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6 lessons learned scaling mobile
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Jamie McDonald
March 17, 2016
Programming
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6 lessons learned scaling mobile
Mobile @ Scale London, March 2016
Jamie McDonald
March 17, 2016
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Transcript
None
6 lessons learned scaling mobile Jamie McDonald & Matej Balantič
175M+ monthly unique listeners ~20 mobile engineers
1 Product over platform
SoundCloud Pulse
Aligned experience
None
2 Find opportunities to share
BFFs
Android iOS Mobile API Skippy Skippy Through the stack
More • Values • Practices • Knowledge
3 Confront technical debt
Brand new app Alternate approaches Modernise by vertical
Android • Legacy code • Small, incremental improvements • Re-build
vertical slices
Successive, well intentioned, changes to architecture throughout the lifetime of
a project can lead to a fragmented and hard-to-maintain code base Lava layers
Rewrite by abstraction
Rewrite by abstraction
None
• Legacy project by an external agency • Decision to
start from scratch • Big bang release* * except iPad which got delayed iOS
None
• Fresh start with code architecture • Away with legacy
code once and for all • Innovation on hold for a while • Might need to sacrifice existing features → angry users Rewrite aftermath
Positive side effect User complaints about iOS app crashes
4 Avoid premature reorganisation
The challenge Scaling the team
How we thought we’ll solve it Scaling the team
How it was in practice Scaling the team
Expectations Path to feature teams
Reality Path to feature teams
Current transitional structure Scaling the team
5 Empower teams
iOS/Android team Search Stations Sign-in Creators ... Traditional release model
Search Stations Sign-in Creators ... Relase train model
Empower teams • Everyone can ship to master* • Put
the code behind a feature flag • Enable the feature once ready to ship * Pairing required. When working alone you need 2x on your pull request.
Release train Feature development & QA Review / Public Beta
Feature freeze Feature freeze Feature freeze
Build time configuration "release": { "inherits_from": "adhoc", "dev_always_skippy": { "enabled":
false } } "release": { "inherits_from": "adhoc", "dev_always_skippy": { "enabled": true } }
Run time configuration
Behind the feature flag - (void)registerAppShortcuts { if ([FTSFlipTheSwitch isDevAppShortcutsEnabled])
{ [self registerInitialActions]; } }
“You break it, you buy fix it” • Continuous integration
allows us to trust that we’re not breaking features • Good unit and acceptance tests as an insurance policy
6 Invest in solid patterns and tools
Android • Reactive programming (RxJava) • Release pipeline • Architecture
& testability
LightCycle @Inject @LightCycle ActionBarUtil actionBarUtil; @Inject @LightCycle PlayerController playerController; public
MainActivity() { [...] }
iOS • Reactive programming (ReactiveCoca) • Stable CoreData stack •
Dependency inversion
None
Thank you, London! soundcloud.com/jobs Jamie McDonald -- @jdamcd Matej Balantič
-- @skavt
Mobile BFF: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/bff-soundcloud Lava layer anti-pattern: http://mikehadlow.blogspot.de/2014/12/the-lava-layer-anti-pattern.html Branch by abstraction:
http://martinfowler.com/bliki/BranchByAbstraction.html Android architecture: https://realm.io/news/gotocph-mattias-kappler-reactive-architecture-android Mobile CI @ SoundCloud: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rq721qtKKNk Dependency Inversion principle: http://martinfowler.com/articles/dipInTheWild.html References