Leading Airline is Testing its Native Apps

The client is one of the fastest growing airlines in the world flying to over 120 destinations in more than 70 countries.

The Mobile website of the client launched in 2011 has witnessed an over 500% increase in traffic since its launch in 2011. Bolstered by its success and increasing popularity among mobile users, the IT arm of the group decided to make the most of Mobile growth story with the development of in-house Mobile middleware to provide a single platform for their upcoming planned launches of Native Apps on iOS, Android and Blackberry.

The complete server side suite will support an ever increasing user base for flight bookings, Managing trips, Push notifications, In-Flight menu selections, entertainment previews and much more exciting features on a host of mobile devices for an user base spread across 70 countries.

The Challenges

• Performance Test the newly developed middle-ware - a collection of web-services to their backend systems.
• Complex n-tier architecture replete with legacy systems in test environment.
• Find and fix quickly performance issues found in the tests so that proper capacity could be provisioned before go-live.
• Accurate modeling of the workload by studying their Analytics Solution of existing applications.
• No in-house competency to record traffic from Mobile devices and generate assets for performance testing.

The Solutions

DXC is engaged in delivering the testing activities on functional, performance, Security and Quality of Service on the native app.

We leveraged our expertise in provisioning rapid test environments to set up offshore test beds for security testing while at the same time syncing up the test set up at client locations based on our best practices. We also outlined and implemented a security testing model that modularized the service components – Device, Network and Server - and outlines a strategy to test each component independently.

Solutions Provided

• Quickly conducted POCs to record traffic from mobile devices and strategies put in place for server load based on App Design.
• Prepared the workload model by studying Analytics data over one year.
• Created Network Impairments load profile to emulate Mobile Traffic typical to mobile service provider networks to gain early insight into app end user experience for critical transactions.
• Collaboratively worked with development team to identify and resolve performance and environment issues.
• Performed server-side analysis and recommendations.

The Results

• Testing proved that the correct workload model was applied giving confidence to provision server capacity prior to App launch.
• Performance recommendations provided helped the project to tune individual transactions for fast response on mobile devices.
• Network Impairments load profile exposed transactions which were prone to failures on slow Mobile networks.