Orrie Shannon - How We Share Wattpad with the World

Orrie Shannon, Android Team Lead from Toronto-based social reading/writing app pioneer Wattpad, will discuss how the organization’s end-to-end release process and continuous integration with Google’s services mitigates risk with each release and helps to maintain a high quality rating with their 3 million active users.

Orrie will detail how the Android team leverages the support of their beta group of some 90,000 active users, utilizing Gradle to create and upload the different build variants as part of their release process. He will also touch on how Wattpad monitors usage information and crash data analytics to evaluate new features, as well as to detect and address bugs.

Transcript

1. Continuous Deployment On Google Play Orrie Shannon - Wattpad
2. What's this about? • More predictable release cycle • Better user feedback • Improved app quality
3. Aka, move fast while reducing these... “YOU WATTPADER JUST F$%&#@ WITH A GOOD THING. I JUST UPLOAD THIS NEW WATTPAD AND IT F$%&#@ UP MYYYY LIBRARY! DO KNOW HOW PISSED I AM RIGHT NOW. BECAUSE OF YOU GUY I HAVE TO FIX MY LIBRARY & ITS REALLY F$%&#@ UP!” - a Wattpad user
4. Wattpad Android App • Social app for reading and sharing stories • 13.5M user installs • 1.6B minutes a month • Cumulative rating 4.52/5.0
5. A Year and a Half Ago... Development Testing Release! Monitor feedback Respond quickly to problems *Repeat roughly every 3-7 weeks
6. The Challenge • Bugs have a bigger impact, there are more users! • Not sure how users will respond to feature changes • Patchwork fixes impact release cycle
7. Multiple Release Targets Internal Beta External Beta Production
8. Separate APKs vs. Google’s Alpha/Beta • Difficult to recruit new users • No feedback on Play Store • Can’t have beta and production side by side
9. • Distributed internally ~65 people • via Google Play Private Channel • Need Google Apps for Business account Internal Beta
10. Internal • First iterations of new features • Emailing apk had poor adoption rate • Auto updates
11. Day 7 New Features Introduced Develop Branch Release Cycle
12. • Distributed via Google Play • ~100k active users External Beta
13. Day 7 New Features Introduced 1.0 Release Branch Work continues on 1.1 Day 14 Feature Com plete 5% rollout Develop Branch Day 21 UI tweaks and bug fixes 20% rollout Day 24 Bug fixes 100% forced rollout Day 27 M inor bug fixes Gold Candidate Day 30 Production Release Cycle
14. • Major changes have been tested by many users • Releases every ~4 weeks Production
15. Build Variants With Android Studio
16. build.gradle
17. Renaming hiccup
18. Monitoring and Analyzing • Developer Console • Google Analytics • Crashlytics
19. • Track user behavior • Refine features before launch • g+ vs. Twitter sign in Google Mobile Analytics
20. Crashlytics • Android and iOS • Monitor fatal and non-fatals • Integration with JIRA and other PM tools
21. Crashlytics...
22. Crashlytics...
23. Other ways of gathering insight..
24. Mobile Wars • Android vs. iOS • Point scale for bug severity • Done before major releases
25. Coffee Shop Tests • Scripted use cases • Watch real interactions
26. Summary • Integrate often • Get early feedback from users • Use analytics and crash reporting to measure quality
27. What's Next? • Appurify • Improve real time analytics
28. Orrie Shannon orrie@wattpad.com Questions?