Last week we held our second tech talk, focusing on mobile, in a new internal series we launched this year. The presenters covered two very important topics in mobile: wearable apps and testing.

Building Our Apple Watch App

The evening started with a talk by Bill M. who lead the efforts to build our Apple Watch app. We knew we had to build the app in order to provide our users with the best possible access and experience. Since the platform was brand new and kept changing, it came with its own challenges. Development needed to be planned carefully to make sure we could deliver an app with a set of features that added up to a useful experience but still hit the launch date.

With a few key features in mind, our iOS developers dove in and started coding away. The storyboard (shown above), defines all of the functionality for the app. The team faced a lot of challenges with how to handle network requests, images, location, and phone-watch communication.

Testing

After learning how to build an Apple Watch app, Mason G. and Tim M. followed up on how we test our iOS and Android mobile apps (respectively) to ensure the best possible end product.

Both apps share a common API. Whenever we want to change this API, we start by writing documentation and examples. This allows us to define a contract between the API and the clients, and work out major problems before we write any code. Additionally, we can then take the examples and use them as mock data to test the clients.

Mason then led us into the world of iOS testing. Testing is critical in order to prevent regressions and give developers confidence that their changes work. The team relies on unit, integration, and acceptance tests to make sure that different components all work correctly. Our test suite leverages several tools, including KIF, to provide great test coverage.

Tim then spoke on the challenging world of Android testing. The major concerns with Android testing include test scalability, reliability, and speed. Despite the many obstacles to overcome, we’ve created a solid setup here at Yelp, largely due to the great open source libraries available for the platform, including Spoon and Espresso.

We have the full video and slides online:

On to the next talks!

If you weren’t able to attend our tech talk this time around, don’t worry! You’ll still get a chance to see our offices at our 3rd annual WWDC party. RSVP here.

If you’re interested in future events at Yelp or in engineering opportunities, let us know!

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