Airportr is a series A startup revolutionizing the way we check in and transport our luggage. Below, we spoke to Roman Nowab, the Lead QA at airportr. We asked him how he had come to work with Global App Testing, and how he'd come to save a day per week's sprint.
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The company
Airportr are a digital check-in and bag carrier service. They were founded in 2013, they raised an $8.6 million series A in 2019. You can book the airportr service from the UK, Austria, and Switzerland (although you can land with airportr in a lot more places).
Roman has been working there as the Lead QA since 2016. "When I joined we had only one airline British airways, and we were struggling with London Heathrow, which was our serviceable airport at that time…," remembers Roman. "Now is that we’ve grown so rapidly. Not just the airlines, but we’ve also been able to open our services from different airports, different regions."
Roman engaged Global App Testing in 2021, as part of the company's post-pandemic bounceback efforts.
The challenges
- A lean team approach meant that Airportr were at capacity
- The international, mobile-first nature of the software put a high compatibility burden
- Airportr needed to maintain a perfect UX to maintain its high user trust
The need to go faster
"I’m targeted a mix of ways…. In startup companies it’s often a balance of a few things. But speed is a huge focus. We need to get releases out the door as soon as possible. This is why we do a risk assessment. We have to make trade-offs with our regression testing – you can’t run through a whole regression suite every time we need to release. There is a constant trade-off between speed and quality for us."
"The other big thing slowing us down was translaton testing, which we had no internal resource for. We’ve recently launched a multilingual website. We support Dutch, French, English, and Italy is on the way. The translation testing… including our email and SMS communications… it’s a small thing, but it’s very time consuming.
77% mobile user base means high compatibility burden
"I only have two or three QA… if you ask them to do tests on multiple devices it will kill their time. We have so much other stuff to do. We have to do test automation. We have iOS testing. We have to do functional test cases.""I think Global App Testing’s range of devices is incredible. I have seen so many bugs coming from that… on different OS, different devices – iPads, android. 77% – of our audience are on iPad or mobile. From 2018 to 2020, it was much more desktop… so we’ve had to build a competency in mobile dev and mobile testing.
The need to maintain great reviews
We asked Roman why it's important that airportr is good quality. "It’s so important… the point of Airportr is to make your trip easier. When people are travelling they’re often anxious, primed for stressful experiences, and we can only hope to have value as a business if they know they feel they can trust our product. If they don't have trust in our product, nobody is going to use it."
"We also know that users check our Trustpilot to confirm that we're trustworthy as they might not have heard of us. That would be shattered if they found a bug."
Global App Testing delivered a bespoke solution to booking dot com which was tailored to their challenges and goals.
A best practice international compatibility test suite with rich, visible bug reports
"I would definitely recommend Global App Testing for two reasons. First, you have the right coverage of locations, and you have the right coverage of devices." Airportr ran tests on 17 countries and a range of devices which reflects their users – from iPhones, to Samsung, to Huawei devices.
"We love the reports. The [full reproducibility details] help as I don’t have to go through everything step by step. I can quickly see the comments, or the media, and identify what kind of bug it is. I’ve worked with providers who provide much less visibility and don’t have reproducibility steps. We’ve not had those kinds of issues from GAT."
Localization tests for new markets
"We're expanding to multiple new markets" said Roman. "Our releases are frequent is that all of the device testing, language testing, functional testing, it’s all done by Global App Testing. So we can release quickly."
"We’ve recently launched a multilingual website. We support Dutch, French, English, and Italy is on the way. The translation testing… including our email and SMS communications... has the potential to derail the release schedule. But it doesn't."
The results
We saved airportr one day per sprint cycle
By example, we’ve recently launched a multilingual website. We support Dutch, French, English, and Italy is on the way. The translation testing… including our email communications… it’s a small thing, but it’s very time consuming. We wouldn’t be able to do the releases on time.
The only reason our releases are frequent is that all of the device testing, language testing, functional testing, it’s all done by Global App Testing. So we can release quickly.
“I have saved a day worth of testing per sprint cycle…. I used to push a release on a Wednesday. Now I push it on a Tuesday. That’s the difference.”
As part of this, airportr automated an additional 15% of tests
We asked Roman whether he'd been able to use the spare time to focus on increased test automation. “We use automation tools where our basic test cases gets executed nightly. That helps us minimize a lot of our regression… but we’re still working on building up the automated test suite. We’ve probably got 15% of tests automated. That’s up from 0% before engaging with GAT.
NPS hits 90%
"NPS is vital to Airportr," said Roman, "If you don't have trust in our product, nobody is going to use it. We have TrustPilot, and you can see all our customers’ feedback and NPS score publicly. We think that transparency is really important. Our NPS score is high – about 90%. We’ve never been below 80%, and we’re really proud of hitting that 90% mark. That’s 90% for both customers and our delivery drivers, by the way. "
"Global App Testing has supported this. There’s loads of examples: in addition to what I’ve mentioned so far, there’s been translation errors you’ve found which would have actually misled customers. It was so important that those errors never went live."
"We’ve definitely increasing our number of repeat users, almost as fast as our number of new users is increasing."
A higher-quality application for airportr
But the best most satisfying result of engaging with Global App Testing has been that each time we've tested the platform, we've found fewer bugs.
"I have come across some of the blockers produced by Global App Testing which could have impacted the whole audience… where the severity was very high. One was on the payments page, and would have prevented users from paying. One was the core signup flow as an airport.com user, so would have been seen by the majority of customers. And lots of the bugs were device-specific, and wouldn’t have been caught by our own QAs.
To be honest, I used to get 30-40 bugs in every test cycle from Global App Testing. Now we find far fewer. It's been 2 years… and I can see our progress of each of the test cycles. So we’re producing significantly better quality software now. "