Shruthi Ballal is the Lead QA of Booking dot com’s Flights booking application. She works with Global App Testing to ensure that the experience of users in the businesses’ top ten countries are exceptional. Here’s how we worked to save her 60-70% of her time.
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The company
Founded in 1996 in Amsterdam, booking.com has a mission to make it easier for everyone to experience the world.
We spoke with Shruthi Ballal, the QA lead for the flights part of booking dot com. “We help customers from the start to the finish [of their holiday]” Shruthi told us. “That’s the goal.” A cutthroat online competitor market in flights makes an incredible UX essential.
“If they land on it and it’s buggy… they will just move on to some other product.”
The challenges
- The volume of QA work
- The international tester challenge
- Getting accessibility testing into process
Too much QA, too few QAs
The simplest challenge Shruthi faces is the volume of work. “The developer-to-tester ratio was challenging to navigate.” Booking dot com Flights was launched in 2018 – and a surge of development work wasn’t matched with a surge of internal QA"
“There was so much work to do… we weren’t always able to keep up. Given the range of devices and countries it would be my whole job.”
Worldwide quality issues
The simplest challenge Shruthi faces is the volume of work. “The developer-to-tester ratio was challenging to navigate.” Booking dot com Flights was launched in 2018 – and a surge of development work wasn’t matched with a surge of internal QA"“There was so much work to do… we weren’t always able to keep up. Given the range of devices and countries it would be my whole job. One challenge before we approached GAT is international testing. We have features which are specific to certain locations. In Brazil, you have the Pay in Installments feature, for example.”
Shruthi told me that the QA team just wasn’t set up to handle international testing.
“We didn’t have the ability to test on the cross-section of devices and locations that were important to us.”
Poor accessibility interrupting development plans
Not only is accessibility key to the values of booking.com, but the deadline for countries in the EU to comply the European accessibility guideline is in 2025, meaning that sites like booking.com have to get accessible as soon as possible. What was the best way to get booking dot com’s values into its workflows?
Global App Testing delivered a bespoke solution to booking dot com which was tailored to their challenges and goals.
We delivered scalable, easy-to-use QA resource
The communication is great, says Shruthi. “We have meetings every other wednesday… we can chat to them on Slack like we would somebody within the company. It’s easy to communicate.” “The reports are superb…. the proper steps [to reproduce a bug] are there, the videos are there, all the communication be the report, the team, the feedback… the developers love it.”
"There are lots of bugs GAT found for us to work on."
Booking.com unlocked 10 countries and all user devices
Booking dot com has scaled testing to its eleven most popular countries overnight. “There’s a lot of changes [in those countries]... so constantly there are new features being released. There’s releases, experiments, and live products.”
Booking.com do a range of test cases and exploratory tests to safeguard the international product from regression and deliver a seamless product experience to their clients. They recently “tested on the beta version of iOS… it’s challenging to have enough devices in-house to test a beta version, so that’s a huge relief. There are a lot of bugs GAT has found for us to work on.”
Global App Testing pioneered booking.com's accessibility strategy
Booking dot com had no resource to do accessibility testing internally. And with european accessibility legislation looming, Shruthi asked GAT to help. “Elsewhere we have function and localization teams testing… but nothing in accessibility.”
Booking dot com organized a series of accessibility audits for its product to assess the content and web against the four pillars of the WCAG accessibility guidelines: perceivability, operability, understandability, robustness. The plan was to help deliver accessibility bugs and formalize it as part of the booking dot com process, and avoid building accessibility debt into the app.
The results
We save Shruthi 60-70% of her time
“Given there’s so many countries, and so many different products for one person… it saves 60-70% of my time. I’m really glad Global App Testing is there to help with delivery. Saving that time allows me to focus more on strategy and planning in QA rather than just test execution.”
“Their bug detail, combined with the sophisticated targeting options, mean that we can get the confidence we need that the UX is perfect on every device and country that’s important to us”
We enabled Booking.com to achieve their accessibility goals
“Accessibility testing has been great… in terms of the quality of the bugs we've got really good bugs. We’ve had critical bugs we weren’t finding internally from accessibility testing. It has been very beneficial to do accessibility testing with GAT. That’s one of booking dot com’s main goals this year… to make the product more accessible. And GAT has helped us deliver it.”
“Now we’ve solved the accessibility debt the product had and we’ve got a partner for ongoing support on continued accessibility testing.”
We've driven global growth for Booking.com
GAT has helped Booking dot com achieve its quality processes around the world.
“For iOS and Android, we now run tests every week now, and earlier on [in the SDLC]. It used to be every 15 days for functional regressions – but now it’s every week, because we release twice a week. Things have changed since we started using GAT… we’ve built bigger teams [and grown the product]. Our workload just keeps increasing, but we know that we can handle any level of growth.”
“I really think that the improvements in the UX we’ve been able to make have underpinned the growth we’ve been seeing in all our top markets. We’re grateful to GAT for supporting that.”