Testing our Shopping Apps with AI - by Thomas Visser
AI is having a profound impact on engineering, pushing the limits of what we can achieve as individuals and as teams. At NewStore we see it as our duty to figure out how AI will influence our established engineering practices, pushing us to do our best work yet now that the tools of the trade are so rapidly evolving. This post is part of a series where we share our experiments and experiences.
In this post, we’d like to share one example of an experiment into how AI changes the way a team at NewStore works. This team is responsible for the development of the platform that powers our Shopping Apps. The experiment is changing the way we test our apps by augmenting traditional testing techniques with AI-powered UI testing.
Our platform is delivering 20+ shopping apps, trusted by brands in 40+ countries and rated five stars by millions of users worldwide. On the app-side, our platform consists of a set of native frameworks for iOS & Android that are shared by all apps using our platform. The frameworks contain the vast majority of all logic. We add brand-specific logic for configuration and theming, which consists of around 1% of an app’s total lines of code. Consequently, the majority of our efforts are focused around the development of the frameworks.
We release the frameworks (internally) on a bi-weekly schedule. We then perform a staggered roll-out of the updated frameworks across the apps. A group of early access brands always receives the latest framework version. The remaining “general availability” apps are updated over the weeks following the initial release.
