PerchPeek

React Native App

4.0

The brief:

PerchPeek offers a five star relocation service, at a fraction of traditional costs. With a goal of providing stress-free location for employees moving internationally for new jobs, PerchPeek runs all aspects of the service through an intuitive mobile app. This allows those relocating to have a single point of contact for all aspects of their move - reducing stress and removing the possibility of lost communication. From flights and shipping, accommodation and insurance, down to education and pet documentation - the app handles everything.

PerchPeek built their initial React Native app internally, however as the company scaled they needed additional capacity to deliver business-critical functionality, alongside important technical improvements. They decided to bring in a capable mobile consultancy to increase the speed of delivery, and improve the quality of their platform.

Our solution:

We worked alongside PerchPeek to elevate their mobile app, embedding within their engineering team to start on much-needed improvements. For example:

extending the use of TypeScript around the project - to improve type safety, reduce the occurrence of bugs, and provide a better developer experience.
focusing on improving the user interface on newer devices with different screen resolutions & features.
rapidly improving test coverage, from ~10% to ~95%, through a combination of automated tooling & leading-by-example.
resolving performance issues within various screens in the application, predominantly the custom chat interface.

Our long term focus consisted of building a detailed automated end-to-end test suite with Appium, a mobile automation framework. As PerchPeek wanted to rapidly deploy new functionality, it was important to verify that the app continued to work as expected. Whilst manual QA engineers reviewed the app, as the functionality grew in depth and complexity, the QA process did not scale appropriately. We built an Appium test suite covering all key flows of the application to ensure that, as engineers contributed new code, the existing functionality was not impacted. We then tied the test suite into Bitbucket and Jenkins - running the test suite on every PR, alongside hourly smoke tests. Overall, the implementation of the test suite allowed PerchPeek to increase their release velocity (from one release every three weeks, to one release every week) whilst also reducing the occurrence of new issues in production.

Overall, we helped:

PerchPeek to rapidly deliver new features to their users
employees relocating to reduce stress, during a complex and challenging part of their life
employers to attract and retain skilled workers through offering an enticing relocation package