Saving millions through sustainable, high-quality solutions for a leading aviation enterprise.

Software quality engineering in the Airline industry increased overall testing efficiency by 80%

Our client is a major US airline operating domestic and global flights. Owing to the complexity of its business operations, the client had an estate of over 500 applications requiring constant development and maintenance, with 15-20 significant new fortnightly releases. Its small, in-house QA team, however, was only able to provide release management assurance for around 50-60 of the most business-critical applications, conducting mainly manual testing with the help of an external vendor.

When we approached the company in 2015 with a proposal for test automation, they agreed to engage three ValueLabs QA professionals to assess what we could do. We provided software testing services and a test automation framework that essentially helped incorporate QA in aviation.

From those humble beginnings, our relationship with the client has grown into a truly strategic partnership. Our eight-year journey has seen the client evolve from manual quality assurance to a culture of continuous quality engineering across its entire software delivery organization.

Integrating DevSecOps into the CI-CD pipeline sped up security assessments

As an organization that handles vast amounts of sensitive data, our client conducted manual vulnerability testing for new software releases after the DevOps workflow. That meant that testing added an extra day to the delivery lifecycle. There was no overall visibility of security testing results and relatively late detection of any vulnerabilities, which delayed releases and increased manual rework.

We identified these issues and addressed them for our client by building a custom test automation framework and using automation tools to integrate security testing into the CI/CD workflow. By applying static application security testing (SAST) at the CI stage and dynamic application security testing (DAST) at the CD stage, we created a seamless DevSecOps flow in which vulnerability scanning is conducted automatically.

As a result, release cycles were shortened by a day, developer and tester time were freed up, and vulnerabilities could be identified and remediated much faster because they were picked up earlier in the cycle.

Automation cut test data creation time by 95%

Creating test data was one of our client’s biggest bottlenecks to QA efficiency. Every time they tested a new process, a test engineer had to find data. For example, a change to an online booking would require test data, such as login credentials and flight data, and passenger data, such as name and passport number.

In the absence of a central repository, engineers had to manually create test data, which took up 30% of each test duration. Our client and their existing vendor tried and failed to tackle the issue.

We understood their concerns and offered to build a robust, automated solution. We took this on as a ValueLabs initiative, securing budget and resources from our leadership to develop a solution at no cost to our client – a client-focused innovation approach we call the VC in Us.

Our test automation solution cut the test data creation time from an average of two minutes to around 20 seconds.

A eight-year journey from one project to an end-to-end partner

From day one of our eight-year journey with our client, we’ve distinguished ourselves through our proactive approach, thought leadership, and client-focused mindset. In keeping with our OneCompany® ethos, we have consistently taken on our client’s challenges as our own and found swift and effective solutions. While this includes our software testing services and our test automation, we do more than other companies might.

When our client started to run out of floor space for our growing team at their offices in downtown Chicago, we leased a floor in the building opposite theirs and had it up and running in under a month. And when COVID-19 hit the airline industry and we had to ramp down the team, our remaining team members worked around the clock in shifts to ensure vital passenger-facing functionality went live with no defects.

Our successful partnership is a prime example of our OneCompany® ethos in action.