Author: Grigoriy Volgin

Why Add Live Activity in the First Place?

The basic idea is that, as a user, you don’t have to open the app whenever you need to check crucial relevant information at a particular point in time.

Here’s a simple example of how your Live Activity works. Let’s say you have ordered a service. In addition to the general status of “Your order is on the way,” a widget will be displayed on your lock screen with all the necessary information, such as order status, delivery time, details about the courier/driver, etc.

In 2018, the release team was significantly smaller than it is now, releases were not yet happening regularly, and all of the company’s QA engineers played a part in the pre-launch inspection. That was very time-consuming, though, and it slowed down the overall development process significantly. It was decided that the testing of each app released would be conducted solely by the release team.

Back then, the release cycles lasted two weeks. The team had 3 QA engineers, who weekly for 2–3 full-time days, checked the release build of one of the alternating platforms. In addition to checking the release, the guys were busy streamlining the release process, writing documentation, onboarding newcomers, and updating test cases in the TMS.