Lean Continuous Integration for Xianyu Mobile Client Development

At the beginning of last year, Xianyu released a new client version roughly every three weeks. Rapid business growth required faster, higher‑quality delivery, prompting the team to collaborate with the Aladdin R&D efficiency group to adopt a lean development model with a 2‑1‑1 cycle (2‑week demand delivery, 1‑week development, 1‑hour integration).

The lean approach uses a Kanban‑style board (referred to as the "swimlane" mode) to continuously deliver prioritized demands. The shift introduced several challenges: accelerating delivery response time, increasing communication cost due to larger team size, extra cost of parallel branch development, and the need for rapid testing of frequent submissions.

To address these, a comprehensive CI pipeline was built to automate the entire flow from demand creation to code development, packaging, testing, and release. Key steps include automatically binding demand branches to packaging projects, triggering builds on code commits, and launching automated test suites based on merge requests, pushes, or schedules.

Automation also extends to test result feedback, enabling immediate quality verification and reducing integration risk. The team further pursued “unmanned” operations by minimizing manual interventions, supporting continuous integration with tools such as fish‑CI for workflow orchestration and fish‑guard for test execution and result notification.

Metrics were defined across three dimensions—responsiveness, efficiency, and quality—to monitor improvements. Results showed a reduction in release cycle from one month to two weeks, increased integration frequency, faster feedback, and noticeable quality gains as illustrated by defect trend charts.

The ultimate goal is a 24/7 release pipeline with no window constraints, achieved through full automation, unmanned processes, and expanded automated testing coverage.