Mobile CI pipelines and workflows are essential for delivering quality apps to your users, but they can also be time-consuming and expensive. How can you reduce mobile CI pipeline build times and optimize your development process? Here are some tips and best practices to help you achieve faster and more efficient mobile CI.
One of the first steps to reduce mobile CI pipeline build times is to choose the right tools for your project. Depending on your platform, language, framework, and testing needs, you may have different options for your CI server, build system, code repository, and deployment service. You should evaluate the features, performance, compatibility, and cost of each tool and select the ones that suit your needs and budget. You should also look for tools that integrate well with each other and support parallelization, caching, and incremental builds.
For mobile iOS builds can only be run with xcodebuild and it requires xcodebuild which in turn requires a Mac. This is a big distinction as most of the world runs on Linux and dockers. You would have to first have a good service provider either a desk full of minis, AWS, bitrise, Macstadium etc where you can configure, scale mac machines. Android builds can be done cheaper/effective on Linux so you need to mix them for a cost efficient pipeline
Another way to reduce mobile CI pipeline build times is to configure your pipeline wisely. You should avoid unnecessary or redundant steps, such as building the same code multiple times, running tests that are not relevant to the changes, or deploying to multiple environments that are not needed. You should also use conditional logic, triggers, and filters to control when and how your pipeline runs, and prioritize the most important and frequent tasks. You should also leverage environment variables, parameters, and secrets to customize your pipeline settings and secure your credentials.
A third way to reduce mobile CI pipeline build times is to optimize your code and tests. You should follow coding standards, best practices, and style guides to write clean, consistent, and maintainable code. You should also refactor your code regularly, remove unused or obsolete code, and minimize dependencies and external libraries. You should also write effective and efficient tests, using appropriate levels of testing, test frameworks, and test runners. You should also use code coverage, code analysis, and linting tools to measure and improve your code quality and test coverage.
A fourth way to reduce mobile CI pipeline build times is to use parallelization and caching. Parallelization means running multiple tasks or tests simultaneously on different machines or containers, which can speed up your pipeline significantly. You should use parallelization for tasks or tests that are independent, isolated, and scalable, and avoid parallelization for tasks or tests that are dependent, shared, or limited by resources. Caching means storing and reusing data or artifacts that are frequently used or expensive to generate, such as dependencies, libraries, or binaries. You should use caching for data or artifacts that are stable, consistent, and reusable, and avoid caching for data or artifacts that are dynamic, variable, or disposable.
A fifth way to reduce mobile CI pipeline build times is to monitor and improve your pipeline. You should use metrics, logs, reports, and feedback to measure and analyze your pipeline performance, identify bottlenecks, errors, and failures, and evaluate the impact of your changes. You should also use benchmarks, comparisons, and trends to track and improve your pipeline efficiency, reliability, and quality. You should also communicate and collaborate with your team, stakeholders, and users to share best practices, insights, and feedback, and to align your pipeline goals and expectations.
Artifact Management Implement an efficient artifact management strategy. Store and reuse build artifacts, dependencies, and libraries whenever possible. By reducing the need to rebuild everything from scratch, you can significantly decrease build times and improve overall pipeline efficiency.