In order to develop a stable and amazing app to use, the Android team goes through a rigorous build and release cycle.
This process, typically results in a new version of the app released every two weeks. However, there are a lot of little things that occur during the two week cycle. The most prominent, is the use of our Wattpad Beta program.
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In case you are wondering what the Wattpad Beta app is, you can download it here.
The beta app is a version of Wattpad which is considered unstable, where we can test out and fix bugs before we roll it to production.
Typically we make a beta app release every single day. This ensures that the most latest code is being tested out by our beta users.
This process, is however very time consuming. Making a build alone, typically takes a developer machine several minutes and a lot of manual labour. In addition, the developer is required to do random bookkeeping which is tiresome and prone to mistakes.
For example, every single day a member of the Android team will have to do the following:
1. Update the version name and version code
2. Clean and build the apk
3. Commit the mappings files
4. Push the mappings and version name/version code changes
5. Tag the build
6 Push the tags
7. Upload the apk to Google Play
8. Upload the apk to Slack
This is why we created Alfred Pennyworth - the Android teams build and release engineer.
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Alfred is a bot that can be integrated via Slack.
Below is a screenshot of Alfred making a build:
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As you can see, Alfred can be commanded via Slack to make a specific build type, which branch and what version name/ version codes to use.
With one line of text, Alfred will kick off a build and do all the steps above without the need for a team member to do anything.
For those who are curious, Alfred is a fork of Hubot, running on Mac mini machine with a full Android development environment.
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Ever since we hired Alfred, he has been a very important member of the team. He has helped us increase developer efficiency and reduced bookkeeping mistakes that used to happen during our build and releases.
