YOW Mobile Night 2011 - The realestate.com.au mobile story

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Who Am I

Delivery Manager - MobileREA Group

(realestate.com.au et al)

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From Concept to …

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The Beginning

• New to the organisation

• New team

• Organisation new to native mobile

• High expectations

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Not a Website

• Native mobile is not the mobile web

• REAPA (REA Personal Assistant)

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We Screwed Up

• The initial project was cancelled after three months (the agile process in practice)

• Reset and re-imagined

• Halved the team size

• Doubled the productivity

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Release One

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Release One

• Nine Weeks to Develop (including back end)

• Initially rejected by Apple

• Counting the appeal it took a month from submission to release

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Android

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Android

• Two External Parties Approached

• Both quoted about the same duration

• Three weeks.

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Android

• Four Months in the Making

• All experience mobile java developers

• Majority of the development done in China

• Completed here (with the team from China)

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iOS 1.3

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iOS 1.3

• Bookmarking + ?

• Third Party integration

• Shelved waiting for Third Party

• Eventually released without Third Party features

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iOS 1.3

• We broke it

• Active error monitoring alerted us within minutes of store launch

• Our only x.x.x release

• 12 Hours for new version to appear in the store

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iPad

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iPad

• Eight week schedule

• Problems with unanticipated scope

• Problems with defects

• Five weeks in and very little was production quality

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iPad

• Changed the team Structure

• Reduced from six to three developers

• Moved two developers to automated testing

• Moved two to another project

• Added an experienced developer (me)

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Observations

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The Platform

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iOS

• Two screen sizes, three resolutions

• Memory varies

• CPU varies

• Subtle UI changes coming in iOS 5

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Android

• Every device is different, you'll need a few

• Screen and resolutions vary (lots)

• Touch and tap tracking vary (lots)

• CPU and Memory vary (lots)

• Basic UI varies (lots)

• Physical keyboards

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The Environment

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iOS

• Objective-C, rocks, seriously

• xCode, sucks, getting better, very slowly

• Frameworks, you need to know them

• Understand, layers and views intimately

• I've never used interface builder for a production application

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Android

• Java, ageing gracefully, but it's still Java

• Alternative languages, scala, clojure, et al

• Eclipse, IntelliJ, rock the house

• Learning curve is in the frameworks

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Memory Management

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iOS• It's easier than you think

• Remember the rules, you alloc or copy it, you own it

• Blocks are sneaky

• Listen to the system warnings

• ARC is coming

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Android

• Garbage collection is a beautiful thing

• Garbage collection sucks

• Reference leaks are your enemy

• Hard to dump it when you know your done

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Delivering to Multiple Platforms

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Respect the differences

• Don't just port you application from one platform to the other

• The UX is subtly (and not so subtly) different

• Cross platform toolkits don't deliver (yet?)

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Unified Testing

• One set of acceptance tests, share the definitions

• Automate what you can, be prepared to manually test what you can't

• Screen comparisons are an essential part of the process

• No dedicated QA for our first two releases

• QA is everyone's role

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Summarysome closing thoughts

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In My Opinion

• Deliver an application that has an opinion (you can't please everyone anyhow)

• Concentrate on a consistent user experience

• Everyone is responsible for quality

• It's not easy. Expect some good developers to fail in the move to mobile and that's okay

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And

• iOS is easier than Android, for now.

• Ice Cream Sandwich will reduce Android device fragmentation

• The Windows marketplace will be a better revenue source than The Android markets

• I'm going to be wrong on at least one of the point above

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Questions@kevinoneill

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