JetBlue

Customer
solution at
a glance
Application
Software functional and
performance testing
Hardware
• HP ProLiant DL385
G5 servers
Software
HP IT Performance Suite—
Application Lifecycle
Management
• HP Quality Center
software
• HP QuickTest
Professional software
• HP LoadRunner software
To ensure these applications run properly, Sagi
Varghese, quality assurance manager, JetBlue, replaced
the company’s manual software testing processes with
automated quality testing—a transition that JetBlue
needed to make to keep its customers happy and its
costs under control.
Take, for example, JetBlue’s online reservations
system. The online reservations business is highly
competitive, Varghese explains, making application
quality particularly important. Should JetBlue’s
system go down, people shopping for airline ights
can go elsewhere with the click of a mouse. The cost
to JetBlue in lost revenues can add up to thousands
of dollars per minute.
“We’d outgrown our old technology. The new
system adds signicant capabilities to JetBlue’s
online reservations applications, and delivers
more value to our customers.”
Sagi Varghese, quality assurance manager, JetBlue
But manual software testing wasn’t an ideal way
to ensure the quality of JetBlue’s reservation system.
A full manual regression test of all 534 scenarios
associated with the reservation system’s use cases,
for instance, took 80 hours to run. The overhead costs
of performing such extensive, and labor-intensive,
procedures were high.
“We’ve put best practices in place. As a result,
we’re condent that our software application
quality processes and performance will be both
cost eective and enable our new reservations
systems to meet our customers’ expectations
for availability and responsiveness.”
Sagi Varghese, quality assurance manager, JetBlue
Because testing took so long, JetBlue sometimes cut
back on its regression tests to meet delivery deadlines.
This, in turn, drove up costs in other areas of the JetBlue
operation. Some of the impact was associated with
troubleshooting software issues after an application
had gone into production. Other increases hit JetBlue’s
customer-facing processes, including its customer
call center. JetBlue normally charges a premium when
customers make reservations by phone instead of online.
In the event of reservations system issues, however,
the company waives that extra fee—so any phone
reservations made during online outages fall under
a cost structure that isn’t in line with the company’s
normal operating margins.
Automated testing in
virtualized environment
JetBlue needed a new software testing framework that
would be more ecient, while also boosting its quality
standards—so it implemented HP Quality Center and
HP QuickTest Professional software. Under the new
framework, JetBlue creates test scenarios that are
converted into standard-format test cases. HP QuickTest
Professional software processes and executes the test
cases, and publishes test scripts to HP Quality Center.
“The new framework uses consistent, repeatable
processes,” says Varghese. “Our engineers are able to
more easily coordinate and execute tests, and analyze
test results, which allows them to prioritize testing
based on business risk.”
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