How to make the brave new world of fingerprint and facial recognition work in your App Development

by Carlos Machado Marcos, iOS Team Lead, Sage

As iPhone users we have all used Biometrics at some point: to login, to confirm a bank transfer, to access passwords, etc.

It is an extremely fast and painless process: just put your finger on the button or even faster, the camera recognizes your face. But how does this really work? How does Apple transform an extremely complex and secure process into a seemingly easy and completely transparent feature for the user?

It is very…

by Didac Morales, mobile developer, Sage mobile center of excellence

This year we had the opportunity to lay the foundations for a new project within Sage taking advantage of our knowledge and experience as a Mobile Center of Excellence.

This is a new mobile app for Sage’s most recent acquisition, a people management product called CakeHR by Sage.

As always happens when we are going to start a project from scratch, we began the conversation/debate about which architecture would be best: MVC, MVP, MVVM, or VIPER. Whether to use CoreData or Realm as the database, etc.

In this article we…

Gavin Johnson-Lynn, Senior Offensive Security Specialist, Sage

Passwords are a painful part of security on the internet. How do we fix that?

Security on the internet is constantly being improved to try to keep up with hackers. Passwords, however, are lagging. They haven’t really changed much since the internet started. If anything, the situation has got worse, because we have to remember increasingly long and complex passwords. It feels like every site we go to has different rules about what our password should look like.

This complexity leads our human brains to simplify it, which often means we either use the same password for lots of websites, or we have slight variations on a single…

Combining human skill and machine efficiency for the right result

Silvia Ochoa Fernandez, Senior QA Engineer, Sage

It was almost ten years ago since I had my first experience leading a test team.

The way testing was understood in some industries was far from being a creative task: we worked with pre-defined test cases that were run over-and-over again in a manual way. Back in the day, test automation was generally reserved for less structured industries.

I was lucky to belong to a very diverse team, which ranged from a very experienced tester to a tester who had just started…

Techniques for improving your chatbot’s performance

Focusing on building a chatbot, but not on optimizing it, is a bit like ordering a burger without the fries — sure, it will do the job, but are you really getting the full experience?

Defining the use case and building the chatbot is important, but thinking about the user experience is critical in today's ‘bot ready’ marketplace — users expect chatbots to understand colloquialisms, accents, slang, jokes and so much more.

Testing, gaining feedback, and refining your chatbot can ensure that your user experience is crisp and clear, as well as dispel confusion and dissatisfaction experienced by users that…

A story of differentiation, efficiency, and speed

Montse Sans, Product Delivery, Sage

By the end of 2020, it is estimated that there will be 6.1 billion smartphones in the world.

As demand soars, mobile app development is a mainstay for businesses today — with any time, anywhere access to information critical as people across the world work from their home office.

As businesses further shift their development to mobile-enabled solutions, a critical part of the strategy must be building a program that helps verify mobile security and admin.

As of the first quarter of 2020, Android users were able to choose between 2.56 million apps, making Google…

by Roger Pintó, Mobile Software Developer, Sage

Last WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference, 2019), Apple integrated Swift Package Manager (SPM) into Xcode 11, creating quite a stir in the iOS developer community. It’s the first dependency manager officially provided and supported by Apple, and now, it’s built right into Xcode, making it easier than ever to manage your dependencies.

After it was released, I couldn’t resist the temptation to try it myself and I migrated my dependencies from Cocoapods to SPM on my personal projects. A few months later, I can tell that I love the simplicity of it and the…

Shivani Govil, EVP emerging technology & ecosystems, Sage

The Covid-19 pandemic is a human crisis. Each and every one of us will have been affected in some way or another. Many people have asked me if innovation is still relevant or if businesses should just “hunker” down and try to survive.

My belief is that innovation is even more important in times like this. In fact, it will be key to economic recovery, both in the long and short term. Given the unpredictability of the long-term impacts of Covid-19, the only thing we can say with certainty is that this…