Development problem solving, the LinkedIn way

Source:- techtarget.com

For those wondering what it’s like to be on a 3×3 mobile release schedule, look no further than LinkedIn which has 3 releases a day and a plan to never let code be older than 3 hours before committing to it. Even if your company is the size of LinkedIn, that’s a big enchilada to get through daily and for it to happen everything — including testing — has to move along like clockwork.

But even with these good intentions, the company hit a wall when it came to automating iOS UI testing. Off the shelf solutions weren’t cutting it, and without an easy fix, the idea of 3×3 was not going to be a reality.

The solution? A DIY open source solution — called “Bluepill” (think The Matrix) — has just been released for all to use, and it’s already saved LinkedIn thousands of developer hours.

Bluepill will let you run tests from multiple simulators in parallel and will pack the tests in to similar groups. A junit report is produced afterwards. Find more details about Bluepill, from LinkedIn’s blog, here.

What did it take for the LinkedIn team to pull this off? Oscar Bonilla, one of the LinkedIn engineers working on this project, explained: “The first commit happened on Aug. 12 and we had it working on the LinkedIn Continuous Integration system by Nov. 1.,” he wrote. “From there we continued to polish the project and address a few bugs. So in total it took about 10 weeks to build Bluepill and another 10 to refine it.”