How DoorDash Manages Mobile Releases
Article Summary
Manolo Sañudo from DoorDash reveals how their iOS team ships weekly releases without breaking things. Spoiler: it's not about having more QA people.
DoorDash's consumer iOS team maintains a weekly release cadence while managing multiple apps at scale. Manolo Sañudo, a software engineer on the New User Experience team, breaks down their six-year-evolved process that balances speed with quality through distributed ownership and strict guardrails.
Key Takeaways
- Weekly releases with phased rollout: 1% on Day 1, full rollout by Day 3
- Component owners (not QA) test their own features using Runway platform
- Dedicated Slack channel per release prevents hotfix confusion
- Strict cherry-pick criteria: only user-impacting regressions allowed in late
- Small rotating release manager team keeps decisions consistent
DoorDash ships iOS updates every week by distributing testing responsibility to feature owners and using strict criteria for late-cycle changes.
About This Article
DoorDash's iOS apps became too large for a centralized QA team to handle. They couldn't keep up with intensive weekly regression testing while multiple teams pushed out new features continuously.
Manolo Sañudo's team gave testing responsibility to the engineers who owned each component. These owners test their own features using Runway, which sends Slack reminders and tracks whether tests passed.
By moving testing closer to the engineers who built the code, DoorDash kept its weekly release schedule intact. Each component gets tested by the people who understand it best and know exactly what changed.