Tips and Tricks for Productive Mobile Development

Talk from The Assembly event in Dubai on June 18th, 2022. This version is more intended for managers and team leads.

Transcript

1. Ahmed El-Helw June 18, 2022 Productive Mobile Development Tips and Tricks for Productive Mobile Development
3. Mobile Apps are the connection to the customer
4. Source
5. Faster Iterations are Essential
6. Factors affecting Speed Things to Consider • Distractions
7. Source
8. Factors affecting Speed Things to Consider • Distractions • Communication Problems
10. Factors affecting Speed Things to Consider • Distractions • Communication Problems • Con fl icting Priorities
12. Factors affecting Speed Things to Consider • Distractions • Communication Problems • Con fl icting Priorities • Technical Debt
14. Factors affecting Speed Things to Consider • Distractions • Communication Problems • Con fl icting Priorities • Technical Debt • Production Fires
15. Source
16. Factors affecting Speed Things to Consider • Distractions • Communication Problems • Con fl icting Priorities • Technical Debt • Production Fires • Hardware
17. Source
18. Process Bottlenecks Mobile Bottlenecks • Company release process • Application store review process • Application store rejections • Adoptions take time
19. Source
20. Experiments and Toggles
21. Choosing between Implementations
22. Deciding on a Direction
23. Ask the Customer Running Customer Studies • You are not your customer • Wireframes and discussions • Prepare • Question • Understand
24. Comparing between Variants
25. 72.31% of all statistics are made up on the spot
26. Tim Campos “Data wins Arguments”
27. Customer Behavior Understanding and Monitoring Customer Behavior • Dashboards • critical business statistics • conversion funnels • Slice by application version • Alerts
28. Run Experiments
29. Source
30. Problems Happen
31. Dealing with Problems How to React to Problems • Ignore it for now • Hot Fix in Production • Release takes time • Adoption takes time • Risky
32. Source
33. What if we just turn it off?
34. Feature Toggle
35. Other Considerations Things to Keep in Mind • Be mindful about: • The e ff ect of experiments on each other • The e ff ect of feature fl ags on each other • Dead Experiments increase Technical Debt
36. Data
37. Data Some odds and ends about Data • Building trust with Customers • Compliance • App Stores • Governments
38. Policy Changes are often a Surprise
39. MetaFilter via Forbes Article “If you're not paying for it, you become the product”
40. As a company grows, so too does the value of its data
41. Structures and Methodologies
42. How to Structure Teams
43. Structuring Teams How to Structure Teams • Single full stack vertical teams • Separate splits between frontend and backend
44. It Depends
45. Evaluate and Adopt
46. You are not Spotify
47. Scrum? Agile?
48. It Depends
49. Source
50. Source
51. Communication is Key
52. RFCs
53. Structuring Code
54. Modularize
55. Define a Set of Rules
56. Split API and Implementation
57. Better Isolation of Features
58. Easier Sharing
59. Faster Build Times
60. Ability to Stub Implementations
61. Faster Testing
62. Standalone Apps
63. Sharing Code Across Platforms
64. How do we Save Time?
65. Options Sharing Code Between Platforms • Frameworks that handle Everything • Do it yourself Tooling
66. React Native
67. 5 Part Series React Native at Airbnb
68. Flutter
69. Frameworks that Handle Everything Sharing Code Between Platforms • Pros • Potentially easier to hire for • Write once, use everywhere • Faster development (hot reload, etc) • Potential for hot loading code
70. Frameworks that Handle Everything Sharing Code Between Platforms • Cons • Need to explicitly separate UI for iOS and Android • Doesn’t “feel” native irrespective • New platform features are di ffi cult to adopt - need to wait • Overhead on binary size • Rejections Likely
71. C/C++
72. C/C++ Sharing Code Between Platforms • Pros • High performance • Easier to obfuscate code
73. C/C++ Sharing Code Between Platforms • Cons • Di ffi cult • Still have to handle di ff erences between platforms • Custom development environment
74. Dropbox Blog Post The (not so) hidden cost of sharing code between iOS and Android
75. Kotlin Multiplatform
76. Kotlin Multiplatform Sharing Code Between Platforms • Pros • Completely native • Easy to learn for engineers writing Swift • Lots of third party libraries • Backed by JetBrains and Google • Supports a plethora of platforms
77. Kotlin Multiplatform Sharing Code Between Platforms • Cons • iOS inter-op with Objective-C instead of Swift • Convincing iOS Engineers is Di ffi cult • Tooling • Still in the process of maturing
78. Which one?
79. It Depends
80. What to Share
81. Analytics
82. Business Logic
83. More?
84. Benefits and Costs Sharing Code Across Platforms - KMP • Pros: • Keeps iOS and Android consistent • Maintenance is cheaper • In the long run, development may become cheaper
85. Benefits and Costs Sharing Code Across Platforms - KMP • Cons: • Might be more expensive initially • Di ffi cult to get buy in from iOS engineers • Inter-op with Objective-C instead of Swift
86. What to Share Across Platforms
87. Vocabulary
88. Features
89. Architecture
90. Design System
91. Versioning
92. Release Process
93. CI/CD
94. Production Issues take Time
95. Time is Money
96. Catching Mistakes Early Saves Time and Money
97. Defense Mechanisms
98. Code Review
99. Tests Catching Issues Early • Tests • Unit Tests • Integration Tests • On-Device Integration Tests (“UI Tests”) • Screenshot Tests
100. Automated Checks
101. Lint
102. Code Styling Enforcer
103. Code Smell Detection
104. Expose Hidden Changes Catching Issues Early • Transitive Dependencies • Binary Size • Permissions
105. Release Early
106. Release Often
107. Staged Rollouts
108. Beta Program
109. Engineering Culture
110. Engineers are Humans
111. Humans make Mistakes
112. Blame is Bad
113. Blame is not Productive
114. Learning from Mistakes is Productive
115. How could we have prevented it?
116. Build Ownership
117. Hire Good Engineering Managers
118. Give Developers Good Hardware
119. Keep Learning and Improving
120. Focus on Impact
121. Thank You
122. Q & A