Starling Bank, Genymotion team up to release Android app faster
As online-only Starling Bank gains in popularity, it needed to keep updating its app. An increasingly more complex, feature-filled app requires a new way of testing. Genymotion’s cloud-based, automated, scalable testing environment allowed for nearly instant feedback the Starling Bank DevOps team. The Challenge UK-based Starling Bank regularly maintains and improves its app, with a long history of daily releases. It uses continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) methodologies. Yet, as the app became more complex, the traditional way of testing—with phones plugged into a computer—simply couldn’t scale to meet the company’s need for speed. Starling Bank then turned to Genymotion solution to resolve this. The Solution Once Starling Bank integrated Genymotion into its CI/CD pipeline, it quickly got results. Automated alerts built into the code pipeline informed the DevOps team if a piece of code broke or test coverage dropped. By removing the need to manage infrastructure, Genymotion empowers Starling Bank to focus on building better features. The cloud-based approach means Starling can scale its fleet of virtual devices in seconds to test multiple features in parallel. The Result The cloud-based nature of Genymotion makes scaling up the testing pipeline a simple matter. “We’ve kept our speed as we’ve scaled up,” says Steven Newson, director of technology at Starling Bank. “We have always had a weekly release cadence, but automated testing ensures we can maintain it as our application becomes more capable and feature-rich.” “If you want to keep build time reasonable for quick feedback, it’s easy to add more instances to run tests for each build,” says Newson. “Using Genymotion on AWS, this process takes about 10 seconds. If we were managing test infrastructure on premises, it could take hours or days. This instant scalability is very useful.” Ready to accelerate testing of your Android apps? Check out Genymotion’s cloud-based solution at https://www.genymotion.com/.
