In case you missed it, last week we announced a big new feature: Fixes. It’s designed to help teams better manage their release diffs, offering a safer and more consistent way to get late-arriving changes into a release if needed. Fixes applies real guardrails that allow you to track, review, and approve any late additions, and automates away the busywork and context-switching required to actually get changes pulled in.
For some background on the launch and detail on how Fixes works, you can read more on the Runway blog!
If your app is available in more than a single language, you’re likely familiar with the extra work and headaches that the translation process can add to every release. You need to keep careful watch across all your localizable strings to ensure new copy is fully translated and that the translated strings made it safely into the release diff. The translation process adds (yet another) asynchronous element to release cycles, since translations are often sent out and finalized as other release prep continues in parallel. And there’s uncertainty around situations in which the team might be okay proceeding with certain strings untranslated, versus those where key untranslated strings are showstoppers.
Now, you can integrate your team’s translation and localization tooling in Runway, and we’ll help you avoid mistakes and save time when it comes time to prepare app copy for release.
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Runway surfaces all the localizable strings in your project and computes readiness relative to each release, so you can see at a glance which strings are fully ready to go – uploaded, translated, pulled back into the codebase (and onto your release branch, where applicable) – and which are still pending. Extra context on pending strings helps your team identify what’s actually needed to get things wrapped up. Perhaps translations are actually complete but the translated strings have yet to be pulled down into the release, or perhaps certain late-arriving strings are still waiting for translation. To complete the picture and further help your team identify translation showstoppers, localizable string keys added or updated in the context of a given release are highlighted.
You can trigger a source file upload or export translations back to the codebase right from Runway when needed – or, save your team the steady drip of manual work and context-switching and let Runway automate the process of keeping translations synced and updated in your project. With the new “Sync localizable string translations” automation enabled, Runway watches your release diff for any new or updated strings and will automatically upload source files for translation when needed, then pull translations back down to your release when ready. If your team prefers to merge all translations into your working branch first, there’s another new automation that can watch your working branch for updated strings and automatically pull them over into the active release.
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Currently available for Crowdin, with Localize, Lokalise, Smartling, and others to follow.
Most of you are probably already familiar with the release pilot rotation in Runway, which allows you to set up a list of team members that we’ll iterate through to automatically assign as pilots (aka captains, drivers, etc.) on each release. You can manage your rotation within Runway, reordering and swapping in one-off subs as needed, and pilots have a special role to play with targeted reminders and action items that make it easier for folks to rotate into the role.
But we know that teams often use specific tools for scheduling rotations more broadly within their org, like PagerDuty, Opsgenie, or even Google Calendar. In true Runway fashion, we want to ensure you get the best of both worlds by offering an integration point for these specialized tools that Runway can tie into and extend from. Now, you can now connect your scheduling tool of choice and Runway will manage your release pilot rotation accordingly, automatically assigning pilots to releases based on a given on-call schedule, swapping folks when coverage changes, and re-assigning pilots if a release rolls over into another team member’s shift. Reminders and alerts can be sent along the way so there are no surprises or gaps in coverage.
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Currently available for PagerDuty, with Opsgenie, Google Calendar, and others to follow.
At Runway, we’re always looking for more ways to keep your team out of App Store Connect and Play Console. They’re not the friendliest of platforms and are two of the worst offenders when it comes to context-switching. You should already be able to do most if not all of what you need to do in the stores release to release from within Runway, manually or automated. But we do field feedback from teams wanting the ability to update even more of their store presence in Runway, and so we’re continuing to add more store-related functionality to the platform. Our latest additions include handling for preview videos, allowing you to view, edit, and upload new videos for both Android and iOS. On the metadata front, you can now edit promotional text, subtitle, and app name alongside the other fields Runway already surfaces. As always, Runway’s user roles and scoped access can give your marketing and product folks an easy and safe way to interact with these items.
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Runway’s regression testing integrations allow your team to connect the test case management tooling your QA folks might be using (TestRail, Xray) to surface live status of test runs alongside each release. This already helps streamline a critical part of the release process by opening up what is typically a black box and removing the need for constant checking-in back and forth between engineering, product, and QA as final build validation is worked on.
Our new ‘Create regression test runs’ automation goes a step further to save time that’s wasted manually managing regression testing processes. Before, for each new release, QA folks would need to manually create a new test run in your team’s test case management tool, copying over the necessary test plans, sticking to any particular naming conventions, etc. Now Runway can handle all of this for you, ensuring there’s a new test run created and ready to go by the time QA hops in to begin regression testing each and every release.
