Skyscanner

The challenge

Skyscanner is a global travel marketplace that provides search and travel booking capabilities, including flights, hotels, and car hire to more than 100 million people monthly. Operating in 30 languages, Skyscanner’s search engine and indexing technology locates the best travel options and transfers users to the supplier’s website to make their booking directly.

After the pandemic, the development team at Skyscanner started to scale its tools and resources across its offices strategically. Their goal was to maintain consistent quality in their development practices and ensure that the codebase contributions were consistent across time zones. They wanted developers across the organization to know and understand code quality standards and best practices so their software would continue to perform for a growing number of post-pandemic users.

The solution

The Skyscanner development team initially built a homegrown solution to address specific code quality issues. But when it came to scaling across the organization, they knew they needed a solution that could withstand the demands of multiple teams while also supporting developers in their code quality efforts. After a proof of concept, SonarQube Cloud’s SaaS capabilities proved to be what Skyscanner needed to roll out its Clean Code initiative.

Skyscanner also chose SonarQube Cloud because it seamlessly integrated into their complex project ecosystem. Where past tools had yet to assimilate into their infrastructure and required manual configuration, SonarQube Cloud allowed for increased speed of integration and needed less maintenance overall.

SonarQube Cloud is a secure and scalable code analysis SaaS solution built on top of AWS cloud services. It integrates with popular DevOps platforms like Amazon CodeCatalyst, GitHub, and GitLab to analyze code and identify maintainability, reliability, and security issues on every merge/pull request. Leveraging services like Amazon S3, AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Aurora and Amazon DynamoDB, SonarQube Cloud allows customers to build high-quality, secure applications faster within their DevOps processes.

Once the integration was complete, the platform team laid out a clear change management plan to help ensure SonarQube Cloud’s quick and easy adoption by developers into their daily coding practices. They performed an initial code analysis and dedicated time to evaluating and aligning the team’s standards and static analysis rules with Sonar’s documentation and guidance. Then, they slowly rolled SonarQube Cloud out across 10 teams in several time zones that all contribute to a single codebase to support their iOS and Android mobile applications.

The results

Skyscanner has seen immediate success with Sonar in streamlining its efforts to improve the quality of its codebase, facilitating communication, satisfying developers, and meeting delivery expectations. Not only do Skyscanner developers use SonarQube for IDE to assist them in writing code in their IDE, but they also use SonarQube Cloud’s automated code reviews to prompt regular discussions and collaboration to address issues proactively. With the help of SonarQube Cloud and the Sonar Clean as You Code methodology, Skyscanner developers stay focused on the quality of new code, or code that’s changed in the process, which has led to a decrease in their total number of issues and an increase in precision in their continuous integration.

Additionally, Skyscanner’s management team now has insight into the most impactful metrics for making business decisions. They can quickly review the status of the current release without getting bogged down by the details. Skyscanner’s developers gain confidence in their code quality by blending the Sonar API, SonarQube Cloud, and internal tools. At the same time, the management team gets consistent information that helps confirm delivery expectations and create more valuable software for their users.