How Virgin Atlantic ships faster with Codex

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.

“The ability to utilize Codex to improve the quality of the application before it got into the hands of our customers was a game-changer for us.”

—Neil Letchford, Vice President, Digital Engineering

Landing the rollout

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.

“These are really interesting conversations from an enterprise perspective when we’re talking to our leadership team, trying to tell everyone that it’s all green for launch,” Letchford says. “These are new things we’re not used to doing. Things don’t get delayed when we’re using Codex.”

Beyond the mobile app

The same kind of improvements are showing up for legacy code. Codebases the team had maintained for years are now being refactored in hours instead of weeks. “We’re seeing in some instances anywhere from 78 to 80% reduction in codebase size from utilizing Codex,” Letchford says.

The velocity is starting to outpace the rest of the delivery process. In a recent sprint, one of the team’s lead front-end developers (a heavy Codex user) built a complete, working front-end application from a Figma prototype in a week, with the backend stubbed out. “The complaint I got from the Scrum master was that we didn’t even have our backend tickets ready to start working on,” Letchford says.

The velocity is carrying over to the data side as well. “Codex has really helped us unblock and de-risk various migrations of databases onto our core data warehouse,” says Richard Masters, VP of Data and AI. With Codex, analyst teams can now prototype internal applications directly against the company’s data warehouse.

“You can develop that data through to a prototype in a matter of literally a couple of hours, or within a workshop even,” Masters says. Teams across network planning, customer experience, and engineering & maintenance are now building their own internal applications with Codex, rather than routing requests through the central Data and AI team.

“We’re seeing gains in the refactoring space where a two-week piece of work now maybe takes about 30 minutes to an hour.”

—Neil Letchford, Vice President, Digital Engineering

What’s next

Codex is reshaping how Virgin Atlantic ships software: from the apps customers use at the gate to the data platforms behind them. The next question for Letchford is what to do when engineering moves faster than the rest of the delivery process.

“How do we start scaling this up, not just in pockets, but across that whole software development lifecycle?” he says. “It’s a really interesting and a good problem to have.”

“The trajectory of Codex is thinking beyond pure engineers. It’s moving into a real tool for everyone.”

—Richard Masters, Vice President, Data and AI