The airline wanted to move to an Agile development model, but its SCM tool made it impossible. To provide more agility and order to its Microsoft .NET development processes, Alaska Airlines turned to Micro Focus AccuRev.
“AccuRev provides our teams with greater visibility into the current state of our release cycle than our previous SCM tool and enables our Agile development process better than any other SCM tool could have, increasing team productivity by magnitudes.”
CHRIS BARNES
Senior Systems Analyst and AccuRev Administrator
Alaska Airlines
Aerospace/Defense
United States
Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air together serve 92 cities through an expansive network throughout Alaska, the lower 48, Hawaii, Canada, and Mexico. Known for embracing innovative technology to improve the customer experience, Alaska Airlines has won numerous awards for its frequent flyer program and eCommerce website.
For years, Alaska Air used a file-based branch and label SCM tool that required a lot of manual processes to prepare source code for deployment. The processes worked but were time-consuming and were unable to support the company’s plans to move to Agile. Alaska Air conducted a thorough assessment as it evaluated 18 SCM tools, six of which were brought in for more extensive demos, and two finalists were invited in for pilot programs: AccuRev and Perforce.
In May 2006, the airline selected AccuRev to be at the center of its best-of-breed application lifecycle management (ALM) strategy to provide more agility and order for developers, business analysts, quality assurance (QA) engineers, production services, and business intelligence (BI) staff to manage its Microsoft Windows .NET development activities.
Twelve teams are using AccuRev. Among them are those managing the eCommerce website (alaskaair.com), Flight Operations including dispatching, the Alaska Airlines frequent flyer system, Finance and Corporate Business Intelligence Strategy. In total, nearly 1,000 applications for 80 to 100 projects are managed by AccuRev, providing a secure, centralized repository to increase reuse, auditability, artifact traceability, and reproducibility. In essence, tickets are purchased, planes are kept flying and customers’ flying habits are tracked, which keeps the revenue flowing.
Alaska Airlines employs Agile practices, including an iterative process, and for some teams promotes in AccuRev automatically trigger a build using CruiseControl in the range of hundreds per day.
While most development organizations will perform Continuous Integration only from the mainline due to the limitations of their filebased source control tool, Alaska Air is able to perform multistage Continuous Integration using AccuRev’s built-in stream-based hierarchical model.
Two of the 12 development teams are currently employing Continuous Integration, the Architecture group and Flight Operations, one of the most mission-critical applications managed by AccuRev. Teams there will first promote to an integration test stream, where there’s an automated build. Once unit testing is completed on that test stream, teams will promote it up to a QA level stream, and there will be another build at that level.
Alaska Air uses the AccuRev cross-stream linking feature and takes advantage of the ability to redefine references in Visual Studio 2005, so that its developers can automatically inherit the latest version of shared DLLs. The architecture team in particular develops a lot of common DLLs, which used to be a manual process. Teams would have to send emails to alert everyone that there was a new version of a particular DLL. Developers can now promote it up to the depot level and then crosslink it into all their sub-streams. Whenever there is a new version, they just promote it up and it automatically gets inherited down into all the development teams’ streams or the workspaces that use it. Alaska Air can now be 100% certain that developers have the latest correct DLLs at compile or build time.
One of the tenets of Continuous Integration is that builds which get released to production do not happen on the developers’ machines, but on a build server. Alaska Air is using VMware virtualization software from EMC to create a farm of build servers in which AccuRev and CruiseControl will automatically trigger a build upon each code promotion.
Virtualization is rapidly becoming a standard part of the deployment platform in IT organizations because the technology provides tangible benefits in terms of both capital cost reductions and operational flexibility. This is spurring CIOs to push for more rapid adoption of enterprise applications that fully support server virtualization. The AccuRev server application, which runs on most Microsoft Windows, Linux and UNIX platforms, does not embed itself into the operating system (OS) kernel and does not require special I/O services, so it does not have to be installed on an isolated server. This improves an organization’s strategic initiative to leverage computing resources and makes it much easier to maintain in a modern IT infrastructure than many traditional SCM tools.