Slides to the talk Domain Real Estate gave at Sydney's August Google Developer Group meet up. In the short span of a few years the Domain Android App has come from a 2.4 star rating to 4.1 and tripled our user base. The major proponent for this is a big shift in our culture and engineering practice. We definitely haven't figured everything out and have lots to learn. But here's our story so far and we hope that it'll help increase your development velocity in your Android Development team too.

1. Android Development
Velocity
Presented by Gary Lo
Android Team Lead, Domain Group

2. Our journey so far
Ratings
2.47 (2012)
2.8 (2013)
4.1+ (2015)

3. Improved Downloads
3x users in 2 years
Disproportionate growth

4. Wearables
Featured on

5. Google Now cards

6. Notifications

7. Map Redesign

8. Details Redesign

9. List Redesign

10. Under the hood
Wrote a new backend - in Python!
Dagger
Retrofit
Butterknife
Espresso
Timber
New Relic
GA
Optimizely
Picasso, Glide

11. Past 2 Years
Shipped more features than ever before
More Tech Innovation
Refactored the entire app (a few times)
Got a lot done

12. Life before 2014
Huge delay in shipping simple production bug fixes
Poor reviews and downloads
Huge releases 6 months to ship and the next 6 months to
fix
Very few product features being shipped

13. Life back then
Credits: Spotify

14. What changed?
Huge team growth?
Change app radically?
Radical technology change?

15. “Agile”
Image by Spotify

16. Image by Spotify

17. Releases
2012 + 2013 - 8 releases
2014 - ~80 releases
2015 - already ~100 releases
Google Play Rocks

18. Fear of Releases
Image by Spotify

19. Measuring Success
Measuring releases with REAL business value
instead of
#tickets closed and story points

20. Measuring Success
Add custom drawable to the right of every list item
2 story points but negative value
Custom View in Action bar across the app
10 story points but negative value

21. Notification
GCM Push Micro-service
+
Device + Membership Registration
+
New DB for read states
+
Server side saving of frequency settings
+
Cron Job
+
Design
=
Months of work

22. Notification Release
Android Client side Daily
alarm service
+
Local diff between searches
=
2 Weeks

23. Notification Release #2
Big Picture
+
Secondary Actions
=
1 Week

24. Notification Release
Android Wear
=
1 day

25. Notification Release
Geofencing Notification
=
2 Weeks

26. Iterative Approach
Easy to do on Android
Learn, refine and pivot
UX + Engineering + Product

27. Feature Flag
Essentially an on and off
button for specific
features
Ship unfinished features
Remote is very useful
Image by Spotify

28. Feature Flag

29. AB Test
Feature flags allow easy AB Testing
How is this going to affect conversions on the page?
Do we know how this will affect user flow?

30. VS

31. AB Test

33. AB Test
Designer: I think this shade of orange is better.
Engineer: But that shade of orange is in the guideline
Marketing: We like this shade of orange
Product: I think we should use green
Let’s try them all and see which one performs

34. AB Test

35. Invest in Dev Process & Tools
Tools that speed up your development velocity
Anything your team has to do more than a few times
Pollination rather than enforcement

36. Dev Tools

37. Dev Tools

38. Dev Tools

39. Dev Tools
Image by Netflix

40. Dev Tools
Image by Netflix

41. Adapter
Much faster deploys
Easier to test
Tailor made for your device
More performant

42. Continuous Integration (WIP)

43. Android Development
Velocity
Presented by Gary Lo
Android Team Lead, Domain Group

44. Questions?

45. References
Domain Tech Blog
http://tech.domain.com.au/
Spotify Engineering Culture
https://labs.spotify.com/2014/03/27/spotify-engineering-culture-part-1/
Netflix Adapter API
http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/embracing-differences-inside-
netflix.html