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February 21st, 2022

Load tests for Black Friday 2021

For many online retailers, "Black Friday" represents the annual high-point both in per-day takings and simultaneous customer visits, and it is critical that the virtual shops run by such businesses can withstand this resultant high load. For the peak season in 2021, one of our longest standing clients, an online fashion retailer, expected an even greater increase in their order volume compared with the previous year, as well as likely the highest customer numbers to date. In addition, the substantial changes to the online shop infrastructure during the year were not backed up by significant experience of running the system for resilience in its new configuration. To assess and fortify the webshop in preparation for the peak season, a task force was formed out of members of development and operations teams, and here TNG played a leading role.

Working alongside other departments and external contractors, developers subjected the production setup to nightly cloud-based load tests that allowed a thorough assessment of the health of the system. Realistic test scenarios were reproduced in the form of JMeter test plans, simulating customer journeys through the shop, while the system could be monitored using both Elastic Stack, Promtheus, and Grafana, as well as in-house analysis tools. All relevant performance problems could be iteratively identified and fixed.

That this was a success could be seen on Black Friday weekend, when technical problems and performance disruptions were not only so minimal as to go unnoticed by customers, but were avoided entirely. The 2021 diet of load tests also afforded many insights into the webshop's performance and let to a round of suggested measures by way of preparation for yet further growth in the ensuing year.

February 17th, 2022

TNG Follows The Sun

TNG is becoming more and more international! True to the motto "Follow The Sun", a second TNG colleague moved from Germany to the other side of the globe at the beginning of January to support our Australian branch. The subsidiary was founded in April last year and is now fully established. As of the beginning of March, a total of four employees will be working Down Under - and we are still expanding.
The pandemic has permanently changed our working environment and significantly accelerated the trend towards remote work. The shift to telecommuting has taught us that we can work together successfully from multiple locations. An international company has some benefits: "Follow The Sun" is not only the motto of our two German colleagues in Melbourne, but also one of the main reasons why TNG has chosen Australia as a location. Due to the time difference, we are able to create a global knowledge workflow in order to provide software development and DevOps services to our clients around the clock. In addition, the location creates the possibility for us to expand into the ANZ market and transfer our experience and success in Germany to this market. We are excited to see what else the future holds!

February 15th, 2022

Security as a Serious Game - Elevation of Privilege online

Without any doubt security is important in software development. At the same time the topic is usually not a core competence of development teams, but is audited by individual, usually external experts. These audits often happen at the end of the development process, contrary to the agile approach. In order to protect systems against attacks early, continuously, and efficiently, potential threats should be considered regularly and counteracted accordingly already during the development process.

The serious game "Elevation of Privilege", developed by Microsoft, helps integrating threat modelling into the agile development process at an early stage and creating awareness for security issues. In the game, with the help of playing cards the development team thinks from the attacker's perspective and thus identifies threats before they actually arise. And it's fun!
An open-source online version is available so that distributed teams can also play the game. TNG colleagues play a major role in developing it using JavaScript, React, and the boardgame.io game engine: https://github.com/tng/elevation-of-privilege.

You would like to try out the game and look for a moderator? Feel free to contact us at info(at)tngtech.com.

February 8th, 2022

How laws become software

More than 2000 years ago, the carpenter Joseph travelled with his pregnant wife Mary from Nazareth to Bethlehem for the census. In order to spare today's population this experience in the 2022 census, TNG is working together with our client AKDB on digitising the registration system. In the future we might not even have to make the tiresome journey to the registration office when moving to a new address.

The heterogeneous landscape in the German registration system, caused among other things by federal structures, poses great challenges for the municipalities when it comes to digitalisation. Technical structures must be built that include the citizens as well as the various authorities. At the same time data reconciliation must take place, rulings of the Constitutional Court must be taken into account, and data protection must be guaranteed by encrypted transmission of information and a validated system login.

In their Big Techday talk, Dr Ulrike Schröder from TNG and Franz-Xaver Salat from AKDB describe how they are facing these challenges and which technical solutions will make the lives of German citizens easier in the future. You can find this and other talks from the last Big Techday in the Big Techday Playlist or directly here.

February 4th, 2022

App enables digital communication with the local pharmacy

Especially during the pandemic, it is a good idea to keep visits to pharmacies to a minimum. Together with Sanacorp Pharmahandel GmbH, one of the largest German pharmaceutical wholesalers, we have developed the meineapotheke.de app to make visits more efficient. Customers can use the application to fill prescriptions online, request medication, chat with their local pharmacy or even find the nearest pharmacy. This saves time and unnecessary journeys while enabling a quick and discreet pick-up.
Data protection is particularly important with these sensitive topics. Therefore, the chats between the customer and the pharmacy are completely encrypted end-to-end, and all data remain in Germany.
In a Scrum team, TNG implemented the app together with the client using the Ionic Framework which enables development of iOS and Android versions of an app with a single code base.
Further useful functionality is planned for the app, such as the ability to get e-prescriptions filled.

January 19th, 2022

TNG out and about

2021 - another year of digital innovations. In the second half of the year our employees continued to participate in several virtual lectures and conferences where they could exchange viewpoints, further their own knowledge, and share their know-how with others. Two topics, "deepfakes" and the impact of neural networks on our world, continue to enjoy great popularity and were presented by three of our colleagues at various events such as the IT-Days and DevDays Europe. In autumn we were represented at the Flink Forward Global conference with the presentation "Using Flink SQL on Ververica Platform". In addition, our colleagues were once again delighted to welcome a very interested audience at Developer Week, one of the largest independent developer conferences in Europe. At the end of the year, TNG presented "The making of VimR" at two conferences and gave a short demonstration of the app.

January 18th, 2022

Game Days at Elli

"Anything that can go wrong will go wrong." If you believe Murphy's Law, you understand the need to prepare for a crisis situation. TNG has done this together with our client Elli, a provider of electric mobility solutions in the Volkswagen Group, through "Game Days", held most recently in July 2021 for over 50 people.

These training days introduce a fun, collaborative way to upskill engineers on incident handling and find holes in infrastructure and processes. Engineers face real incidents, prepared on production-like systems, and have the chance to practice analyzing and fixing a variety of issues in a realistic, hands-on setting.

In their exciting and entertaining talk, Katja Ried (TNG) and Dimitris Kirtsios (Elli) present the project, explain why they find incidents so exciting, and show how Game Days might continue in the future. You can find this and other talks from our last Big Techday in the Big Techday Playlist or directly here.

December 21st, 2021

ArchUnit - Open-Source Library for automated Architectural rule testing

The open-source library ArchUnit was first designed by our colleagues a few years ago and has been under continuous improvement ever since.
By using ArchUnit it is possible to enforce architecture rules for Java and Kotlin applications via automated unit tests. It makes for a simple and quick way to check whether, for example, dependencies between packages are allowed, or whether naming conventions are adhered to. In addition, it motivates regular discussions on architecture rules and thus helps to keep documentation alive. Especially in bigger teams with faster turnover of members and extensive code, this can be of great help.

Our colleague Peter Gafert has published an article in the current "Java Magazin" (issue 1/2022) on the introduction of ArchUnit into the architecture process in a team.

More information at https://www.archunit.org/

 

November 30th, 2021

Cloud version of our Multivote & Enterprise Survey for Confluence

Do you use Confluence Cloud? Are you looking for the possibility to let people vote directly in Confluence? Check out the brand new Cloud version of our popular app Multivote & Enterprise Survey for Confluence, which can be found in the Atlassian Marketplace as of November 22nd, 2021.

It has been the most used voting app in the Atlassian Marketplace for almost ten years. With the release of the Cloud version, which is now available in addition to the Server and Data Center version, we complete our portfolio in the Atlassian Marketplace. We now offer customers migrating to the Atlassian Cloud, as well as customers already using the Atlassian Cloud, the ability to let people vote directly in Confluence. You can try out the app for free here.

November 26th, 2021

TNG again among Bavaria's Best 50

TNG was honored again this year as an especially fast-growing, owner-operated medium-sized company, receiving the Bavarian Best 50 award. We are delighted to receive this distinction, which is about economic stability and being future-proof in addition to growth. Thanks to all our colleagues who made this success possible.

Current news and events can be found here.