Started automating the hardware test round, and it immediately found things a person would miss
Verifying a release on real hardware had grown into a long list of manual steps, run by hand every time, which is both exhausting and easy to cut short. About half those checks turned out to be automatable on a real device, so they now run as tests instead of instructions — leaving the human list for the things only a person can judge: airplane mode, the watch, widgets, lock-screen behaviour, screen-reader output, and whether a layout simply looks wrong. The first automated batch paid for itself twice. One test caught a mismatch between the length limit the app enforces and the one the server enforces — a gap only certain emoji reveal, and one that would have surfaced to a user as an unexplained rejection. Another run surfaced that the timeline becomes unusable at the largest accessibility text sizes, a problem that had been suspected for months but never actually measured.
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🏗️ Shipped: Started automating the hardware test round, and it immediately found things a person would miss 🧵
Verifying a release on real hardware had grown into a long list of manual steps, run by hand every time, which is both exhausting and easy to cut short.
About half those checks turned out to be automatable on a real device, so they now run as tests instead of instructions — leaving the human list for the things only a person can judge: airplane mode, the watch, widgets, lock-screen behaviour, screen-reader output, and whether a layout simply looks wrong.
The first automated batch paid for itself twice. One test caught a mismatch between the length limit the app enforces and the one the server enforces — a gap only certain emoji reveal, and one that would have surfaced to a user as an unexplained rejection.
Another run surfaced that the timeline becomes unusable at the largest accessibility text sizes, a problem that had been suspected for months but never actually measured.
Follow the build → build-log-five.vercel.app #testing #accessibility #automation #buildinpublic