Building an all-around solution for mobility services

Overcoming barriers with Sixt

As the world’s largest integrated mobility service provider, Sixt offers innovative transportation solutions in 105 countries with branches in over 2,200 locations. Their car rental services can be found in almost every major city worldwide, at the most convenient locations such as airports, train stations, cruise ports, and hotels.

At the forefront of the industry, Sixt was the first car rental company with a website, and the first one to accept mobile reservations. Today, their mobile app brings together car rental, car sharing, and ride-hailing to customers around the world to make reaching a destination easier and more reliable than ever.

Standing behind their brand philosophy, "Accessibility to mobility is freedom", the Sixt group enables their users to experience and share the world with others and to overcome barriers. They are working towards a future in which travelers have access to safe, efficient, and comfortable mobility at the touch of a button. 

Building an all-around solution for mobility services

There are nearly 600 IT professionals and 40 iOS or Android developers working at Sixt, who operate multiple public and internal apps on different platforms. Their teams, apps, and concurrency numbers are expected to grow even more in the next few years. This rapid increase also means that regular quality checks are necessary to make sure that new code changes and merges are not breaking their app. 

The company is planning to expand the options they provide even further, from personally driven cars to driver services and even completely automatic cars in the times ahead. Their goal is to become an all-around solution for mobility services: one brand, one company, different services — all in one app. The teams working on different features and integrations all share the same goal: delivering the best possible user experience. 

Automated testing brings more confidence

To tackle the challenges that came with the growth they were experiencing, Sixt had started implementing CI/CD tools into their workflows  — initially Jenkins, then Circle CI —but after a year of no real improvement, they decided to look for something that suited their needs better. Bitrise was one of the top search results for cloud-based mobile-specific solutions, and the team was quickly convinced by the extensive feature set, the customizability, various APIs, attractive pricing, and its outstanding customer support. 

The first pleasant surprise their mobile development teams came across was the quick and easy nature of the setup process — they had both iOS and Android running on Bitrise within the first day — all they had to do is hook up the right trigger points. Since most of their workflow is in Fastlane scripts, they use the Fastlane step the most, while for faster build times, they also make heavy use of the caching feature. 

Moreover, the team has automatic unit tests running on every pull request. Thanks to Bitrise, Sixt is now able to trigger builds of pull request branches and send them directly to QA engineers and product owners as well. When they merge to the develop branch, it triggers two things: an extensive test suite to catch regressions, and an alpha version build of the app. Through the platform, their team is now able to catch bugs faster and more efficiently than before, which has made them more confident throughout the merging processes. 

More builds, fewer manual tasks, and higher app ratings 

“Bitrise enabled our teams to ship code to our customers with high confidence. The easy-to-use interface and excellent support make working with them a true pleasure.” — Franz Busch, iOS Engineer

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The Sixt team is now able to reach an incredible number of builds — around 1000 per week — running across 7 apps, mostly on iOS and Android versions. One of their biggest achievements is having been ranked in the top 10 within the travel category in both the App Store and the Google Play Store. Their ratings are at an all-time high: 4.8 on iOS and 4.6 on Android, while the daily downloads and monthly active users have also increased considerably.

Perhaps the biggest benefit is that — given that their entire integration and release process across all apps is now completely automated — nobody has to do a single manual action to integrate a feature until the new version of the app is live. Overall, Bitrise has helped the Sixt teams automate and streamline more and more of their daily workflow, reduced the number of mistakes, and alleviated common pain points of the daily developer life. 

Are you heading to a new destination and looking for fast, easy, and reliable means of transportation? Download the Sixt app for Android or iOS here!

If you want to become a part of the Sixt family and work on the mobility solutions of the future, visit their career site.

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