Chapter 15. Sabre Airline Solutions
Sabre Airline Solutions offers software and services to help airlines plan, operate, and sell their products. They are an early adopter of Extreme Programming and Specification by Example and an interesting case study because they applied SBE on a massive project, with a relatively large distributed team.
The project was Sabre AirCentre Movement Manager, a software system that monitors airline operations and alerts the relevant teams when it finds issues, allowing them to adjust schedules to minimize the impact to customers and the airline. According to Wes Williams, an agile coach at Sabre, two previous projects to build similar systems failed because of the domain complexity and quality issues. Specification by Example enabled them to complete this project successfully.
Because of the complexity of the domain, the teams at Sabre were looking for a collaborative way to specify and automate acceptance testing soon after implementing Extreme Programming. Williams said that they initially tried to do it with a technical unit-testing tool. That approach didn’t help with collaboration and it wasn’t reusable, so they abandoned it.