4. Project automation – why we have used Bitrise
Each of our product use continuous integration service – and LiveHelpNow! was not an exception!
To make more robust products and reduce costs we tend to automate everything we can.
BitRise automates our build system. We had regular contact and feedback loop with our partners from LiveHelpNow!
Therefore, we had to release frequently – in this case we have been implementing new features and hotfixes each day.
Unfortunately building optimised, cryptography signed release version of the app for iOS and Android takes about 30 minutes on brand new MacBook. Sending new version to testers/client or AppStore plus communication process takes on average another ten minutes.
If we had done this process manually this would result in ~40 minute of developer time wasted each day. Taking in account that sometimes fail during build (developers are humans – they make mistakes 🙂 ) we would waste about hour daily.
Monthly that might cost our partners about 20-25 hours. Bitrise cost us 40 USD monthly – for two apps cheapest plan is sufficient. In 2019 developers cost is much much higher.
Another side effect of automating build process is that we could deliver hotfixes much more quickly. Developer does not need to go through build process manually – instead he just write fix, push commit and we are done!
Below, we have presented how our sample CI work-flow looks like for staging branch:
