Automation & Continuous integration of Mobile

A story of differentiation, efficiency, and speed

Montse Sans, Product Delivery, Sage

By the end of 2020, it is estimated that there will be 6.1 billion smartphones in the world.

As demand soars, mobile app development is a mainstay for businesses today — with any time, anywhere access to information critical as people across the world work from their home office.

As businesses further shift their development to mobile-enabled solutions, a critical part of the strategy must be building a program that helps verify mobile security and admin.

As of the first quarter of 2020, Android users were able to choose between 2.56 million apps, making Google Play the largest app store on the market today. Apple’s App Store was the second-largest app store with almost 1.85 million available apps for iOS. Interestingly, Huawei is gaining ground, with big ambitions in this space.

What we have learned

Our Sage Mobile Certification group at Sage engages and collaborates with different in-house stakeholders with the objective to ensure, before any Sage mobile app goes live in our stores, the app meets the company guidelines in areas such as Branding and Design, and the Security, Legal and Strategy requirements.

Our Mobile Portfolio is available across two stores, Google Play, and the Apple AppStore, and includes applications focused on everything from supporting customers with Accounting, HR, Finance, Payroll, CRM, to participating in Sage events on-the-go.

Focus on Process Automation and Integration with two main objectives to start with:

1) Speeding up the deployment of our Mobile apps by delivering them in the test environment of our stores quicker and in an automated way, integrating with the tools and repositories used.

We’ve achieved this by implementing an automated Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) Platform as a Service (PaaS), as a part of our mobile app development stream.

Some of the steps our Mobile Team followed included a workflow design adding the steps needed (available on the platform, although new steps can be added as well) to connect the path between the app build generation and the store's test environment. Steps allow us to easily integrate with current app development processes.

With this implementation, our Mobile Team automated the Mobile delivery process (including build generation to the Store, on both Platforms iOS AppStore and Google Play, saving time and working more efficiently. The final step of our mobile software projects independently of the technology-based, iOS and Android native, Flutter, Xamarin, or any other. As mentioned before, we can get apps to the store quicker by either, sending the binaries to the google play or iTunes connect platforms.

2) Accelerate our internal Releases request process, by automating internal approvals, reducing communication and emails back and forth, and save time on the whole release processing.

We also updated the ways of working across Mobile Certification by implementing a new Change Request tool to request, manage, track, and extract Dashboard reports for our mobile apps releases. Stakeholders involved in our Mobile Certification process are kept up to date on any new request and release. We have automated the major releases process, including the internal approval process workflow.

And what does the future hold? Who knows… but what is for sure, we are laser-focused on improving our current process, and staying in tune with market trends and developments — as well as our customers' needs.