Name: Unlock Faster Mobile Releases: Lessons from Wolt
Start: 2025-05-16T14:10:00+0300
End: 2025-05-16T14:50:00+0300

Friday May 16, 2025 14:10 - 14:50 EEST

BlackBox

At Nordic Testing Days, I’m excited to share my journey at Wolt and provide actionable tips on how to unlock faster, more robust mobile releases. I’ll present four key strategies that I hope every audience member can take away and apply to their own release processes.

Over my 14-year career in IT, I’ve experienced a variety of approaches to production releases across desktop, web, and native mobile applications. For the past four years at Wolt, I’ve focused on testing and refining the release processes for our native mobile apps. When I joined, Wolt’s small consumer mobile team followed a release cycle that took 3–4 weeks to ship updates to customers. Over time, we transformed our approach, evolving our release strategy to achieve faster, more efficient, and higher-quality releases—ultimately reducing the cycle to just one week.

1. Quality Assurance to Quality Assistance
Transitioning from the traditional quality assurance model to a quality assistance approach significantly streamlined Wolt’s mobile release process. Historically, a small group of QA engineers handled release testing, but as the company rapidly scaled, this assurance-based model became unsustainable. By adopting the assistance model, we empowered teams to take ownership of their testing, involving everyone in the testing phase throughout the development cycle. This shift not only accelerated release timelines but also fostered collaboration and accountability across teams.

2. Defect Prioritization
Over the years, developers, QA engineers and stakeholders at Wolt actively addressed issues as they were discovered, whether from team feedback, support reports, or App Store reviews. While this approach showed great responsiveness, it often resulted in fixing too many issues and significantly slowing down the release process. The constant flow of new commits also increased the risk of new regressions in the application. To tackle this, we introduced a prioritization framework to rank the issues identified during the release process. This framework helps us decide which issues are critical to fix and which can be deferred, ensuring a smoother and more predictable path to production.

3. Automation
Test automation was a game-changer in shortening the release cycle. Manually running hundreds of tests was neither efficient nor scalable, so we explored and experimented with various tools and approaches to find the most effective solution. The key was identifying the most critical parts of the app to test at both the UI and unit test levels. Additionally, we revamped our CI pipeline to better support the release process, enabling faster, more reliable builds and deployments. Automation became a cornerstone in ensuring speed and quality while reducing the manual workload on the team.

4. Be Brave and Roll!
While Android and iOS ecosystems have their own default release processes, we discovered that following them too cautiously can be both time-consuming and unnecessary. Most issues are typically caught early in the rollout, allowing for faster adjustments if needed. Emphasizing the importance of feedback loops, tools like Crashlytics and other third-party providers play a crucial role in monitoring releases and ensuring a smoother journey. Sometimes, taking a confident approach and accelerating the rollout can save time while maintaining quality.

In this talk, I’ll share how we transformed Wolt’s mobile release process—from 3–4 weeks to just one week—by adopting a Quality Assistance model, prioritizing defects effectively, leveraging automation, and embracing faster rollouts with robust feedback loops.

Key Takeaways:

Testing is not just QA’s responsibility, it’s a team effort.
Defect prioritization: making the right fix at the right time.
Release automation is more than just unit and UI tests.
Releasing native apps isn’t always about following Google and Apple’s standard flow.

Speakers

Pekka Pönkänen

QA Engineer, Wolt

Heya! I’m Pekka Pönkänen from Helsinki, Finland. I’ve worked in tech for 14 years, starting in IT and later shifting to software development and testing. Over the years, I’ve worked with desktop, web, and native apps—mostly focusing on native mobile applications!Last year... Read More →

Friday May 16, 2025 14:10 - 14:50 EEST
BlackBox

Track

Difficulty Like a Fish in the Sea

Nordic Testing Days 2025

Pekka Pönkänen

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