Alex Zubkov is a technical writer at LITSLINK from Dnipro. Alex has 15 years experience in sales, marketing, and product promotion for both local and international markets. He’s also a techno geek and amateur photographer with a love of gadgets and the Arsenal FC.

Quality assurance (QA) is an essential stage of any software development cycle. It helps developers catch the lingering bugs and inconsistencies in the product’s functionality before you deliver it to your customers.

According to Statista, companies spent 35% of their financial resources on software testing in 2015. In 2019, this figure went down to just below a quarter of the company’s budget, but it is still taxing in 2020 to balance financial expenditure and product performance.

A sophisticated QA process can cut costs by reducing the number of errors that need fixing and, subsequently, the amount of iterative testing required. It can also improve the reliability of the testing process, further reducing expenses, which is crucial for startups and low-budget, middle-size enterprises.

In this article, we’ll briefly run through the key stages of the QA process:

• Key stages of the QA process
• What tools should you use?
• The role of QA processes in your startup growth

Let’s get started!
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Inhale… Exhale… Inhale… Exhale… 🧘🏻‍♂️

Why the deep breaths?

Perhaps because of the pandemic, its subsequent lockdown measures, and the impending breakdown of life as we know it?

In the midst of the global crisis, people are increasingly turning to mindfulness and meditation to regain a sense of calm in their lives.

This means that while the world goes bust, it’s boom time for the mindfulness app industry.

Downloads of mindfulness apps have doubled since mid-March and the digital mental health market is projected to reach $4.6bn in 2026; a massive jump from its value of $1.4bn in 2017.

Continue reading to take a look at the two key rivals in the mindfulness app game: Calm vs Headspace. We’ll also examine why people are turning to mindfulness as a means to cope with the pandemic, and check out two other alternatives beyond the Calm vs Headspace feud: Waking Up and Reflectly.

To skip to a specific section of this Process Street blog post click the appropriate link below:

• Why mindfulness and why now
• How to be more mindful?
• Mindfulness Apps: Calm vs Headspace (the top dogs)
• Beyond Calm vs Headspace: Waking Up and Reflectly
• It’s not a question of Calm vs Headspace, the question is: Are mindfulness apps for you?

Take a breath… Now let’s get started! ✨

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Quality management. Oh, how I love thee.

You’ve given us rubber flavored cookies, phones that go up in smoke, and exploding car airbags (we’ll get to all of that later).

Last year, 337 food products passed through stringent quality management procedures and went to market with major issues. So major, in fact, that each and every one of those products had to be recalled. This cost the US economy over $7 million.

But, the cost of poor quality management surrounding the production of food is only a tiny part of the picture:

“Defective product incidents have caused in excess of $2 billion of losses over five years” – Allianz, Product Recall, Managing the Impact of the New Risk Landscape

When you consider that the global quality management software market is valued at $7.96 billion, why are we, as consumers, still being exposed to low quality, defective products?

Because, contrary to what most organizations think, there is more to quality management than simply making a good product. You need to know how you’re going to make it good and how you’re going to make sure it remains good.

In other words, you need a plan. A quality management plan to be exact.

The reasons for this will become even clearer as we make our way through this Process Street post and discuss:

• What is a quality management plan?
• What is the most useful thing about a quality management plan?
• What’s included in a quality management plan?
• How to enforce a quality management plan

Let’s get planning.
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“The misinformation crisis is a symptom of the enormously significant ways that the internet has changed our information ecosystem, which I don’t think anybody, least of all governments and traditional media, has fully got to grips with.” Al Baker, Managing Editor at Logically

If you’ve been on social media at all in the past decade, you’ve likely spoken to at least one synthetic person without even realizing it.

To be honest, probably more than one. In the early months of 2020, Twitter purged 174,000 bots it claimed were being used by the Chinese government.

This is what propaganda looks like today. But no, you say, propaganda is kitschy, cartoonish posters from the 1940s, and, once upon a time, you’d be right. The truth is, though, modern propaganda is almost completely digital – and not nearly as easy to spot.

Dictators use bots to stifle uprisings. Political candidates use bots to promote their platforms. Civil rights advocates use bots to schedule protests and share information. That new startup has bots to raise its brand profile, and if you’ve ever scheduled an automated post, you’ve used one, too.

Like most technology, bots aren’t malevolent by nature; how they’re used, however, is another matter entirely.

This article is going to examine the methods and origins of modern propaganda and what’s been done to combat it.

• Is there a difference between “fake news” and propaganda?
• Is modern propaganda really doing anything new?
• Meet the AI generating synthetic content
• How you can spot modern propaganda

Onward, we go:
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Republican or Democrat. Brexit or remaining in the EU. Pepsi or Coke.

There are some things that people just can’t agree on.

These debates all pale in comparison to the one argument that is so vitriolic, so polemic, and so bitter that it’s infamous the world over: The Mac vs Windows debate.

The heated rivalry has brought out the worst in people, with message boards, forums, and social media threads being the digital battlegrounds for these two factions to clash. The primary method of attack for Windows supporters is to scoff at the price of Apple’s Mac products. Mac aficionados — while they only make up 9-13% of all operating system users — go for the throat by ridiculing how error-prone Windows is.

But I’m glad to say that the operating system war has finally come to an end with a clear victor.

Mac.

With their trojan horse — Big Sur — they’ve created an OS that’s so streamlined, easy to use, and downright fast — all while tying it in with the interface of iPadOS and iOS — that Windows 10’s defeat was inevitable.

But what’s changed, exactly? What are Big Sur’s most exciting features? And, more importantly, when is macOS 11 being released?

Make your way through the following sections in this Process Street post to find out:

• Introducing Big Sur, Apple’s 11th MacOS
• Everything that’s changed since Catalina
• Why Big Sur is such a big success — particularly for productivity
• When is the Big Sur release date?
• Productivity tools to enhance Big Sur even further

Hey, Siri?

Scroll down so the reader can continue on with the post.

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This is a guest post from Margo Ovsiienko, you can find her website at margoleads.com. Margo is a tech enthusiast and a growth marketing strategist. She is passionate about topics related to SaaS growth, startup strategy, and IT development.

To outsource or not to outsource? The eternal tech question, and a persistent hot topic in tech communities. How do you manage your expectations against your budget and be sure you’re finding the right team for the job? This can be especially challenging for anyone lacking experience with hiring (which is not a task to take lightly).

Building an in-house team vs outsourcing those efforts can depend heavily on the kind of product you’re trying to build; how complex is the feature set? What does your roadmap look like for the next 12 months? These kinds of questions will help you to figure out whether or not your best bet would be in-house or outsourced.

For long-term, committed projects, building a trusty in-house team is almost certainly your best bet. But working with an outsourced, remote team has its place and also comes with many advantages, such as reduced set-up or training time (in the case of outsourced design and development teams) and ability to rapidly develop and tweak early stage concepts (often for a cheaper rate) when searching for the ideal product-market fit.

So, how can you build a SaaS product that gains traction fast before you run out of limited funds?

In this Process Street article, we’ll consider how to build a SaaS product that gains traction fast on a constrained budget, and kick-start your growth.

• What you need to know before you build a SaaS product
• How to validate your product idea
• Key steps of product development
• To outsource or not to outsource?
• How to build a SaaS product: Key takeaways

Let’s get started!
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If Shakespeare offered to write a guest post for TechCrunch, I highly doubt he’d be declined.

Similarly, if Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Fitzgerald — or any other great writer — wanted to post on the blog of Atlassian, Buffer, or Unbounce, these sites wouldn’t exactly say no, would they?

That’s because they’re the lucky few who became internationally-renowned as stellar writers. The hard part wouldn’t be pitching and writing for these incredible, modern-day sites and blogs; it’d be resurrecting themselves so they could write in the first place.

How do you get your business’ writers — who are all incredible in their own right but don’t have the reputation of the above (yet) — published by other sites? How can you add authority, improve targeted traffic, increase qualified leads, and secure backlinks with guest posting? What needs to be done?

That’s exactly what you’re about to learn.

At Process Street, we’ve been guest posting for sites like TechCrunch, HubSpot, G2, TheNextWeb, AppSumo, and hundreds of others for years. Our offsite efforts make up a fundamental part of our content marketing machine, and have since helped us achieve a high domain rating, clinch the #1 spot for our most useful keywords, and get lots of juicy backlinks, too.

If you want to learn how we did it — and how you can, as well — just read through the following sections:

• What is guest posting?
• The business benefits of guest posting
• Process Street’s guest post journey (and how we systemized efforts)
• 4 essential guest blogging tips for writers and marketers

“Brevity is the soul of wit”, Shakespeare once said.

So without more ado, let’s get started! ✍️

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This article started with a cold cup of tea.

I was in the middle of a power cut, and the teabag floated despondently in a sad, mottled brew. In the confusion, I’d allowed the beverage to cool for far too long. All of that precious energy transferred to raise the temperature of the kettle to boiling point, gone to waste, and there was nothing I could do about it.

This is an example of poor energy management on my part.

As I sulked over the absence of my morning brew, it did get me thinking, would society ever face these kinds of energy management problems, like I easily had?

“Welcome to the energy crisis” – Lawrence J. Becker, Welcome to the Energy Crisis

Some of you may have already experienced, say, aggravating waits in lines for gasoline, or your pocketbooks taking a punch from inflation. But, energy problems – like a cold cup of tea – are not only personal, they permeate into society and our economy.

80% of U.S. energy comes from fossil fuels. According to BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy, we have 115 years of coal and roughly 50 years of oil and natural gas remaining. To compound this, we also need to leave ~80% of current fossil fuel reserves untouched if we stand a chance of meeting IPCC 1.5°C (34.7°F) warming targets.

Energy management is the process of tracking and optimizing energy consumption for your business. It’s a continuous process, easily implemented by following the correct procedure.

In this Process Street article, you’ll learn about best practices for energy management, how you can successfully manage energy in your business (and beyond), as well as how to adopt best energy management practices using a handy free checklist to help you save time and money.

Don’t cry over cold tea. Learn how to manage energy properly, for a healthier business and a healthier planet. Click on the relevant subheader below, or continue reading as you please:

• What is energy management?
• Energy management: Improve energy efficiency
• Energy management: Conserve energy
• Energy management: Renewable energy
• Quarterly Energy Management Plan Template

Let’s not waste any more time, and get right into the basics of energy management.
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With nine years in the aviation industry, Daniel Martin is an experienced team-builder with several high-performance content creation teams under his belt. He is currently the Head of Customer Success at LinkDoctor.

As of October 2019, there were 1.72 billion websites on the Internet. Keeping up with reputation and rank is important for any website owner, but it’d be impossible to manually check every site one-by-one.

Google has developed a ranking algorithm that crawls through billions of websites in a short time. This algorithm determines the site’s relevance and trustworthiness based on several factors, including backlinks from other sites.

A backlink is equivalent to statements such as “I trust this website,” or “This is a valuable website.” This is why link-building has become necessary to get higher ranks on the Internet.

High-ranking sites are more visible on search engines’ results, which leads to higher conversion rates and traffic.

When it comes to organic links, though, you can’t just ask other sites to give them to you; you need to earn them. But how do you get other sites to link to yours?

In this article, I’ll cover everything you need to know about:

• What are organic links and link building?
• Focus on gaining these high-quality links
• Low-quality organic links to avoid
• How to deal with toxic backlinks to your website
• Determining the best strategy to gain organic links
• Understanding user behavior and interests to increase organic traffic
• Identifying your site’s customer personas for more tailored content
• How to create high-quality, linkable assets other sites will want to use
• Optimizing your website for better organic links
• Leveraging social media for more backlinks

Read on for step-by-step instructions on sowing those backlinks to your site!

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Once upon a time, the island nation of Sri Lanka was called “Serendip,” a word derived from Sanskrit which means Dwelling-Place-of-Lions. (Lovely, right?).

Serendip provides the setting for the Persian fairy tale “The Three Princes of Serendip”, who throughout their travels, stumbled upon an uncanny amount of luck. 🤴🏾🤴🏾🤴🏾

The story of the princes and their relationship with luck is where the wonderful word Serendipity comes from. Serendipity, meaning accidental, unexpected, random, wonderful, happy, luck.

It is luck, or rather, how to make your own luck, that is the focus of this Process Street blog.

This post embraces and explains tech entrepreneur Jason Robert’s concept of “Luck Surface Area”, in the hope of helping you, the reader, increase your luck both in life and in business.

To jump to a specific section of the post click the appropriate link below. Alternatively, just keep scrolling to learn about the three lucky princes, Luck Surface Area, and how you can make your own luck.

• Serendipity and making your own luck
• How to make your own luck
• Make your own luck: The Luck Surface Area equation
• 5 actionable ways you can increase your luck surface area and make your own luck

Feelin’ lucky? ✨

Let’s get started.

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