Let’s start with uncovering this mysterious SPP acronym – it stands for Shared Products and Platforms. Our team is part of this central organisation. We cooperate closely with brand teams (publishers/newspapers), providing them with an app that is mostly based on a shared codebase.
People
We are a distributed team, with six devs and an engineering manager located in Poland, one dev in Norway, and a PM and UX duo in Sweden. We work with our stakeholders who are located in both Norway and Sweden.
What do you do daily?
Even though we are based in different countries we work very closely together. We meet every day to discuss progress and how to address problems, and to celebrate successes. Technical decisions are made in an open forum where everyone – no matter what their seniority level – has the opportunity to give their opinion. When the world is not suffering from a global pandemic, we meet once or twice a year for team gatherings.
As a team we own the full development process. We work in two-week release cycles (aka release trains). Each train starts with a planning session; during the week we focus on implementation, working together on pair programming sessions, then we test the release candidate version of the app. At the end of the cycle one developer is assigned to lead the release process.
Technological stack
We use Kotlin – and 100% of our project is implemented in this beautiful language. While we avoid jumping on “Hype Trains” (yet another innovative library that will solve all our problems), we methodically evaluate each new trend, then test it on a small part of our codebase. In the end, we decide if it accelerates our work or not. Our multi-module project uses coroutines for asynchronous operations; navigation is based on Jetpack; for DI we use Dagger 2. We are currently introducing Compose into our stack. Our development and build stands on GitHub Actions.
Future of the team
One thing ends, another begins… This year we finalised the migration of all major Schibsted publishers into our platform. Now we have started to execute our new App Strategy. We are focusing on Native Brilliance: delightful native experience, integration with Android OS, new features, and unleashing the full potential of the native news app.