Sprint 5

December 24 – January 7: Happy new year everyone! The DrivnBye team has been hard at work this sprint and we’re still on track for spring 2024 beta release! Before we get into the release notes lets also include some company updates as well!

• We introduced two new members to our staff to help our marketing and design departments.
• We continue to post on a regular schedule to all of our social media accounts and converse with our audience through DMs on Instagram.
• We also started posting polls on Instagram so our community can contribute to decisions in the app.
• Our website has seen a large spike in traffic and activity amassing over 5,000 unique visitors in the last 2 weeks.
• Created a stakeholders group with potential users and businesses to receive feedback on ideas, features, and solicit feedback.
• 5,000 new followers and 150,000 new profile views on instagram!
• Our first community driven blog article published – Read here
  • Reach out to us if you’d like to write your own blog article!
• Began the planning process for future giveaways
• Partnered with vehiclesociety for a merch drop coming soon.

Release Notes

This sprint we focused on bigger stories that took more time to complete and test; thus ending our sprint with 15 stories completed and 82 points. We also worked on big picture

• Reliability and performance conscious adjustments for the map view. On physical hardware (iPhone 12, iPhone 14 and iPhone 15) we were observing very encouraging framerates when viewing 500+ markers on the map.
• User navigation adjustments to ensure a fluid and intuitive experience when clicking through the app
• Implemented image blur hashes – no more ugly loading skeletons, now you’ll have pretty loading blur imitations of images
• A large refactor to remove unused libraries and removed libraries that were not as performant than what we’d hope they’d be
• After conversing with our stakeholders and our community, we came to the conclusion that implementing our own business review system was ideal for auto enthusiasts.
  • Implemented all backend changes required to fetch and make reviews with multiple photos
  • Added ability to view infinite scrollable reviews for a business in a full screen view
  • Added ability to create your own review with a description and up to 5 high quality photos
  • Added ability to report a review for abuse
• Added fullscreen photo viewer for reviews, posts, instant messages, event photos and more
• Added full screen event attendance screen with infinite scrollable attendees page
• Added ability to sort through attendees based on a list of filters
• Separated events into 3 categories with their own designated UI’s
  • Future events
  • Current events
  • Ended events
• Lots of error handling – it’s important to handle errors gracefully; but also report errors back to us so we can roll out a fix ASAP

INFRASTRUCTURE

• Internal scripts edited to simulate active businesses
• Internal scripts edited to simulate existing reviews on a business
• Developer account for apple’s app store has been approved
• Accounts created through expo and amazon to automate app releases and app updates
• Configured internal-use servers for app testing amongst staff
• Introduced a kubernetes cluster for a websocket server to serve all apps with live updates – More information on this coming soon in our blog section

Whats Next?

If you have been staying up to date with our past release notes you’d notice this one is a little shorter. That is because the first week of this sprint we focused on features, the second week we focused on release ready-ness. We focused on optimization, building the app into it’s respective native code for iOS and Android. This process requires waiting for accounts to be approved (apple and google), troubleshooting builds that may report an error, running on multiple pairs of phones to ensure compatibility and more. Going into Sprint 6 we are going to continue focusing on smoothening out this process so building the app in the future is as simple as a single button click.

Happy New Years!
– The DrivnBye Team

Progress screenshots