How to avoid 70 000 angry passengers

There is a growing need for automated testing platforms in the transportation industry and companies should turn their manual testing processes into modern ones

The following news is the worst nightmare for QA managers, especially ones working in the airline industry. Around a year ago, a leading software system supplier to British Airways, Air France, and Lufthansa experienced an awful glitch in their system (The Telegraph, September 28, 2017). Their check-in system was down for 15 minutes during the holiday season and experienced a power failure to top it off. This created absolute mayhem. Thousands of customers filed complaints, six hundred flights were cancelled and over 70,000 angry passengers were created. However, the software glitch didn't just create upset customers – this failure ultimately led to an international news frenzy. The airline brands were negatively affected and lead

to a loss in profit.

There’s no question of how critical customer loyalty is these days. Throughout the past decade there have been many instances where a small software glitch has turned a company upside down – cases where one small software bug creates one big fiasco. So, how can big airline companies avoid this?

COMPETITIVE EDGE – CONTINUOUS DELIVERY

Nowadays, a bumpy digital interaction is a deal breaker for both the business and the customer. Brand loyalty can weaken in an instant when a customer becomes unsatisfied. Marketplace competition is much stronger, so there is a greater chance these customers will move on

to a competitor. If I enter Expedia to purchase a plane ticket, for example, and experience even a minor bug, I would then instantly move to Skyscanner or any other comparison website to move forward with my purchase. This not only applies to travel-fair websites, but to all transportation companies where competition relies not only on product quality, but on customer service and user experience.

The digital revolution, thus, turns customers into omni-powered beings who expect nothing less than a seamless and effortless experience. Software development, inevitably, moves hand-inhand with a customer’s expectation, and the industry has seen huge developments towards a smart and automated environment that provides continuous delivery. Nonetheless, software testing is still heavily manual and is lagging behind the expeditious agile dev process. Previous QA efforts are no longer effective in a fast-paced industry, which brings us to a new era. The era of the modern manual automation tester in the agile world.

WHEN DID AGILE BREAK THROUGH?

Companies have started to adopt agile through the dev process over the past decade. However, the agile framework has picked up momentum over the past few years. The motivations from shifting from waterfall to agile were pretty clear from the get-go: bring software faster to the market by dividing the production process into short stacks, thus, increasing both the level of software quality and customer satisfaction in organisations.

Is agile the norm today? Definitely yes – a recent HPE survey shows that 67% of companies are either pure agile or leaning towards it.

With agile taking over the software development process, many challenges rose to the surface that companies were not yet aware of. Teams that had a lack of communication typically failed to pursue deadlines and deliveries for new features. Plus, the teams weren’t appropriately equipped with the right tools. It is important for any company or team to have tools made especially for agile delivery. Agile-based tools may include types for continuous integration that allow teams to continuously develop and deploy robust test code.