DroidCon 2014
You can watch all the videos on the Droidcon Paris Youtube channel but I especially recommend these 3 talks.
Scaling Android Development at Twitter
This talk by Jan Chong, engineering manager at Twitter for Android, was about how Twitter’s mobile team transitioned from a 5-people team to a 70+ contributors effort. Here are some key points from the talk.
You can watch it here.
Operations
- In 3 years, Twitter for Android went from a 8 to 12 weeks release schedule to 1 release a week
- The key quality indicator they’re following are crashed : they analyzed that when a user experienced a crash, his engagement would drop significantly for the next month (of course, they use Crashlytics, that they own)
- API released for mobiles need to be supported for a loooooong time
- They baked an API mechanism to support A/B testing within their apps that does not require republishing
- They also have an interesting feature switch system where they remotely control a device/manufacturer/OS version matrix to swith features on and off, again to be able to tune their apps and avoir crashes without the need to republish
Tools and processes
- They’re using Gradle and Android Studio
- Twitter practice dogfooding
- They switched from Robotium to Espresso
- They also use uiautomator
- They use a release train schedule to run their and transitioned from a single 4-week train to two concurrent 2-weeks trains to reduce the gap between deadlines
- They also use a “+1/+2” code review system