Building E-procurement Systems: The Importance of Product Catalogs
Alexandr Orlenko | July 21st, 2023
Discover the transformative power of product catalogs in eProcurement systems. Unveil the seamless integration, challenges faced, and future-proofing strategies to streamline purchasing, reduce costs, and drive procurement excellence. Join us on this exciting journey to revolutionize your procurement landscape.
Deep Dive into eProcurement: New Article Series
Alexandr Orlenko | July 14th, 2023
Deep dive into eProceurement: New Article Series — Stay tuned for expert advice & best practices that empower professionals in the eProcurement industry.
Version Control of Jupyter Notebooks
Anton Bogomazov | June 29th, 2023
Learn how to effectively manage version control for Jupyter Notebooks. Discover tools like nbdime and nbconvert that enable viewing differences, enhancing code review, and streamlining workflows.
What is a Common Misconception About Agile and DevOps
Alisa Zamaraeva | June 7th, 2023
Agile methodologies and DevOps practices have revolutionized the software development landscape, enabling organizations to deliver high-quality products faster and more efficiently. However, there are common misconceptions surrounding these concepts that can lead to confusion and potential misinterpretation. In this blog post, “What is a Common Misconception About Agile and DevOps,” we aim to debunk one such misconception and shed light on the true essence of Agile and DevOps. Misconception: Agile and DevOps are the Same Thing A common misconception is that Agile and DevOps are interchangeable terms, representing the same set of principles and practices. This is far from the truth. While they share certain similarities and are often implemented together, Agile and DevOps serve different purposes within the software development lifecycle. Understanding Agile Agile is an iterative and incremental approach to project management and software development. It emphasizes adaptive planning, collaboration, and continuous improvement. Agile methodologies, such as Scrum or Kanban, break projects into small, manageable increments or iterations, promoting flexibility and responsiveness to change. Agile empowers development teams to prioritize customer needs, deliver incremental value, and gather feedback throughout the development process. Exploring DevOps DevOps, on the other hand, is a cultural and collaborative approach that bridges the gap between development and operations teams. It focuses on breaking down silos and fostering seamless collaboration, communication, and automation throughout the software development lifecycle. DevOps aims to improve the speed, stability, and reliability of software delivery, enabling organizations to respond quickly to market demands. Key practices include continuous integration, continuous delivery/deployment (CI/CD), infrastructure as code (IaC), and monitoring and feedback loops. The Key Distinction While Agile and DevOps share the common goal of delivering high-quality software efficiently, their focus differs. Agile focuses on project management and development processes, promoting adaptive planning and iterative development. DevOps, on the other hand, emphasizes collaboration and integration between development and operations teams, streamlining the deployment and operational aspects of software. The Synergy Together, Agile and DevOps form a powerful synergy. Agile methodologies drive the development process, allowing for iterative feedback and customer focus. DevOps practices automate and streamline the deployment and operations aspects, ensuring faster and more reliable software delivery. Together, they create an environment that fosters continuous improvement, rapid iteration, and improved customer satisfaction. In this blog post, we addressed the common misconception that Agile and DevOps are the same. By highlighting their unique roles and areas of focus within software development, we provide insights to help organizations realize their full potential. Adopting these practices under the guidance of dedicated DevOps specialists can transform software development, increase efficiency, and drive business success. Related posts Let’s start building something great together! Contact us today to discuss your project and see how we can help bring your vision to life. To learn about our team and expertise, visit our ‘About Us‘ webpage.
Anemic Domain Model Anti-Pattern
Anton Bogomazov | June 2nd, 2023
Avoid the Anemic Domain Model anti-pattern: learn its drawbacks, violations of OOD principles, and strategies to build cohesive domain models.
DevOps and AWS Cheatsheet by Setronica
Info Setronica | May 19th, 2023
Welcome to our DevOps Glossary. This guide is designed to help you better understand the world of cloud computing and automation.
From Engnyte to MS SharePoint Online: A Successful Migration to Improve Data Security and Management
Info Setronica | April 3rd, 2023
Setronica’s team migrated the client’s data to Microsoft SharePoint Online, Azure and Azure DevOps stack, saving fees, improving collaboration and security with role-based access control.
The Most Efficient Development Philosophy: Think DevOps
Alisa Zamaraeva | November 11th, 2022
In the world of modern technologies, software development is one of the fastest-evolving areas. Through the last decades, even development approaches changed and brought out new methodologies. The most popular one today is DevOps. What Kind of Beast is DevOps? Sometimes DevOps is considered as just a term for particular tools, in fact being a whole philosophy reflecting the necessity of close collaboration between the teams responsible for application delivery. The methodology is based on 3 principles: Some business owners have already heard of DevOps here or there and came to a conclusion that DevOps is some kind of technological stack: CI servers, development platforms, automatic deployment tools and so on. The truth is, DevOps implies using some particular tools but is not limited by them. Without the above-mentioned principles and your team sticking to them, such tools can be useless. The same is true for people who think that implementing CI/CD pipelines is enough to implement DevOps. The key principle still lies in the area of team communication: everyone who works on an application must exchange information. Otherwise it will make no difference to the traditional development. Another trap one can fall into is thinking that hiring a few DevOps engineers will solve all the problems. Actually, having an outsource DevOps team is a good idea — until your own developers accept the described principles and use the same instruments. You have to adjust your processes and culture first. And a good professional can help here, if you accept their advice. DevOps Tools Though DevOps tools don’t equal the DevOps approach, it’s necessary to adopt the corresponding stack. DevOps implies working with the cloud infrastructure. The most popular cloud service is AWS. Besides a public cloud, AWS provides specific APIs and various web-services. Cloud infrastructure helps to make development teams’ collaboration easier and application deployment smoother. Besides, AWS offers a huge number of useful services for almost everything from data storage to CI/CD orchestration. Kubernetes is another great tool which leverages DevOps. It helps to wrap services into containers and manages everything connected with them. Also, DevOps uses tools for deployment automation, cloud infrastructure management (for example, Terraform), CI/CD automation software like Jenkins or TeamCity and several others. Most of them concentrate on the automation of any development or operating process that can be automated, because this is how continuous integration and delivery is achieved. As we said before, adopting the proper tooling is only the first step for implementing DevOps into your processes. DevOps as a Development Approach In traditional development, the team is usually divided into groups: developers, QAs, system administrators (if any), management and so on. The development cycle — whatever methodology is applied — in this case is divided into consistent steps: creating a technical task, prototyping, writing code, testing, etc. But going from step to step, some information about the application (and the desired result) is lost, because no one cares about explaining to colleagues what was done and why. No one sees the process in the whole, probably except for the project manager, and doesn’t understand its purpose. Such miscommunications may cause undesired process interruptions, restrain the development process and move the deadlines further and further. DevOps implies tight connections and interactions between the developers and other teams. And that’s how it works: when developers, QAs, and system administrators know what’s happening in other teams, they’re able to think in advance and avoid many annoying problems. The best you can do to support the cooperation is to hire or train DevOps professionals who will think as developers and system admins at the same time. Of course, a few DevOps engineers can’t ensure your whole development cycle automatically becomes DevOps. Every team member must adopt the corresponding instruments and remember about communication. In Setronica, all software engineers and other professionals stick to the DevOps approach and have perfected all the corresponding tools and skills. DevOps Benefits So, once again: why is it worth using the DevOps approach? The short answer is that DevOps allows the team to work faster and make fewer mistakes. And if you dive in deeper, you’ll see that this approach emerged in response to the developers’ and users’ needs for quite a reason. The efficiency of DevOps is proven by the following points: Thus, DevOps helps optimize business and development processes, cuts costs and saves time. With DevOps tools and way of thinking, any team can perform the maximum efficiency with minimum expenses. In Setronica, we think that DevOps is the most profitable development approach. It’s not a silver bullet, but it proved its efficiency for many companies. That’s why we adopted the DevOps tools and practices and keep sharpening our professional skills. Let’s start building something great together! Contact us to implement CI/CD pipeline, set up a robust cloud environment and adjust your system and team to DevOps principles. To learn about our team and expertise, visit our ‘About Us‘ webpage.
Information Security Management System
Alisa Zamaraeva | April 3rd, 2020
ISO-27001 is widely known for providing requirements for information security management systems. The development of software products and digital services has changed a lot over the 20 years of our company’s existence. We’ve used different ways to improve the development process and introduced the most promising technologies and quality control methods. Even though this brought fruitful results, we are not ready to stop. The moment you manage to team up the best technical specialists, unite them into a single and monolithic department for solving any technological problems, it’s time to improve management processes. One of the improvement methods that we decided to apply was the construction of a system according to the ISO27001-2013 standard “Information Security Management System ”. Company’s Mission In addition to the direct goals and successful results in the context of particular projects, we also take care of maintaining our mission: creating the best and most effective digital services for our customers, creating our own services, and improving the industry by introducing the best and most advanced technologies. The main product of our business is not a software code per se; it is architectural and managerial decisions, expertise, and methods for the most efficient construction of digital platforms. We believe that identifying and executing the company’s mission is very important for building an information security system. The applicability of the standard in the company and its scope can be determined by a correctly organized mission. Scope If a business is in the technological field, any consultant or auditor will recommend that the entire company be included in the scope of the ISMS, which makes the implementation process complicated, lengthy, and expensive. These factors usually become an obstacle to the implementation of security in processes. We created the architecture that allowed us to include only certain areas in security processes related to decision making and defining the functioning of business processes. This greatly reduced the complexity of the implementation. This software development process was successfully certified. Implementation Method The ISO series standards focus primarily on business continuity. Among managers, there is a tendency to believe that security processes are needed only to protect material assets, storage media, and control access to the office. For these purposes, a company usually creates a security department with people experienced in law enforcement (police or army). As a result, they have a department that interferes with business development (or even freezes it) in order to reduce the risk of data or office equipment being stolen. This method didn’t work well for us as the main value in our company is flexibility and the ability to adapt to any conditions to improve efficiency. That is why we have built a risk management system that allows us to manage incidents and accidents, investigate causes, and prevent their occurrence. In other words, it allows keeping business continuity that everyone needs. Thus, the protection against theft of data or office equipment that we mentioned above, became an addition to a well-built system. This happened all by itself with an introduction of a modern standard, specifically focused on the prevention of such issues. Security has become a part of our business processes having integrated itself as an invisible part, taken for granted. Implementation Result As a result, we got business processes protected in their architecture from external influences. Duplication of decisions, transparent management processes, simple and understandable instructions “What to do if …” for any emergency. For business, this means an opportunity to concentrate not on micromanagement within the organization and attempts to tie the company together, but on finding new ways to grow and expand. Security has become the corporate glue that has put together development teams, management, and leadership into a single structure. Our method suits perfectly the SCRUM and Kanban methodologies used in company management. In accordance with the Agile manifesto, we focus on the people who work for us, rather than the processes in which people become cogs in the mechanism. Everyone is important to us, that is why with the help of security processes we made, our team feels as comfortable as possible, both in terms of security of their work processes and due to the simplicity of corporate interaction based on the principles of ISO27001-2013. Future Plans We do not stand still, our business is constantly transforming and improving, so our security system is changing and developing with it. In the future, we not only want to improve our own processes, make them simpler, more resistant to threats, and more understandable, but also eager to help our customers and partners to build reliable processes. We offer our knowledge and experience, we know exactly how to apply it with minimal risk for a company that needs such knowledge. Indeed, one of the most important requirements of the ISO27001-2013 standard is the continuous improvement of the implemented system. The most important thing for us is not to stand still.
How Designated PIM Software Beats the Spreadsheets
Yuliya Malinina | February 17th, 2020
I’ve been working with and making Product Information Management (PIM) software for eCommerce since 2008. Here are the thoughts I want to share. First things first, my intro to PIM PIM’s main idea is centralizing product content creation. This is implemented through 3 following steps: Collect ALL information on products (Supplier price lists, Digital assets, Marketing materials, Buyers’ testimonials, Internal instructions for content managers). Enrich product profile with data valuable for end-user (add a product to hierarchies, translate product descriptions into a brand’s tone and language of the content consumer). Disseminate product info across all channels (Website, Mobile app, Amazon catalog, Facebook store page, eCommerce platform, etc.). Get feedback, and go to Step 1. Now to the main point of this article One of the most common “not to have PIM” reasons I’ve been getting — “We manage all our product descriptions in Excel spreadsheets. How’s PIM better than this?” My usual answer is that PIM is the one place where content is. It minimizes the chance of errors and allows multiple parties to update product catalog content at the same time. One place to keep product content To elaborate on the points above: PIM allows manufacturers and retailers to focus all content creation efforts in one place and maintain a consistent presence in all channels. There can be only one product profile, and only this profile will be distributed between content consumers. As a result, we can avoid the problem shown below: Minimized error possibility Via role-based access control. If a user with the Content Editor rights is not supposed to change a product name provided by the Supplier, for instance, they won’t be able to. With the help of UI. PIM’s UI displays numerous product attributes in logically arranged groups, some attributes have references to pre-filled lists of possible values. Also, PIM user interface helps content editors with tips when some mandatory data is missing. On top of things, there is a changelog of the product profile. So, one can see when the product title from the Supplier was changed, compare the previous and current versions of it, and edit the title for the eCommerce channel if required. PIM Workflow PIM software has a certain workflow, during which the product profile is gradually getting closer and closer to a “ready for publishing” status. Workflow is transparent for the company staff so that the digital assets team would know which products are waiting for a photo. As a result, content editors would be able to distinguish and prioritize new products with yet empty profiles and the products, which content requires immediate attention and corrections. And all of them are able to work in parallel. And to bring the issue to a close, ask yourself: “Can I achieve all of the above with the help of spreadsheets?”. Probably not!
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