May 2021 Summaries

We've discussed Compass, a real estate technology company that has streamlined their testing and release cycles through automation. Russell Stephens, Mobile Infrastructure Lead at Compass, shared their journey of transitioning from an on-premise Jenkins to the cloud and ultimately to Bitrise for their CI/CD processes. They automated their entire release pipeline, including code signing and uploading to the App Store, and reduced manual regression cycles from 80 hours to just under four hours. By leveraging automation, they were able to achieve a two-week release cycle, which has since been shortened to one week, allowing for faster time-to-market and improved agility in responding to issues. The transition to Bitrise has also freed up Russell's team from maintaining the CI/CD pipeline hardware and software updates, allowing them to focus on developing new features confidently.

Bitrise is a cloud-based platform that helps indie developers overcome various challenges in creating and deploying mobile apps, such as robustness, deployment, testing, and monitoring. Setting up Bitrise requires only a few minutes and most of the setup is done automatically, with support for multiple technologies and languages. The platform provides a wide range of features, including automated builds, notifications, code quality checks, and integrations with other tools and systems. With its simple and quick setup process and free trial or Hobby tier available, indie developers can benefit from implementing Bitrise to streamline their development workflow.

DexProtector is a powerful in-app protection and real-time threat tracking solution for Android and iOS developed by Licel, now an official integration in the Bitrise Step Library, offering individual app hardening with multiple layers of protection against static and dynamic attacks. The step works directly with various file formats and supports multiple programming languages, providing instant protection for apps and maintaining their performance level. DexProtector's unique features include encryption, integrity control, tamper notifications, native code obfuscation, and more, making it a reliable app protection solution that can be easily integrated into Bitrise Workflows with an active license.

PagSeguro is a Brazilian company that provides online or mobile payment-based services to commercial operations, aiming to disrupt and democratize financial services in Brazil by offering an end-to-end digital banking ecosystem that is safe, affordable, simple, and mobile-first. The company's mobile app, PagBank, has had over 8.6 million downloads and is one of the best-rated apps in its category. PagSeguro's development process is highly modular, using a stack of technologies such as Swift, Kotlin, Flutter, and GitHub, with continuous integration and a team dedicated to building mobile infrastructure. The company uses Bitrise for its mobile app development processes, which has improved reliability and made it easier to keep the stack up to date. PagSeguro's teams collaborate closely to ensure efficiency in delivering functionalities fast and reliably, with each team responsible for specific features and services. The company is always looking for ways to evolve and improve its processes, including using Bitrise add-ons for insights and accelerating release cycles with weekly deployments to app stores.

The process of releasing an Android app involves sufficient testing and the use of software development practices such as continuous integration and continuous delivery to reduce cycle times for delivering new changes. To migrate an Android app from Jenkins to Bitrise, one needs to create a new Bitrise account, set up repository access, validate configuration, and configure environment variables. The workflow editor is used to add steps such as cloning the repository, configuring Google service accounts, building the app, running unit tests on Firebase Test Lab, distributing the app through Firebase App Distribution, deploying the signed APK into production through the Google Play Console, and sending notifications about build statuses to the team. Once set up, the workflow can be run manually or scheduled using GitHub tags or branches, allowing for seamless building and releasing of applications with minimal effort.

In this blog post, Bitrise's CTO and co-founder Viktor Benei and VP of Engineering Gergely Hodicska share their insights on how they approach metrics, performance, and success in their engineering teams. They discuss what they look for during the hiring process, including a growth mindset, holistic thinking ability, grittiness, and being proactive and resilient. The team emphasizes the importance of creating an environment that encourages experimentation, transparency, and continuous learning, with a flat setup but also recognizing the need for tribes to facilitate communication. They measure performance using outcomes rather than output, with metrics such as deployment frequency, mean lead time, and change failure rate, and set goals using the S.M.A.R.T. criteria. The team is always looking for ways to improve, including investing in lean and agile metrics and prioritizing transparency and communication to ensure everyone's wellbeing.