gdollardollar / flow-challenge

Flow challenge

This challenge offers a good insight into one of the core problems we solve at Waldo: how to properly match together different screens and user journeys in a mobile app.

Submit

You should have received an upload link from us. Please zip your work once it's complete and upload it there.

The goal

You are given the results from the extraction of different flows, on 2 different versions of an app, that we called base and head. A flow is a sequence of user interactions that start from an app open, and where each step is the result of a user tap on the previous step.

An extraction is formatted like this:

• flows.json: the collection of flows, each defining a sequence of steps, from start to end.
• 3 representations for each step
  • xml/step-{step}.xml is the xml structure as retrieved from Android. It represents the elements on screen.
  • json/step-{step}.json is the normalization of this xml structure into our proprietary structure. One thing to notice is that it includes the activity name (in the Android sense) which rendered this screen.
  • png/step-{step}.png is the snapshot of the device screen at the time.

For instance, head/png/step-1.png is the second step of the Flow #1 and was obtained after the user tapped on the 3 dots on head/png/step-0.png (no need to look for it, the information about the tap is not captured in the results and is not relevant to the problem here).

head.step-0	head.step-1

Your goal is to best match the steps of each flow from base and head, while preserving their order. For instance, for the Flow #1, this is a correct mapping:

base.step-0 <-> head.step-0
base.step-1 <-> head.step-1
base.step-2 <-> head.step-2
base.step-3 <-> head.step-3
base.step-4 <-> head.step-4

This is also a correct mapping:

base.step-0 <-> head.step-0
base.step-1 <-> head.step-2
base.step-2 <-> head.step-3
base.step-4 <-> head.step-4

but this is not a correct mapping:

base.step-0 <-> head.step-0
base.step-1 <-> head.step-2
base.step-2 <-> head.step-1
base.step-3 <-> head.step-3
base.step-4 <-> head.step-4

because the steps of head are not in an increasing order.

Guidelines

This is purposefully a pretty open-ended problem, and most certainly one that you could spend way more than a few hours on. And yet, we recommmend spending no more than 5 hours on it.

This should not scare you, we're not trying to set you up for failure here. Instead, we're very interested in how you approach this problem.

That being said, we want to see some things in your submission (and the more visual, the better). So we strongly encourage you to start small but try to get deliverables along the way. You should not care about code quality, it does not matter, be scrappy and explore!

And there's a good chance that it brings a ton of ideas to mind. Please share them with us, we recommend that you spend ~30 minutes capturing your thoughts in a quick doc before submitting to us.

Good luck, and have fun!