How Automation Testing Improves Service Quality in the Airline Industry?
When I talk about Automation Testing in Airlines Industry, the first question that everyone asks is, how will automation testing help the Industry? Airlines have frequently changing metrics and other issues like dynamic pricing, bookings across cross platforms, and cross browsers. All of this significantly increases the possibility of issues and bugs getting un-noticed and impacts the business and final outcome if it results in a bad user experience for the customers.
The Automation testing process has evolved over the last decade, and more agile automation frameworks are being developed to increase the testing efficiency and maximize the breadth of testing coverage. Above all, the significant benefit that automation brings is a faster time to market with improved quality.
Instead of going into generic benefits of automation testing, here I will describe scenarios relevant to airlines in particular:
Dynamic Pricing:
All the dynamic prices get uploaded into an airline-specific GDS application. Then the manual testing team will write test cases to verify the pricing by comparing the GDS prices with the prices on the website to make sure they are accurate. This is a highly manual and resource-intensive task.
This manual testing process involves two different platforms and different application stacks, one could be a proprietary GDS, and the other could be the airline’s reservation/booking engine. In the earlier evolution of Automation testing, it used to be only browser-based, but now there are plenty of frameworks that can-do application-level testing on any platform or operating system. Because of these frameworks, it is highly desirable to use synchronous automated scripts that will run on all the platforms simultaneously. Automation tester can use two automation tools for two platforms and test this dynamic pricing with just in time automation.
Mobile Devices and Browsers:
Airlines end-users use different platforms like Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS to make a reservation. If we are specific to the Mobile users, then there are 1000s of smartphone variants used by users to access the application. It is impossible to test each mobile device manually; however, automation can very much attain it. By using automation, we can create a simulator of different mobile devices test applications using parallel execution. A better approach is to use a combination of a mobile simulator with a real device for testing. By doing this, the tester can cover the maximum devices that are used by the user.
We can also add multiple browsers to the above mobile cluster and test all browsers and mobile devices simultaneously.
KIOSK Machine:
The biggest challenge faced while testing KIOSK machines is to have the functionality to allow check-in for PNRs only within 24 hours; there was a significant amount of manual testing that was being used to compare which PNRs are within 24 hours on the booking site and then testing them on KIOSKs accordingly. With API automation testing tools, you can have one single API script that can retrieve the PNRs that are allowed to check-in within 24 hours and then verify it on KIOSK, and this way, you can satisfy all preconditions.
Desktop Applications:
The automation scope is increasing nowadays. Automation testing is not only limited to web-based testing with the increase in requirements; many open source tools are available in the market for desktop-based scripting as well. They can be used to automate testing for the following modules:
- Flight Scheduling: Flight fares vary with the flight schedule changes; all the schedules can only be managed at a GDS level; in the past manual testing was used to verify fares due to flight schedule changes both on GDS and web booking platform. Automation scripts can perform this process by changing the flight schedule using window-based automation and then verify fare changes on web applications.
- PNR Refund Process: When PNR is canceled, some amount is deducted as the cancellation fee. An Automation script can verify whether cancellation fees are applied according to the GDS cancellation rules on the web reservation platform.
- Seat Price Verification: Airlines Seats depends on the Leg Space/Seat Location/Aircraft Zone and City Pairs, and these seat prices vary with time depending on business requirements. Testing need to be performed frequently to make sure all seat prices feed in the GDS tool are correct and the same; is displaying properly on the web application. With limited manual testers, this process is challenging to perform daily. Automation can verify these prices on both GDS and Web Application daily as part of regression automation routines.
- Special Fee/Taxes: Outstanding Fees and Taxes are charged on some of the city pairs based on the business requirement. Manual testers are verifying these special fares on GDS tools(window-based) and making sure that the fee/taxes set up by the business team is correct and the same fee/taxes appear properly on the web application. This can as well be achieved using automation scripts.
Heartbeat:
For a successful business, it is required that the PROD environment be always up and running. It is essential to continuously monitor the production environment and make sure it is available to the client for ticket booking with appropriate taxes and fees.
Automation plays a vital role in monitoring the production environment 24x7 by running some of the primary test cases on the production environment till the payment page(booking is not completed) to make sure the production environment is right, and no delay is being observed from the server-side.
By running a few test cases, automation checks the health of the production environment. If any continuous failures are observed, mail will be sent to the team to investigate production for any issue quickly.
To summarize, there are a lot of Automation tools available, including open-source, and ShreePartners can help airlines achieve automation in a cost-effective manner.
For any questions, please mail us at connect@shreepartners.com
