Crowdtesting

source: pinterest.co.uk It’s been a while since I first heard about crowdsourced testing platforms. It was a time when I had just started to be interested in QA, and when I was browsing Google one day, I found a forum, where a link to the site uTest.com was posted. After a brief…

iOS UI development in Badoo

Hey! Being a developer in Badoo is not only interesting and fun, but also challenging — you have to produce highly maintainable code in a short period of time. Due to the amount of new features coming to our team on a weekly basis, we have to think of the…

What Google I/O 2019 addressed: Android 10, AR-applications and much more

In this article I’ll share my thoughts on Google I/O 2019 that my colleagues and I attended recently (and Badoo were even mentioned in one of the talks). During the three days, there were more than 150 talks, lots of choice as you can see, but I really wanted to…

A monolithic architecture for our clients’ hundreds of versions: how we write and support tests

Like any developer, I really enjoy attending conferences and reading articles. It keeps me up-to-date with what’s going on in software development, as well as be in touch with the tech community. So last December when I was invited to speak at the Highload conference — Russia’s largest professional conference…

Top 5 Bumble Android AMA

A few weeks ago, our Bumble — the parent company operating Badoo and Bumble apps — Android team hosted their first Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on Reddit. It was great! Our Android apps are huge: they have over 1.3 million lines of code, over 210 million downloads on the…

Checking your app’s paid services without losing money

Checking paid services is crucial in Badoo and Bumble apps testing process. Our applications are integrated with 70 payment providers in 250 countries. This means that bugs at any integration can seriously affect revenues, and in unpredictable ways. In this article, you will learn about methods that we employ in…

Singleton, Service Locator and tests in iOS

In this article, I want to review the usage of Singleton and Service Locator patterns in iOS and the reasons why they are often called anti-patterns. We’ll learn when and how to use them, while keeping our code testable. Singleton Singleton is a class which has only one instance existing at…

Screen navigation in iOS

In this article, we will go through different ways of presenting screens in the iOS app. We will start with most straightforward cases and eventually go through some advanced scenarios. In a nutshell we will be adding more abstraction layers to make our screens decoupled and navigation testable by unit…

Image detection as a service

How we use deep learning and APIs to support our products Across our two apps Badoo and Bumble, we have over millions registered users worldwide uploading millions of photos a day to our platform. These images provide us with a rich data set from which we derive a wealth of insights.

Using Hopper to investigate an IOS bug

In this article, I share how we investigated a bug in UIKit, which Apple wasn’t able to solve since the introduction of a new major iOS version until the recent release of iOS 13.4.1. The problem was first noticed in August 2019 with the first beta versions of iOS13. In…

Cron in Linux: history, use and structure

There is an age-old classical saying that happy people don’t watch the clock. There weren’t any programmers or Unix operating systems in those pre-civilisation times, but in our day programmers know for sure that cron is watching the clock for them. For me, command-line utilities are both a passion and…

Aspiring team lead?

Six tips on how to meet deadlines and develop your team When I became a team lead for the first time, I started going to lots of conferences and reading deep books on team management. I was reading all about what I should be and how I should develop, but it was still not clear to me what exactly I should…

Optimising relational databases with zero downtime

A case study of Badoo’s most loaded database Optimising relational databases is much harder in high-load circumstances: buying an even more powerful hardware is expensive, and one cannot just turn off the app at night to alter the database and migrate data. In this article I would like to tell you how we completely changed the inner structure…

Covering A/B tests with UI tests:

How to avoid getting tangled up in your own code Hi there! My name is Vitaliy Kotov and I spend most of my time working on automated testing issues at Badoo. In this article, I tell you all about how we have organised the UI testing work with our numerous A/B tests, the problems we have had to deal with…

Server-provided animations in iOS apps

Hi everyone! About six months ago we launched one of Badoo’s most exciting features: Live Streaming. One of its main functionalities is that viewers can send gifts to their favourite streamers to express their appreciation. We wanted to make the gifts as fancy and as engaging as possible, so it…

MVI in Kotlin Multiplatform — part 1 (1 of 3)

About a year ago I became interested in some new technology: Kotlin Multiplatform. Since then I have been actively experimenting in this area and promoting this technology within our company. One outcome, for example, is our Reaktive library — Reactive extensions for Kotlin Multiplatform. The story continues here: MVI in Kotlin…

Modularising the Badoo iOS app

In my previous article, I explained how we singled out the chat functionality in our app for modularisation. Everything had gone well and we were preparing to roll out this experience to start work on modularising all of Badoo iOS app development. We even did a presentation on the approach…

Client-side neural networks

Historical background The popularity of machine learning and neural networks is growing every day, and faster than we could ever have imagined. Many industry players are contributing, and client-side frameworks are developing rapidly. Many libraries, such as TensorFlow, are constantly releasing new versions. More mobile devices are now receiving hardware support for…

Add Superpowers to your Appium-Android tests

[Update]: I have now pushed this feature in new appium-espresso-driver upstream and it is available out of the box to everyone! Please refer to this medium blog for the latest happening Over the past few years, Appium has become one of the most widely used mobile automation tools. While there…

Configuring Jira for your needs

Perfect flow and ideal ticket If you work in an IT company then the likelihood is that your processes are built around Atlassian’s well-known Jira. There are numerous task-trackers available on the market for solving such tasks, including open-source solutions (Trac, Redmine, Bugzilla), but Jira is probably the most widely used. My name is Dmitry…

Jira combats chaos: how to not lose tasks in development

In my previous article I talked about how we configured Jira to make work flow as convenient as possible and to ensure tickets provided exhaustive information. The aim of today’s article is somewhat different. Assumptions: You are developing and providing support for a complex programming product in use by several…

Home-grown bytecode interpreters

In recent decades the use of virtual programming language machines has become very widespread. It is some time since the Java Virtual Machine was first launched in the latter half of the 90s, so we can state with confidence that bytecode interpreters are now very much a reality and not…

How to use Composite builds as a replacement of buildSrc in Gradle

Gradle buildSrc approach has become standard for implementing custom plugins, tasks and specifying common configurations (like dependencies list and versions) but has one major flaw — it invalidates a build cache when it is changed. On the other hand, Gradle also provides an alternative composite build approach that lacks this…

Modularising an iOS app

At Bumble — the parent company operating Badoo and Bumble apps — the iOS development team have been involved in creating modules for several years now. A large part of the new code is also being developed outside the apps’ code base. As a result of this work, we now…

The Immense Benefits Of Not Thinking In Screens

DroidconUK 2019 Lightning Talk Abstract of the talk: Maintaining a large project and not going insane — in practice: – Causes of everyday development pain, frustration and slowdown less frequently talked about – Breaking down the complexity of screens instead of a classical layering approach – Keeping code easy-to-understand…