More is not always better. An inferior strategy in analytics usually is a derivative of business goals that are not clear. As data accrues and more variables are tracked, their relevance gets diluted. It becomes easier focusing on the metrics that appear favorable even if they’re weak barometers of the business success. Keep it focused and keep data collection insightful.

DATA ANALYTICS, THE UGLY

The key to making clear decisions from digital data is context. Frequently, time is a major contextual factor. With accurate long-term data, an organization could see normalized trends that tell them they are doing better than last year and the reason why. However, when overbearing analytics strategies are implemented, often, there are inconsistencies, which corrode the benefitting factor of data collection in long term. Changes in website functionality, tracking tags dropping, altering data point focus and volatile marketing strategies all interrupt the ability of making recommendations from normalized sets of data. Most of the ugly scenarios could be avoided through keeping an eye on actions that matter and making certain of the accuracy over time.

Is it possible to keep sensitive data out of government hands and corporations? There is a reason for old-school devices, such as typewriters being used. The defense and emergencies ministries of Russia for document drafts, special reports and secret notes prepared for President Putin. The outdated technology has turned into an ultimate security system exactly because it is ‘off-line’ and has a unique advantage, which documents could be linked to a certain machine. Identifiable information or PII is at danger of exposure. There are indeed mechanisms and schemes for keeping data secure, but locks could be picked and accidents could occur. The more data, the more vulnerable to identity theft or even worse.

Nothing, not the cautious logic of mathematics, the statistical models and theories and not the awesome arithmetic power of modern computers, nothing could substitute for the flexibility of the informed human mind.

Truly, big data and analytics is a wonderful thing. However, there are always drawbacks to big data usage that could impact an organization, big or small.