The ideal case scenario is that the developer has made an amazing application and made no mistakes. Regardless, the goal of testing is not only to find errors but to understand the quality of your application. The right kind of questions for this would be, does the app work? How much is the time complexity?
Finding bugs is the most important benefit of using an integration. Apart from this it also ensures a stable codebase which for most developers is more of a hassle setting up an Xcode server and to run all the requirements on a server. To simplify this process, a number of alternatives are available like Travis-CI. solution that takes away the hassle of setting up a server.
The only prerequisite for this is an Xcode project hosted on Github.
We at CopperMobile set up Xcode projects with travis-CI for automated builds which are further automatically distributed using HockeyApp. Travis-CI is automatically set up using your GitHub account by simply going to the official Travis page, click on sign in with GitHub.
Further, what Travis-CI does is, it will show your latest CI build in the form of a dashboard. For this build, you can either use your private repository like CopperMobile does or use the public repository provided by Travis. We have the option of using either a public or a private repository.
Once it has fetched the private repository, we can enable Travis but this might not be such a good idea unless travis knows how to do it. It is better to hold travis when the configuration file is not available, till then you can start by selecting “Build only if .travis.yml is present” in the project settings.
This brings us to a very important step in setting up travis which is adding .travis.yml file which has to be placed in your repository’s root. Note that this is an important and necessary step in using travis.
Once the setup is complete, you can push your changes to the GitHub repo. Travis-CI should start building your project. Travis will confirm whether the build was successful or not. The success of the build implies that the application is opening while it might crash later which is not taken into consideration.
The build will be pushed back to GitHub from where the HockeyApp will pick it up. The question here is how does the HockeyApp work?
The first step is to link the HockeyApp SDK with GitHub. Then the developer or any team member will create a login. Upon login, you will receive a key that has to be added to the application. The key remains the same throughout which has to be added every time you start a new project.
The pull request is merged in the develop branch of GitHub from where the build automatically goes to the HockeyApp so that the testers or clients can download it.
With HockeyApp the process is simpler and a little less time consuming as the app is installed over the air without much struggle. It is installed directly into the device from the download page.
Convenience is the word that defines the use of HockeyApp instead of the original developer to tester the transfer of APK.
