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How Virgin Atlantic used Codex to ship its revamped mobile app on a fixed holiday travel deadline, reaching near-total unit test coverage and zero P1 defects.
Virgin Atlantic used Codex to strengthen test coverage, accelerate refactoring, and ship customer-facing software with greater confidence.
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.
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.