Preface

While working for a start-up in San Francisco, as an iOS developer, I've had the arduous recurring task of having to gather all the coding contributions from my fellow colleagues, run some tests, and package the project for the stakeholders and beta testers to test, find bugs, patch, and re-distribute. 

Finally, when we get to the green-light stage, we package the application once again for publication to the App Store, update the metadata, update or add new screenshots, and so forth. Of course, with start-ups growing as rapidly as they do, so do the size of their development teams, which leaves you having to spend time on-boarding the new team members and setting up their environments with provisioning profiles and certificates. 

Having your attention and focus diverted from your primary goal of feature development bug fixing in order to deal with  repetitious application-delivery tasks is certainly frustrating, which is what inspired me to investigate ways to automate this process. 

We already implement regression testing in an automated manner, through continuous integration, so there should be a way of being able to automate the process of packaging our apps, pushing them to TestFlight or the App Store, and dealing with provisioning our apps. Introducing fastlane...