Since I’ve been self employed again, I’ve been working on 3 iPhone development projects. On 2 of the projects, I’m the lone developer (at the moment), with a QA resource and a project manager. On the 3rd project, at its peak, we had 5 developers, 7 or 8 QA folks, and a project manager. This last project has made it painfully obvious to me (more so than the other 2), that Apple has designed iPhone development around the loan developer that has no formal QA.
Why do I say this? Well, for a number of reasons. First off, the whole provisioning thing is quite problematic for a team. The concept that only the team agent can do AdHoc and AppStore provisioning is not realistic. The Team Agent has typically been someone that is the CTO of a company or someone else that is not involved in the project on a day to day basis. We have to pass around the agent credentials in order to do provisioning (admin privileges are not enough).
Second, Xcode’s Build and Archive is not maintainable for a team. If one person does the build, another person on the team may have to examine the crash logs and therefore need the dSYM file in the archive that is built. The archive needs to be checked into source control, but Xcode hides it somewhere else.
Third, with Build and Archive in preparation for deploying as either AdHoc or AppStore, the developer is building the app from his local source tree. Almost all projects that I work on are built using a build script so that the builds are done from source control in order to have a reproducible build. Building an app from the local source tree is quite dangerous as a developer may have forgotten to check in a file and then the next person comes along may not be able to build the app.
Fourth, Xcode’s managed provisioning isn’t all that helpful. It generates a completely wildcard provisioning file which I’m not really sure how it affects different apps when there are different app IDs. In addition, most of the devices that are provisioned aren’t on developer machines, but are QA devices and other devices.
Fifth, the 100 device limit for AdHoc provisioning may sound like a lot, but if you have a team with 5 developers, each with 3 or 4 devices (iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS running 3.1.3, and iPad), and then have 7-8 QA folks with 3 devices each, you can see that the devices get eaten up quite quickly. This isn’t even considering all the devices a client may want to use for testing. I understand that Apple doesn’t want people using AdHoc provisioning to get around the AppStore, but here is a case where we’re doing the right thing and could run into issues.
Sixth, Xcode’s ability to deploy an application to the AppStore is another area where it is problematic for the team. This requires that one of the developers does the submission. In theory, QA should do the upload once the build has been approved. The way around this, of course, is to use the Application Loader to handle it. However, the Application Loader application is half baked and very much geared to only working on one project. You have to go back through the setup wizard to change accounts (I’ve done uploads for 3 different projects).
While it is true that probably 95% of iPhone development is done by single developers, some of the top applications are done in teams and I think the teams are still trying to figure out the best way to handle development.
In my next post, I’ll outline some of my ideas/practices for effectively working in teams on iPhone development.