There’s nothing more annoying that having HipChat crash in the middle of a call or when you’re chatting with a coworker, right? It pisses us off, too. Well, you may have noticed that our Mac, iOS, and Android clients are working a lot better lately. Now that we’ve launched video (phew!) we’ve been able to focus more time addressing issues causing random bugs and crashes. We’ve reduced the number of crashes/day by almost 95% on our Mac app, 75% on our Android app, and 25% on our iOS app. In addition we’ve resolved dozens of bugs reported by you (thanks again!).
What We’ve Been Doing
We’ve made a lot of changes in code and process over the past few months. Here are some highlights:
- Aggressively monitoring crash reports in HockeyApp and quickly triaging the worst offenders
- Use Kanban to optimize our development workflow
- Focus on a 2-3 week release cadence, so fixes get to you sooner than later
- Major changes to thread handling and concurrency:
- Switch from using Key Value Observers to GCDMulticastDelegate (part of the XMPPFramework) – KVO didn’t work well in our multithreaded environment
- Encapsulate classes to use a single queue to manage all their behaviors
- Fix every place we were accidentally trying to modify an immutable collection
- Better error handling – errors happen and the client should be able to absorb them gracefully without a complete meltdown
What’s Next?
We’re not done yet and there are many more improvements on our list. Here are a few:
- Give our Windows and Linux apps some well deserved love
- Performance and usability improvements!
- Continued bug fixing on Mac, iOS, and Android
What You Can Do
If you see something funky or want to request a new feature, just let us know at http://help.hipchat.com. Also, make sure you’re using our latest clients to take advantage of all the improvements we’ve been making. You can download our Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, or Linux clients from https://www.hipchat.com/downloads.
We’re Hiring
Oh, by the way, we’re hiring! One of our core values at Atlassian is “Be the change you seek”. Want to be part of making our clients even better? Great, come join us! Apply at http://hipchat.com/jobs/.