Case Study: Alaska Airlines achieves repeatable, reliable testing and eliminates false positives with Parasoft Virtualize

Alaska Airlines Solves the Test Environment Dilemma

Alaska Airlines, a major West Coast carrier serving Alaska, Hawaii, Canada and Mexico, faced a testing crisis: their flight operations manager — which coordinates thousands of flights and dozens of dependent systems — relied on a shared, constantly changing environment and multiple databases that updated at different frequencies, making repeatable, reliable testing nearly impossible. These complex dependencies and volatile test environments caused persistent debugging, false positives, and slowed development for Ryan Papineau’s testing team.

The team decoupled the flight manager using service virtualization with Parasoft Virtualize, capturing real requests/responses and virtualizing each key subsystem while managing test data with IBM Optim and custom T‑SQL transforms to create a “Groundhog Day” 24‑hour dataset. Running seven parallel virtualized environments, they now execute 500 on‑demand automated test cases that are 100% reliable and repeatable, eliminated false positives, reduced wait times, and scaled testing without tying up production resources.

Alaska Airlines

Ryan Papineau

Senior Software Engineer