Today we’re excited to announce a new iOS course called Continuous Integration and Deployment. This course, developed with our collaborators at buddybuild, is designed to teach iOS developers how to set up continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) for their apps. By utilizing buddybuild’s awesome platform, developers can easily deploy their apps, gather feedback, and make improvements without getting bogged down in a laborious iteration cycle.
If you’ve deployed an app before, you’ve probably experienced the headache of correctly signing and provisioning your app. And, if you’ve received any complaints of bugs or crashes, you also know how difficult it can be to hunt down and fix issues reported by users. I know this has been true for me! The first app I launched (back in the Objective-C-only days) was a maintenance nightmare! But, I’m happy to say those days have passed—for me, and for anyone who enrolls in this course!
Buddybuild is a Vancouver-based software company whose CI and CD platform is featured throughout the course. Their platform allows you to configure a mobile app for rapid development—quickly integrating and deploying changes to your valued users. And, unlike other solutions in this space, buddybuild pulls together the entire development process (build, test, deploy, feedback, repeat) into one easy-to-use system. It’s like magic! To learn more about how buddybuild approaches CI and CD, watch this segment from our interview with Chris Stott (you can enjoy the full interview here).
Like the interview, the course is jam-packed with useful tidbits for improving your development and deployment workflow. Some of the highlights include:
- Setting up GitFlow—an extremely common Git branching structure used by professionals
- Writing basic unit tests and recording UI tests in Xcode
- Configuring your app to use buddybuild’s automated build system (using GitHub, Bitbucket, or GitLab)
- Identifying when bugs have been introduced into a codebase through CI
- Uploading and managing signing certificates and provisioning profiles with buddybuild
- Deploying your app using automatic, scheduled, and manual deployments
- Gathering feedback and crash reports from users with screenshots and video replay
- Integrating user feedback with services like Slack and Trello
By the end of the course, developers will have the tools to build a complete app development loop: continuously building, testing, deploying, and gathering feedback from users. The days of being intimidated by continuous integration and deployment are over. Take this course, and discover how joyful these processes can be!
