Travel / Emirates

Leading airline embarks on an Agile transformation journey to maintain their reputation for high-quality, modern service.

One of the world’s largest and most reputable airlines realized the strategic need to modernize their software development infrastructures and processes to continue providing leading and refined services for their 60 million passengers. Emirates chose TribalScale for our best-in-class, proprietary process, and years of experience transforming the world’s biggest brands into leaders in modern, cloud-native, software development and delivery.

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Challenge

The business problem

Emirates integrated some aspects of Agile development into their software teams and processes, but they needed experienced, external help to make Agile stick. While incremental improvements were made, they wanted to kick their reliance on waterfall methods to reduce lead times, tackle technical debt, and improve product quality. Emirates needed to:

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Elevate IT from a cost centre to a business enabler

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Shift from on-premises to cloud infrastructures

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Reshape their software development process and adopt an iterative, flexible, collaborative approach

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Understand the value of, and practice engaging users through the development and release phases

Key results

4.6 ratings on both App Store and Google Play

Lowest crash rate ever recorded

500% increase in TDD

Solution

The business solution

Instead of singular presentations and consulting sessions, a TribalScale transformation involves hands-on, collaborative work, and coaching in the context of a specific project. We thereby instil a sense of applicability and practicality to the engagement. Further, our method ensures that a transformation engagement is tailored and suited to the given team, and their unique goals and challenges.

BASELINE ASSESSMENTS

We establish a benchmark for the people, processes, and tools to identify challenges and opportunity areas. Then, we track progress throughout to guarantee a successful transformation.

PAIR PROGRAMMING

A TribalScale Agile engineer operates on the same computer as an Emirates engineer — one entering in the code and the other reviewing and planning ahead. This allows for knowledge transfer and produces higher quality code, resiliency, and extensibility.

AGILE AND XP PROCESSES AND RITUALS

Through pairing, we scaled extreme programming (XP) throughout, and embedded test-driven development (TDD), unit testing, and modern architectures into the Emirates development process.

EMBEDDED APPROACH

With a dedicated team onsite, we provide day-to-day coaching and comprehensive delivery support to ensure Emirates is able to maintain and build upon their code once the engagement has concluded.

Technologies

• Cloud infrastructure
• Build through MVP
• Cyclical and iterative development

Outcome

How the business benefited

Beyond transformation of Emirates’ delivery processes and teams, we helped both of Emirates’ mobile teams achieve better code quality and revamp their delivery practices for long-term success — and in four months. We rebuilt the app architectures and launched an online check-in feature on both iOS and Android. After scaling XP practices throughout, TribalScale and Emirates noticed huge improvements in efficiency of processes and quality of software products — including an estimated 500% increase in TDD and unit testing. The product was high quality, delivered on time, and had the lowest crash rate ever recorded by Emirates.

Our partnership with Emirates is ongoing. We continue to help Emirates transform their practices and create a culture of continuous learning. We are empowering them to create high-quality, innovative experiences for their customers.

Pairing really helps speed up development when one person has more context about the code than the other.”

Product Team

Emirates

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