Autodesk Used to Only Release Mobile Features Every 6-8 Weeks. Now, It's Every Week

Key Takeaways

Autodesk used LaunchDarkly to increase their mobile app release velocity by 500%.
Autodesk used to release entire apps to all users at once, now they progressively deliver specific features to specific audiences.
Autodesk minimizes customer-impacting software problems and ships valuable features to customers faster.

About Autodesk (ADSK)

Autodesk, Inc. [ADSK (NASDAQ)] is a global software leader with multiple solutions that support professionals across a wide range of industries from manufacturing to virtual reality. To quote Autodesk directly—they “make software for the people who design the world.”

This also means Autodesk has many applications to support, ranging from web to mobile, and they knew they needed to improve their overall release process in order to deliver optimal customer experiences while reducing risk. And so, Autodesk began their journey to find a feature management solution that would best meet their needs and ultimately selected LaunchDarkly.

In an interview, Alex Bicalho, a Director of Engineering - Developer Platform Services at Autodesk, shared about Autodesk's journey with LaunchDarkly, how it’s impacted their mobile release process, and some compelling things they are doing within their mobile app teams. Watch the full interview below:

The problem with costly, cumbersome releases

Before LaunchDarkly, Autodesk had a cumbersome and costly release process. Releases were done every 6 to 8 weeks, included a complicated QA testing process, app downtime, and engineers working through the weekend.

If they found a bug, they had to postpone the entire release and begin the whole process all over again. This prevented them from getting new (and great) features to customers quickly.

And what about mobile app releases? We know releasing mobile features is especially challenging due to the large variations of devices in the market and lengthy app store reviews. Because of how app stores function, once a new app version is approved and made available for download, there’s no way to remotely control individual features in-app. And if a bug is rolled out as a part of a new app version, there’s no quick or real-time recovery. Instead, a new app version that includes a bug fix must be submitted to the app store and approved before it can get downloaded to devices.

These are all challenges that Autodesk faced…until they adopted LaunchDarkly, that is.

Decoupling feature releases from app releases to the app store

By leveraging feature flags, Autodesk successfully decouples feature releases to end users from application releases to the app store. But what exactly does that mean?

Autodesk can release an entire app version containing several new features to the app store. And they can use LaunchDarkly feature flags to hide all of those features from end users. This decoupling of the app release from the feature release allows Autodesk to do more thorough testing and mitigate risk.

Once the new app version is approved and downloaded to a device, Autodesk’s mobile developers can toggle 'on' the new features for internal QA testing teams exclusively. Assuming testing goes as planned, that feature can also be slowly rolled out and tested by beta users before it’s ultimately released to all devices and users. Progressively delivering mobile features provides a better end-user experience.

Autodesk’s mobile developers now release every 1-2 weeks, a 500% increase in release frequency

But what happens if they find a bug during testing? It’s simple—Autodesk simply keeps the feature 'off'. And even if a bug sneaks through all the tests, they can simply turn 'off' the bug-causing feature, so it no longer impacts customers. And top of that, if the bug is only impacting a select group of devices, it can be toggled 'off' for that select group, while it remains 'on' for all other devices.

The control LaunchDarkly provides has enabled Autodesk’s mobile developers to release every 1-2 weeks, a 500% increase in release frequency.

Improving in-app experiences

A big priority for Autodesk is to deliver optimal customer experiences both by delivering higher quality features to customers faster and by minimizing any negative impact due to a software bug or error. They are not only leveraging LaunchDarkly to release new features, but communicate updates and ensure mobile apps remain functional 24/7.

“We use feature flags to enable banners, notifications, and whole application behavior. For instance, if we have a problem with our cloud services, we can turn 'on' a feature flag to make the application go into offline mode asynchronous. We call these operational flags as they allow us to help mitigate the impact of a cloud outage or incident.” —Alex Bichallo, Director of Engineering - Developer Platform Services, Autodesk

At the end of the day, the ultimate goal for Autodesk is to reduce the impact and risk of large feature releases and provide the best end-user experience. Whether that means leveraging LaunchDarkly to do progressive and targeted rollouts, push out in-app banners or notifications, or even “turn on” an app’s offline mode to mitigate the impact from a cloud outage, with LaunchDarkly, Autodesk can be agile and deliver quality in-app experiences no matter what hurdles come their way.