Over the past twenty years, I’ve written my fair share of unit tests, mostly just covering the happy path and sending in some bogus inputs to test the edges. Typically following a fat-model-thin-controller method (often recommended by me), I failed to understand the point of integration tests. I tried TDD at the beginning of several greenfield projects, but I was never successful in making it sustainable. Similarly, with Selenium, it worked at first but quickly proved to be too brittle to keep up with rapidly changing UIs. (In retrospect, bad CSS architecture on those projects probably deserved the blame more than Selenium per se.)
Lab Zero Team members are passionate about staying up-to-date with latest topics and tools of our trade. We regularly host show-and-tell experiences in which a member of our team presents a topic to the rest of the team. They’re fun! They’re informative! They’re a little exclusive.
Most people cannot imagine life without the Internet. Can you also imagine being the only person without access while the world carries on without you? I don’t know about you, but I’d give up a lot of other things before giving up access to the Internet.
Head of Business Agility, Training and Leadership Development
One of the common concerns we hear from clients is that more nimble and laser-focused competitors are nipping at their heels or could emerge from a blind spot and impact their market. This concern only seems to increase with scale. This post describes an example of how we helped a large organization discover how much faster it could experiment, innovate and deliver a product.
At Lab Zero, we’re often hired by clients to create brand new products, and thus brand new codebases. When our time on a project is complete, the client’s own developers inherit the codebase. We’re usually working side-by-side with these developers and are constantly engaging in knowledge transfer.
Lab Zero has been building server-side applications for products of all shapes and sizes using languages like Ruby, JavaScript, PHP and Java since 2008. We’re always looking for the best tools available and that has generally been satisfied in the Ruby and JavaScript ecosystems. We still love Ruby and JavaScript, and will continue writing both, but I’ve been feeling the itch to adopt an additional language and framework to the LZ toolbelt.
The Lab Zero Design Team had the opportunity to attend Adaptive Path’s UX Week 2016 conference in San Francisco. The conference brought designers together from all over the world to share diverse perspectives. We met folks from Australia, Canada, Germany, Ireland, and Japan in addition to folks from right here in our hometown.
We are back from UX Week 2016 and we really enjoyed the conference. Our hosts Adaptive Path offered an app for attendees, and we thought we’d share some impressions from using it at this year's conference. Most of our team in attendance use iOS devices, but the experience seems similar with the Android and Web interfaces.
Lab Zero’s design team is embarking this week to an experience designer’s dream: UX Week San Francisco! UX professionals from all over the world are giving talks and workshops about the latest ideas and research in our field. As a product design and development shop, we’re always eager to learn new ways to think about design and how to better serve our clients. We’re looking forward to exciting experiences ahead.
Development of new front-end frameworks continues to move forward at blazing speeds — so fast, at times, that it’s hard for testing frameworks to keep up. In the case of React app development, our go-to solution is a collection of small tools that work together to provide us with a bespoke unit-testing workflow: Mocha, Chai, Sinon, Enzyme, Proxyquire, and Istanbul.