How to use Bitrise to improve collaboration across teams

In today’s ever-changing mobile development world, effective collaboration is extremely important — especially when growing and scaling your mobile team. And for many organizations, the “mobile team” actually encompasses several different teams. For this, we have coined the term: Mobile Product Organization.

We recently surveyed people across Mobile Product Organizations about their Mobile DevOps performance and processes. Over one-third of respondents rated their level of collaboration as a 6 or worse out of 10, which signifies the need for substantial improvements. (You can take the survey too if you want to assess your Mobile DevOps maturity level)

This means that working together maximizes your overall app impact — from product managers to engineering leads and beyond.

Improve cross-team collaboration with communication

When working with iOS and Android developers on separate teams, new feature releases — for example — need to be planned, discussed, and synchronized across multiple teams. And it’s not just releasing new features across iOS and Android apps — it’s also about collaborating with marketing and product teams about releases, mapping app features to overall company goals, and more. So the question is: how can the Mobile Product Organization collaborate when multiple teams or departments are involved to achieve the most overall app impact?

Well, the simple answer is that cross-team collaboration requires continuous communication. Gaining insights into the right kind of information, in the right format, and at the right time is the best way to improve communication. At the end of the day, you can’t fix what you don’t know about.

You can’t fix it if you don’t know about it

First, you have to know about what is happening in your build. All apps built on Bitrise have build logs, which tell you:

• The version of the Bitrise CLI that ran the build.
• The name of the Workflow that was run (for example, build_app).

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Below this basic information, you will see every Step that was run as part of the build. For each Step, Bitrise displays:

• The name and version of the Step.
• The running time of the Step.
• A printout of the Step’s commands and their results, including highlighted error messages.
• Whether the Step passed or failed.

Apps build on Bitrise also include Build Insights, which tracks metrics that show the performance of your Bitrise builds. You can track your metrics on an app Workflow-level and Step-level, and you can use that data to optimize your builds. With the Insights tool, we are targeting three main areas:

• Stability: reducing the errors that have the highest impact on your builds
• Velocity: improve the speed of your builds by measuring build time
• Usage: understanding which Steps and Workflows take the most time in your builds

With Build Insights, each app has two main types of metrics:

1. Build stats: on an app's page, you can check aggregated metrics for the app's builds, including detailed data on Workflows and Steps, typical build time, build usage, and more.

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2. Test stats: look at the detailed metrics of all test cases of an app, including data on individual test runs, typical duration, number of re-runs, and more.

Secondly, you need the information in a timely manner. Of course — it’s better to learn about an issue that happened today than an issue that happened 6 months ago and is still occurring. Bitrise connects to Slack so that your team can be notified about build status as changes are made. That way, you never miss a build failure again.

See Bitirse Docs for more information about setting up Slack notifications.

‍Note: the amount of alerts you receive is customizable. You can also receive notifications to your inbox by setting up email notifications.

Seamlessly onboard and offboard team members

Onboarding new engineers is important. Not just to increase employee retention rates, improve job performance, and create a happier workforce — but also to avoid the costs of replacing a developer. To seamlessly onboard new team members, avoid infrastructure that makes it difficult to onboard new team members and offboard old ones.

With Bitrise, everything is cloud-based — this means that new engineers can build and release to QA right away without needing to access local workflows or private keys. When developers connect their repository, they immediately can fetch the project settings and confirm the build configuration; Bitrise handles the rest of the processes automatically.

You can also automate code signing for iOS and upload Keystore for Android, monitor performance with Build Insights, and implement SSO/SAML for new team members.

Continuous collaboration for mobile teams

When onboarding new engineers to your mobile CI/CD workflows, continuous collaboration and continuous learning should also come into play. When you know your builds and you can quickly onboard new team members to your ever-growing mobile engineering team, cross-team collaboration becomes easier to manage. 

Incorporating a mobile CI/CD platform, like Bitrise, can help you maintain a smooth continuous integration process where you can create a workplace with continuous collaboration and communication. Bitrise offers 330+ open-source integration Steps for mobile engineers, which help you build, test, and release your mobile apps — and so much more.

Bitrise improves collaboration across different teams

Apps that use Bitrise have a holistic view of what’s happening to builds across multiple teams and apps. With the insights that you gain from the build logs and Build Insights, you can see all the data and metrics for your apps — including details on individual test runs.

At the end of the day, when you have insights into what’s happening to your builds, your teams are informed and have the information they need to do their jobs. And, when done correctly, cross-team collaboration can boost team satisfaction, speed up your builds, improve app performance, and much more.