Cross-Platform Collaboration Patterns

Most apps are built for iOS and Android, most also require a backend. Many teams are set up as feature teams, including developers specialized for their respective platform. Yet, how do they actually collaborate?
We’ll talk about patterns and antipatterns I’ve seen - apps built in isolation to feature parity, from silos to cross-platform pair programming and code sharing.
There is more than one way to collaborate with your peers. Let’s see what is in there for you and your team.

Transcript

1. Cross-Platform Collaboration Patterns Miriam Busch @miphoni UIKonf 2020
2. Imagine a cross-functional team of specialists…
5. About me • Freelance developer & consultant for Embedded Linux, iOS and Android • For > 5 years, CTO at Karlmax Berlin - an agency doing Android, iOS and Flutter projects • Sketchnoting at meetups and conferences • Just joined SoundCloud as Engineering Manager
6. Cross-Platform Collaboration Patterns #1 Recap: How did we get to cross functional teams? #2 Collaboration among individual developers: • Planning • Coding #3 Sharing of Artefacts
7. How did we get here?
8. The catch up game
9. The holy grail of feature parity
10. Independent piles of technical debt
11. Collaboration patterns among developers: Planning & Design
12. Unified terms - Naming is hard!
13. Unified user flow != Unified UI
14. Unified handling of corner cases and thresholds
15. Unified high-level design & data flow
16. Collaboration patterns among developers: Coding & Review
17. Can you actually build for the other platform?
18. Code Literacy - Reading Code Snippet File Module Codebase
19. Code Literacy - Writing
20. The Mobile Developer != Dual Specialist
21. Cross-platform code review
22. Cross-platform pairing
24. Sharing
25. Shared frameworks
26. Shared artefacts
27. Defining the API
28. Server-driven UI
29. Code generation
30. Code sharing
31. Why collaborate?
32. Thank you! Links & Attribution • Thomas Sammons: A co-platform pairing experience (Sketchnote only) • Laura Kelly (Airbnb): Using Server-driven UI to rapidly integrate on Android and across platforms (Video) • Andrea Cipriani (SoundCloud): Backend-driven Upon mobile applications, a hybrid approach (Video) • Nicola Corti (Yelp): Let me write your networking code (Video) • Jeremia Lee: Failed #Squad Goals (Article) • Niamh Power (Monzo): Better together (Video) • Elin Nilsson & Raul Herbster (Spotify): Breaking the (developer) silos (Video) • Images: • Rowing: Photo by Matteo Vistocco, Unsplash • Koala: Photo by David Clode on Unsplash • Other drawings: Miriam Busch with support from the wonderful Procreate app • Developers at Karlmax Berlin and SoundCloud for their support & collaboration!