Did you know that Google developed the first versions of Twitter and other popular apps on Android with no strings attached?

According to Sara Beykpour, a former Twitter employee and the company's second Android engineer, "

The Twitter for Android client was a demo app that Google had created and gave to us.

" Twitter then took this foundation and continued to develop it into the robust platform it is today.

Of course, these designs are now about as current as your grandma's flip phone, but back then, they were top-notch.

When designing your app, always keep the user in mind. Prioritize seamless navigation, intuitive interfaces, and quick access to key features. Regular UX testing ensures your app is user-friendly and meets your audience's evolving needs.

Analyze support tickets to identify the most frequent requests and find common patterns instead of addressing each issue individually. Spending 20% of the time replacing a whole section of the app can eliminate 80% of your users' problems.

Integrating your app with widely used platforms and services can enhance its functionality. APIs from social media, payment gateways, and cloud services can enrich user experiences and expand your app’s capabilities.

Sharing your progress and insights gained in the process on social media platforms will drive engagement and traffic. Posts detailing the journey and steps taken to achieve milestones often go viral, making social media a top source for sign-ups. A single viral post on Reddit can increase traffic tenfold overnight.

Incorporate AI-driven features to personalize user experiences, provide intelligent recommendations, and automate customer service. Tools like TensorFlow, Azure AI, and AWS Machine Learning can help you add these advanced features.

Ensure your app runs smoothly on all devices. Focus on speed, reduce load times, and test across various hardware and network conditions. Performance optimization is crucial for maintaining a positive user experience.

As Google did with their early app development efforts, be prepared to go above and beyond to make your app successful. This might mean providing extra features, offering exceptional support, and continuously iterating based on user feedback.

If your business needs a cutting-edge app and Google is no longer giving them away for free, don't worry—we've got you covered at a reasonable price. 

How Google Crafted the First Twitter Android App

As a startup founder in today's rapidly changing times, you might be overwhelmed by the numerous tasks that arise after your brilliant idea comes to mind. The most important ones include testing your idea and bringing value to your end-users as soon as possible. Outsourcing software development could be the most suitable solution in such cases, especially if you lack expertise in development or don't have enough time to manage this process due to your main business.

In this easy guide, we'll help you explore outsourcing programming for your startup, showing you how to start, pick a good partner, and dodge common mistakes new entrepreneurs make.

First, let's define what you can outsource:

Developing the entire app from start to finish could be both mobile and web applications. See more about our SDLC.

Specific tasks include UI/UX design services, DevOps services, or developing any part of your software product.

Requesting a company to provide you with a reliable programmer to join your team as an outstaff specialist or consultant.

Unlocking the Power of Outsourcing for Your Startup

Outsourcing programming is a significant part of the IT industry. In 2023, it's anticipated that the IT outsourcing segment will generate a whopping US$430 billion in revenue (

). Even big companies like Google have recognized the benefits of outsourcing programming tasks. These benefits include:

Quick access to specialized skills without investing in training or hiring new staff.

Established and automated business processes and workflows.

Increased flexibility, allowing you to scale your arrangement as needed without worrying about hiring or firing staff.

Reduced risks associated with staffing and operations, including turnover, training, and compliance.

How to Maximize the Benefits of Outsourcing Programming

We'll provide a guide to help you with everything from choosing the best vendor to launching your product, aiming to ensure a great experience for your startup's partnership with an outsourcing company.

Define the Most Suitable Employment Model

If you are ready to manage the whole process or already have an established team, hire one or more outstaff developers to augment your team. This approach requires more time from you to describe tasks and manage the process, but you won't have to pay for an external manager.

Another popular model is hiring a dedicated team with developers, project managers, QA specialists, designers, and other team members on board. Depending on your expertise, you can discuss and select the necessary team members. If you hire a team, you must choose the most appropriate model, such as Time & Materials or Fixed Price.

If you only need to augment your team, identify your requirements for each team member, such as programming languages and tools. If you want to hire a team, define a project description with a shortlist of features to help you communicate with the outsourcing company.

Outsourcing companies are located in different countries, allowing you to find the perfect fit. Consider factors like cost, language, cultural compatibility, and time zone. Eastern Europe is a popular region because developers have a good English level and excellent hard and soft skills that enable them to work with team members from different countries.

Now you can move on to defining a shortlist of companies based on your requirements and preferred location. Using platforms like Clutch or GoodFirms is a simple way to find potential partners, as these platforms provide lists of companies with verified reviews from real customers. Additionally, take your time to conduct Google research and investigate company websites to check their portfolios. If a company has already completed projects like yours - they can likely do it faster and with less risk than their competitors. Once you're confident that a company suits your needs, contact them with an inquiry about their services.

After examining past projects and client feedback, ensuring that the company has a solid track record in managing the required IT services, it's time to arrange interviews with shortlisted candidates to assess their hard and soft skills. The management team represents the company, so pay attention to their focus. Good service companies are centered on bringing value to your projects, so expect many questions, particularly if you haven't provided detailed requirements upfront.

If a company just gives you a rate card without asking questions, be careful, as it may lead to misunderstandings down the road.

If you need developers but don't have tech experts around, it could be a good idea to hire developer from another company just to o the interview or look up popular interview questions online and ask a couple during your search. You can compare the answers and pay attention to how developers communicate with you and whether they are confident in their responses.

When you've found the perfect match, prepare an agreement with your lawyers or use an agreement from the service company. Remember that both parties have had various positive and negative experiences, so a well-drafted agreement is crucial for successful collaboration. Moreover, if an outsourcing company has a well-prepared agreement, can provide accurate estimations and explanations, and their documents have a user-friendly interface, these factors serve as additional reassurance that you've made the right decision.

By following this comprehensive guide, you can effectively navigate the world of programming outsourcing for your startup. Outsourcing has lots of advantages, like saving money, reaching global experts fast, easily scaling, and cutting down risks. By carefully choosing the right partner, specifying your business needs, and actively participating, you can ensure a successful collaboration that brings your startup's vision to life.

You've come to the right place if you're searching for a proficient outsourcing company catering to your business's diverse IT service requirements. With years of experience delivering global programming services to businesses, we're equipped to assist you with any emerging IT-related needs.

, and let's explore how software development outsourcing can enhance your business!

How to outsource programming in 2023: A comprehensive guide for startups

By following this comprehensive guide you can effectively navigate the world of programming outsourcing for your startup. 

At CML Team we are building our own (yet internal) CRM system. Technology-wise, it's a traditional web application with Java + Spring Boot + MySQL on the backend and React + Next.js on the frontend.

We have pretty good code coverage for the backend (reaching 80%) with tests, but the integration tests are (as expected) rather slow. It takes 20+ minutes to run on CI server. It's even slower running locally.

Needless to say, this slowness renders tests much less useful and helpful for the developers, since they practically can't run the tests locally often enough.

At CML Team we value integration/functional tests. So we tend to write tests with less mocks, tests that span all layers of the (Java) application (controllers, services, repositories) -- down to (and including) the DB. The tests run on a real database (MySQL), not on often recommended H2.

Overall, the idea is, the closer your tests follow 

 application setup, the higher are the chances to catch 

Of course, we write unit-tests when applicable. But otherwise, we prefer end-to-end tests to tests for a specific controller, service or component.

It's clear that such tests are inherently slow, but they should not be 

 slow! It was time to take a deeper look to understand what's going on.

Let's take a look at typical test we had there:

As you can see, this test has the following logic:

Firstly, it wipes the DB and fills it with initial data in 

@CleanDataBaseBeforeAndAfter(".../init_data.json")

Then, it runs the body of the test method, that executes a REST call to the API being tested

Finally, it tests the correctness of the final state of the DB via 

It appears that this test takes whopping 8+ seconds to execute:

And if we take some thread dumps during the execution, we can see, that major part of this time is spent in the Database Rider plugin applying the initial state to the DB (

I have some guesses why this can take so long:

 into a set of SQL inserts the Database Rider must determine the correct insertion order, according to entity relations (like foreign keys). So I guess, as part of this routine it needs to first fetch the whole database metadata, and then apply some topological sorting to the source dataset.

I'm not quite sure, how efficiently does the Database Rider do the inserts. Whether it is in an auto-commit mode? Whether it does each insert in a separate transaction?

 is shared among multiple tests, it, probably, contains more data than needed for this particular test.

Given the concerns above, the rewrite strategy was obvious. Get rid of Database Rider annotations and code the DB initialization and DB check steps in plain code.

So now instead of having implicit logic, hidden in annotations we have it in code, in the 

 encapsulates the functionality of cleaning the DB and starting/committing the transactions, common for many tests:

 is to generate the testing data records in the DB. So by default it should generate the same entity data for any test, but should also provide a common way of customizing each entity instance before creation (using 

Using this design you can pre-populate the testing data set in any way you like in the most concise way:

 also uses a small trick of not using all the specific repositories for each entity type (like 

, etc.), but persisting through a lower level 

 fixture reuse. This makes it less efficient due to excessive data not needed for a particular test. Besides, tests now tend to rely on the same (or intersecting) data, making it harder to change this data for a particular test.

Secondly, tests are now self-contained, not scattered over multiple files, like with DB Rider. This makes the test logic more comprehensible.

Thirdly, it's easier to debug and profile this way. Also, you only create the minimum test data you need for a test.

Lastly, you have more opportunities to refactor, less copy-paste.

To illustrate the last point, let's take a look at the set of (repetitive) tests we had before the refactoring:

So far only 40 integration tests (out of around 490) are refactored this way.

And believe it or not, we also were able to delete over 3K+ lines during this change (mostly due to dropping the fixture files):

In the near future we plan to rewrite the rest of the tests and use this approach for new tests.

Rewriting Spring Boot integration tests for 10x speedup

How to drop the execution time of integration tests from 4m 30 sec to just 20 sec? Let's figure it out.

We use the Agile approach for small projects and the Scaled Agile Framework for big projects that involve two or more teams. Using small groups allows us to speed up the process and achieve the desired result quickly.




1. Product Owner - a project's key stakeholder.
2. Scrum Master - facilitator for an Agile development team.
3. The development team typically consists of developers, designers, quality assurance personnel, and others.




1. The product backlog is a list of tasks that need to be done.
2. The sprint backlog is a subset of tasks that need to be completed during the sprint.
3. The product increment is a deliverable produced by completing the sprint backlog.




1. Product increment planning refers to a meeting of multiple teams and stakeholders wherein a shared vision is established, features are discussed, the roadmap is planned, and cross-team dependencies are identified. This typically occurs 4 or 6 times per year.
2. The Sprint Planning Meeting takes place at the beginning of a sprint and is when the team defines what can be delivered and how. The team makes the decision based on the early defined feature priorities. Stakeholders' participation is optional.
3. A sprint is a short period (usually two weeks) wherein a development team works to complete specific tasks, milestones, or deliverables.
4. At a Daily Scrum Meeting, the team discusses what they will do that day and creates a plan for the next day.
5. At the end of each sprint, the team has a Sprint Demo Meeting to show what they have accomplished and how it works. Stakeholders can choose to participate in this meeting.
6. The Sprint Retrospective Meeting is an opportunity for the team to reflect on how the past sprint went regarding people, relationships, processes, and tools. The team identifies what went well and what can be improved.
7. The Innovation and Planning Week occurs every Program Increment. This is a time for the team to estimate their objectives, plan for the next increment, and dedicate time to innovation.
8. The team inspects all the developed features and makes any necessary adaptations. They then present this information to a broader audience, including external and internal stakeholders.




1. Before development begins, each feature and its corresponding definition of done is clarified. This way, developers don't waste time having to rework the same functionality twice.
2. While developers work on current features, a project manager discusses a new set of features with stakeholders and fills the sprint backlog.
3. Each meeting has an agenda, and afterward, we send a follow-up letter with a summary of the discussion and the decisions made.



How we bring the product to life

We use the Agile approach for small projects and the Scaled Agile Framework for big projects that involve two or more teams.

In the heart of 1970, whispers of an unusual lecture buzzed through the corridors of the University of Southern California School of Medicine. Two groups of students were curious and looking forward to hearing a new class on "Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education." Little did they know, the day's lesson held a twist.

Among the presenters, one was a genuine scholar, while the other was actor Michael Fox, cleverly posing as "Dr. Myron L. Fox."

As the lecture unfolded, the students who joined the Mr. Fox lecture were drawn into the charismatic web spun by the excellent performer. Though his speech was peppered with nonsensical jargon, contradictions, and gibberish, they rated him on par with the real scientist.

His secret weapon? An attractive mix of humor, charisma, and warmth.

This experiment, known as the Dr. Fox effect, parallels ChatGPT's abilities. Just as Dr. Fox, ChatGPT can craft convincing yet potentially misleading responses, taking advantage of people's cognitive biases.

Even Stack Overflow fell victim to the ChatGPT spreading and now has experienced a decline in traffic, despite researchers finding that 52% of ChatGPT's responses to questions may need to be corrected.

The following sections will analyze how ChatGPT affects community engagement and communication.

One of the most appreciated aspects of Stack Overflow is the availability of multiple answers to a single question, along with varied perspectives from developers, aiding in selecting the best solution.

ChatGPT can provide multiple options if explicitly instructed in the prompt. However, its answers lack human-based reasoning. This can be problematic for junior developers. While they can ask questions without fear of negative feedback, they might struggle to identify flawed architectural approaches behind seemingly correct answers.

Therefore our focus should be on promoting best practices and fostering a collaborative environment. This way, developers will feel comfortable communicating within the company and seeking trusted answers offline and online rather than solely depending on "smart" assistants.

Moreover, we can take advantage of the Mr. Fox effect. Now, everyone has the potential to become an excellent presenter, sharing brilliant ideas with others. ChatGPT offers a unique opportunity, especially for non-English speaking developers, to practice communication with stakeholders and colleagues. It has become the best soft skill simulator ever created.

Since ChatGPT shares all the data with its analytics and others, users can't put it under an NDA. However, by crafting our prompts to be artificial and using fictional scenarios without real names, numbers, and proprietary ideas, we can quickly learn from ChatGPT's clear and polite way of responding.

For instance, here are five examples showcasing ChatGPT's ability to transform a potentially misleading or toxic communication into a more professional tone:

“I need to convey feedback to my colleague. Can you help me rephrase the following statement to make it more professional and constructive? Some incorrect sentences.”

Original: "Your idea doesn't work. Try something else."

Reworked: "Thank you for the suggestion. I believe there might be alternative approaches to consider. Do you have other suggestions we could explore?"

Original: "I don't understand why you did this."

Reworked: "Can you help me understand the reasoning behind this approach?"

Original: "You should've told me earlier."

Reworked: "Could we set up a regular check-in or communication method in the future? This will ensure we're both informed and address issues promptly."

Original: "Add more content to the report."

Reworked with ChatGPT's help: "Expand the report by including detailed analyses of our Q2 sales figures, a comparison with Q1, and insights on market trends. Also, incorporate relevant charts and infographics for better visualization."

Reworked with ChatGPT's help: "We've observed intermittent app crashes, particularly when accessing the 'Profile' section on Android devices running version 10.0. Can you investigate and rectify the root cause?"

Such interactions refine communication, fostering collaboration, client satisfaction, faster deliveries, and outstanding outcomes.

The wave ChatGPT has created in the online Q&A sphere is undeniable. Technologies are reshaping the digital dialogue. As we stand at this intersection of AI and human intellect, we must recognize and leverage the potential of such platforms to our advantage.

The Dr. Fox Effect & ChatGPT: Charisma, Cognitive Biases, and Digital Communication

The following article analyzes how ChatGPT affects community engagement and communication.

How Google Crafted the First Twitter Android App

Key lessons for startups in 2024

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