How Virgin Atlantic ships faster with Codex

Virgin Atlantic used Codex to ship its revamped mobile app in time for the Christmas travel rush—one of the highest-risk periods of the year for potentially introducing software bugs.

“We’re an operational airline, so we have to be very careful about when we deliver applications to our customers live,” explains Neil Letchford, VP of Digital Engineering at Virgin Atlantic. “People are flying with this application. They need to be able to check in, and they need to be able to get on their aircraft.” With the help of Codex, the team was able to hit the window with near-complete unit test coverage and zero P1 defects at launch.

Codex is also helping the team refactor years of legacy code dramatically faster, while analyst teams across the airline are building tools directly on top of the company’s data warehouse.

“The ability to utilize Codex to improve the quality of the application before it got into the hands of our customers was a game-changer for us.”

—Neil Letchford, Vice President, Digital Engineering

Landing the rollout

Virgin Atlantic launched the new mobile app in beta over Christmas and went live in production weeks later. “The quality levels there due to the test coverage were exceptional,” Letchford says.

Hitting that quality bar under deadline pressure isn’t easy. Engineering teams working toward fixed launch dates often have to reduce scope or compromise on testing to ship on time. Codex helped Virgin Atlantic do the opposite: they shipped their app with zero P1 tickets at launch.

“These are really interesting conversations from an enterprise perspective when we’re talking to our leadership team, trying to tell everyone that it’s all green for launch,” Letchford says. “These are new things we’re not used to doing. Things don’t get delayed when we’re using Codex.”

Beyond the mobile app

“We’re seeing gains in the refactoring space where a two-week piece of work now maybe takes about 30 minutes to an hour.”

—Neil Letchford, Vice President, Digital Engineering