5 Mobile-first quotes from the 2023 Mobile DevOps Summit

This year’s Mobile DevOps Summit 2023: Accelerate your Mobile App Success kicked off with a Keynote address from Bitrises’ CEO and co-founder: Barnabas Birmacher. Throughout the two-day Summit, we had a whole heap of noteworthy Mobile DevOps expert speakers from companies like eBay, Qantas, DuckDuckGo, DeliveryHero, Runtastic, Skyscanner and much, much more. 

We had an incredible 3,500+ mobile developers and DevOps professionals from all around the world attend the two-day event, 61 speakers, and 56 sessions and interactive workshops. 

Did you miss the Summit? Don’t worry, you can watch back all the sessions on-demand now: https://attendees.bizzabo.com/485407/agenda

Let’s take a look at 5 mobile-first quotes from the world’s only Mobile DevOps Summit.

5 Mobile-first quotes from the 2023 Mobile DevOps Summit

1. Releases at Scale | DuckDuckGo

‍Lorenzo Mattei | Director, Native Apps

Lorenzo sat down to talk about ‘Releases at Scale’ on day 1 of the 2-day Summit. His focus during the 25 minute talk was on the common problem most companies face when they scale: teams don't grow in a coordinated way and the communication between different stages becomes less fluid. As a result, bottlenecks and broken pipes start to pop out in your delivery pipeline.

Register now for his talk on-demand to see the strategies you can put in place to maintain high quality and fast releases as your company scales: https://attendees.bizzabo.com/485407/agenda/activity/1203943 

“Research has proven that investing in improving the reliability of your release process has a noticeable and faster return on investment when it comes to shipping your product” Lorenzo Mattei, Director, Native Apps

‍

🚀 Register for Lorenzo’s on-demand session now: https://attendees.bizzabo.com/485407/agenda/activity/1203943 

2. Server Driven UI | Qantas

‍Daniel Tome | Engineering Manager

Daniel’s session at the summit: ‘Streamline your Mobile App workflow: Mastering Server Driven UI’ focused on streamlining workflows to deliver dynamic, responsive, and engaging apps. 

In his 25min session he talks about the transformative potential of Server Driven UI in mobile app development. Server Driven UI is a paradigm that shifts the control of app rendering from the client to the server. By decoupling the user interface logic from the app codebase, developers gain unprecedented flexibility, scalability, and maintainability. This approach enables rapid iteration, as changes to the UI can be implemented without requiring a new app release.

“For applications that run on multi-platforms like web, iOS and Android, server driven UI can ensure a consistent user experience across all platforms because the server controls that user interface”, Daniel Tome | Engineering Manager

‍

🚀 Register for Daniel’s on-demand session now: https://attendees.bizzabo.com/485407/agenda/activity/1203935 

3. Automating Audible’s iOS Release Process | Audible

‍Charles Pisciotta | Software Development Engineer

Charles Pisciotta, Software Development Engineer at Audible sat down on day one to talk about ‘Automating Audible's iOS Release Process’. He talks about his first-hand experience at streamlining the iOS release process at Audible and the pain points his Apple Platforms team faced.

“At any given time we have many open feature branches, sometimes we have multiple release and hotfix branches too and so we needed to implement some automation to help with this process. For example: our feature branches are automatically updated nightly, this ensures that every night QA has a test build for any given feature branch, it allows us to test those earlier in the process, before they go out to a release branch during release regression testing.” Charles Pisciotta, Software Development Engineer

‍

🚀 Register for Charles on-demand session now: https://attendees.bizzabo.com/485407/agenda/activity/1203949 

4. Server Driven UI | eBay

Wyatt Webb | Director of Native Platform Engineering

Wyatt Webb’s (eBay) session at last year’s Mobile DevOps Summit 2022 was a huge hit - in fact, it was one of the biggest and most watched sessions! Yet again, his session this year: ‘The Journey to Weekly Releases at eBay’ was one of the Summit’s most watched and most favorited. 

His talk last year focused on the seven month process of moving from monthly to weekly releases and this year he spoke about taking that process even step further by discussing how they optimized this process by focusing on pull requests:

“Realistically we won’t be able to release any faster than weekly, and we really don’t want to - that starts to become annoying to our users - so the next improvements have to come from within. How do we improve the iteration speed for developers? How do we reduce their daily toil? We decided to focus on where our developers interact with the CI pipeline everyday: pull requests. We chose this not only because it's a high friction point for developers, but because we also have 200 mobile developers at eBay so any improvement we make here would make all of them more productive.” Wyatt Webb, Director of Native Platform Engineering

‍

He then went on to explain how reducing PR times and making the switch from on-premise servers to servers in the cloud freed up development time and increased developer productivity and experience:

“Our Android story looks a bit different from our iOS story, and this story starts at a pretty painful place. In January of 2021 our average PR validation time for our Android pipeline was nearly two hours. [The first change we made to decrease this was] to run our tests at the same time, so we used a third party service to build an army of emulator clones to run the test suites that we had, side-by-side. The biggest challenge here is test hygiene, if your test leak state are otherwise dependent on each other they might not always react the same way when split up into different threads or even run out of order - this forced some cleanup on us, which was good, but it took some time, so there was also some manual tuning to define that sweet spot of how much parallelization made sense. The upside though was significant - we dropped 24 minutes from the PR time with just this change.” Wyatt Webb, Director of Native Platform Engineering

“We’d also been slowing ourselves down by managing the servers on premise to run out Android pipelines so these were just hefty PCs and we only had so many of them and so if we needed to increase RAM, increase CPU or storage, that meant an actual hardware swop so that just takes time and we knew the long term solution for the Android pipeline was to move this compute to a cloud platform, so we bit that bullet early on in this process and did that.” Wyatt Webb, Director of Native Platform Engineering

‍

🚀 Register for Wyatt’s on-demand session now: https://attendees.bizzabo.com/485407/agenda/activity/1203957 

‍5. Make your App Modular and Test Only what’s Changed | Delivery Hero

‍Mike Gerasymenko | Staff iOS Engineer

Mike Gerasymenko was joined by Bitrises’ Kaushal Vyas for his session on making your app modular. Mike shared his experience in using Bitrise Insights: the build, test, and credit data, that let’s developers know what to prioritize and optimize in their CI/CD workflows. Whilst Kaushal, Bitrise’s Insights expert, was on hand to provide further knowledge and answer any questions.

Before his role as Staff iOS Engineer at Delivery Hero, Mike worked in a mobile infrastructure team so he has a lot of experience in setting up Bitrise and other tools. Here’s what he had to say about Bitrise Insights in his October 4th Summit session:

“It's sometimes hard to get to the bottom of flakiness - tests are passing locally and failing on the CI - those situations [are difficult] when it's hard to look beyond the surface, but with Bitrise Insights, we know how to solve them right away. With other tools its [been very, very hard to understand why UI tests fail - its a painful thing to debug usually.” Mike Gerasymenko,  Staff iOS Engineer

‍

🚀 Register for Mike’s on-demand session now: https://attendees.bizzabo.com/485407/agenda/activity/1203951 

‍

If you missed any of this year’s Mobile DevOps Summit session, watch them all back on-demand now: https://attendees.bizzabo.com/485407/agenda