three “tall” tails - goto conferencegotocon.com/dl/jaoo-melbourne-2011/slides/kevin-o... ·...

Three “Tall” TailsYOW 2011

Three stories from mobile software delivery.

Friday, 2 December 11

Who Am I?Friday, 2 December 11

The Tails


a story about a card wall hack


a story about getting to right via wrong


a story about application testing


The Card Wall Hack


Lonely Planet was an early iOS adopter


Seventy plus “City Guides” based on their

book offerings


Created for iOS 2


“Upgraded” to iOS 3


From the App store


• “I don’t think this app has been properly tested before it was released …”

• “The new version crashed to the iPhone desktop every time I use it …”

• “… I love Lonely Planet but this is a poor half-baked (and that’s being generous) release …”


The “Platform” wasn’t progressing


New features where difficult to add


Most of the effort was going into “fixing” stuff


Product schedules are compromised by technical fragility


Card wall has degenerated into a

mess of things to do


But


There’s a reluctance to discard the current

code base


Activity equated with progress


An Opportunity


A new light weight product


A focused producer(now with four square)


A great UX/UI designer(now the rea group)


The Christmas Break


Quick Inception


New card wall layout


A public and visual progress report


The crux of the Hack


Use card colours to distinguish types of

activity


Duh!


At the end of the iteration stack the

cards up


Pretty simple huh


The result


Inception to submission in three weeks


A card wall telling a story


An opportunity to apply the same

techniques to the existing products


A wall that told a story


Made it apparent that we weren’t going

forward


The decision was made to “re-platform”


FromFriday, 2 December 11

ToFriday, 2 December 11

BobFriday, 2 December 11

Right via Wrong


From concept toFriday, 2 December 11

Greenfield's Delivery


New Team


An organisations first step into native mobile


High Expectations


Large team


Only one with commercial iOS

experience


Only two had commercial c experience


Native mobile is not the mobile web


Almost three months in


The product is sketchy


Progress is unpredictable


Unknown unknowns are killing us


We (I) screwed up


The project was cancelled


It was the best thing that could have

happened


Agile in practice


… but boy did it sting


Regrouped& re-imagined


Halved the team size


New producer


Doubled productivity


Increased focus& commitment


Nine weeks from inception to submission


Rejected


We appealed


Including appeal time it took a month from

submission to release


Android


Two external parties approached


Both estimated the same delivery time


Three weeks …


Four months later


All experienced java mobile developers


Majority of the development done in

China


Completed here with the offshore team


You can’t just port


The UI/UX paradigms are often different


And must be respected


Fragmented device market results in …


Increased testing load


Interesting performance issues


iOS 1.3


Bookmarking + ?


Third party code integration


Shelved waiting on third party


Eventually released without third party

components


We broke it


Active error monitoring alerted us

within minutes of store launch


Our only x.x.x release


12 hours for new version to appear in the

store


iPad


Eight week schedule


Problems with unanticipated scope


Problems with defects


Five weeks in and very little is production

quality


Stop!


Changed the team structure


Reduced from six to three developers


Moved two developers to create automated

test tooling


Moved two to another project


Added a developer experienced with the platform & domain

(me)


Testing iOS applications


iOS testing is comparatively primative


Unit tests only effectively cover a small

portion of the application


but they are effective


what matters?


imho


we want to test what’s on screen


we want to test on device


we want a report that hi-lights issues


Some choices


Frankthe grandaddy


KIFthe “hot” new kid


UIAutomationthe child no-one talks

about


Frank


Cucumber for iOS


… but it’s fragile


KIF


built on accessibility API’s


… but it’s written in objective-c


UIAutomation


Integrated within instuments


… but it’s verbose


… difficult to run in CI


… not designed for TFD


… but it runs on device


and that’s key


Zucchini


Zucchini ain’t Cucumber


Wrapper around UIAutomation


designed for developers and testers


Runs in CI


tests are written in coffeescript


with a little DSL loven’Friday, 2 December 11

screens Friday, 2 December 11

anchor Friday, 2 December 11

define elements Friday, 2 December 11

define actions Friday, 2 December 11

zucchini run <feature>


generates javascriptFriday, 2 December 11

runs instruments


checks images


generates reportsFriday, 2 December 11

bloody awesome


RejeshVasily


PlayUp will be releasing zucchini via github later

this month


Wrapping it up


We’ve seen how important visualisations

are to effective agile processes


We’ve walked the path of a product to multi-

platform release


We’ve looked at application testing in

iOS


Questions?Twitter: @kevinoneill

#yow_oz#zucchini


three “tall” tails - goto conferencegotocon.com/dl/jaoo-melbourne-2011/slides/kevin-o... ·...

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