Etsy’s Journey to Building a Continuous Integration Infrastructure for Mobile Apps

While traditional websites can leverage their continuous delivery infrastructure to quickly identify and fix bugs, releasing mobile apps requires a 3rd party approval. Major bugs and security vulnerabilities call for emergency releases, which still require the app store approval and can mean days of poor user experience, developer frustration, and a negative impact to the app ratings and reviews.

A comprehensive suite of automated functional tests can greatly help detect defects early across the broad spectrum of devices and configurations. The challenge then becomes setting up a reliable, scalable, and sustainable infrastructure to automatically build and test your app on simulators and devices, as soon as a developer pushes new code.

Today, we want to share with the audience Etsy’s journey to setting up our Continuous Integration infrastructure for our mobile apps teams.

This talk will cover:

• How we do continuous integration for our iOS app and Android app
• How a simple xcodebuild command, a review process, and OCLint can help you detect defects as early as they are introduced in the code base
• How we use calabash for our functional tests
• How we leverage a 3rd party mobile cloud provider to run the functional tests suites on physical devices for every push
• How we use chef to maintain our iOS and Android build servers (including an army of mac minis)
• How we organize manual testing of our app throughout the development cycle