What's that about

When you think your application is ready to launch or it's just launched we recommend you to make last tiny step to ensure your success. We know that modern approach in web applications says "ship, then test", but often this "then" never happens. We're not talking about testing frameworks, neither about QA. This is about having a second opinion. We're sure your R&D team is doing its best to deliver the greatest product ever, but sometimes they miss something they shouldn't really have to.

Many times we've been asked to make code reviews, security reviews (with or without access to a code), deployment reviews, usability reviews, and check out many kinds of other issues before the project launch or during beta/production stages. So, we came up with a service named Launch Review.

Why do you need this

Bugs vs Problems

In a next sentence you may find something you're not agree with, but we'll try to convince you that it's true ;-) It is good when your application throws an exception and users see some "Error 500, we're sorry but something went wrong" message.

Sounds weird, right? Well, it's not.

It means that you have a bug, and it can be fixed. Setup some exceptions notifier, or do whatever it takes to be informed as early as possible about all exceptions that happen, write a regression test reproducing the exception, be sure it fails, and then fix the bug and make sure the test passes.
Quite simple, right?

But what's going on when you're not aware that something bad is happening in your application?

You won't get exception if somebody gains unauthorized access to your application for example. You have a problem, and you're not aware of it. That's why we've said that bugs are good, at least you know they exist.

Give us a chance to check your application. All the projects we reviewed so far had security problems. Sometimes developers are simply not aware of security issues, sometimes third party libraries or plugins have security bugs, sometimes - both. It's dangerous to leave these problems unsolved especially if you deal with sensitive private information in your application.

Usability and graphics.

You and all your team work hard to make the greatest look and feel for your application. You as well as your team work several hours a day and every day looking at the design of your application, filling forms and clicking links.

You know navigation hierarchy because, well, you the one created it. You definitely know what should be done to add a product to a shopping cart, or to create a new item, or whatever your application does. You know what you going to see when you click on that tab, what kind of menus are going to appear, and so on. Sure you know, because you have been working very hard to create this project

But! What about your users?

They will arrive for the first time to your site. Will your application act as they expect? Will they understand what's going on when they click Submission link? Are the tab captions are readable and obvious, or users should work very hard to understand what's going on?

Are you making your users think?

Cause most of them don't really like to think about those things. And if they feel uncomfortable and lost, if you will not think for them where you can and make their life easier, they eventually going to leave.

It doesn't actually matter what your application does if users' expectations are not met.
Let us check this out.

What we do

Here is a brief list of things we can do to make your application better

• Security. There are a lot of possible ways to compromise your application: XSRF , XSS , SQL injection , the list is goes on and on. We try to find out if your project is vulnerable to these attacks and suggest possible solutions.
• Scalability. Scalability is not the target, it is process, allowing fast response to growing number of requests. Every project should have scalability plan. Current implementation should be able to deal with growing number of request until next step of the plan is implemented. Next step of the plan should be known at every stage of development. We check that current implementation is able to deal with growing number of requests, and next step of plan is theoretically implementable with current approach.
• Performance. Please pay attention that scalability and performance are not the same thing, scalability issues are about growing of number of requests (with solutions like adding more front ends, splitting databases, etc), and performance is a function of a time of one request with possible solutions like query optimizations, caching, etc.
• Technology. We check that choosen technologies match the project requirements and do not break general industry standard rules, like full text search implementation, AJAX and Javascript usage, etc.
• Code Review. We check that code is written "in a right way", readable, maintainable, have concerns separation, etc.
• Usability Assessment. We look out for usability problems, make a user testing and prepare a prioritized list of things that can be improved, together with possible solutions.
• Graphic Design. We work with the best designers that not only know how to make a good looking buttons in Photoshop. They know how to develop graphic language for you project and bring attention to the most important information of the page while keeping the single style of all the pages. They know what users expect and how to avoid disappointing them.
• Deployment. Deployment is about sticking to a checklist. We have it outlined in a separate blog post .

Sounds interesting? Talk to us at we@astrails.com