ANA reduces human labor by 1000 hours using CircleCI

ANA Group is integrating its system platforms to provide seamless passenger services

Specifically, ANA will integrate the domestic passenger service system, which was previously built and operated on-premises, into the SaaS-type passenger service system provided by Amadeus. By centrally managing reservations for domestic and international flights, the company aims to further improve customer convenience by linking customer information between booking confirmations on the website, applications for various services, and transfer procedures at the airport. Even in the event of changes or delays in flight schedules, information will be provided quickly via the ANA app, email, and SNS.

In an era where people and goods are moving around the world, separating systems for domestic and international flights is no longer the optimal solution. ANA will not only improve customer convenience, but also improve the efficiency of internal operations and promote digital transformation. “The Next Domestic Passenger Project was launched and ANA is developing a system as a transformation support partner for ANA Group’s existing and new businesses,” said Toshiaki Maeda of ANA Systems.

Eliminates issues faced by traditional CI/CD tools

Since the project’s inception, the company has been proactively strengthening its systems and processes with an eye toward building a DevSecOps system. As part of this, they introduced CircleCI.

“CircleCI is the de facto standard for CI/CD tools with a rich global track record and an active user community. The advantage is that it is easy to obtain a variety of information for utilization. Also, since it is a SaaS-type service, the initial cost is low. The deciding factor was that it could be used in a controlled manner and that maintenance and operation would be hassle-free,” says Mr. Maeda regarding the reasons for choosing the system.

This is not the first time the company has introduced CI/CD tools. It is said that OSS CI/CD tools have been utilized for the existing systems handled by ANA Systems. However, existing tools had limited functionality and were unable to achieve the extensive automation of testing, build, and deployment that the company was seeking.

“Many processes such as program code merging, building, and regression testing were performed manually. This made it essential to have members specialized in library management, which caused work delays and issues such as being able to release only at specific times,” Maeda recalled.

Therefore, the company conducted a PoC for about a month to verify CircleCI’s functionality and have confirmed that the development process can be significantly automated.

CircleCI also supports many execution environments such as Linux, MacOS, Windows, Docker, GPU, and Arm. The testing tool can also be integrated with frameworks such as Jest, Mocha, pytest, JUnit, Selenium, and XCTest. “Our company handles both front-end and back-end system development. We felt that the ability to build an environment that matches the characteristics of each system was a good fit for our business,” said Kyohei Iwata of ANA Systems.

Reduced man-hours by 1000 hours per month

The progress of the Next Domestic Passenger Project directly overlaps with the company’s progress in utilizing CircleCI. Since the start of its use, many advantges have been realized.

The first significant finding is the reduction in human labor. The manual work required by library administrators in each process from build to testing to deployment has been reduced to almost zero. In particular, testing has been significantly automated, including regression testing, which previously could not be automated.

“Tests are automatically started when you push the modified source code. This not only improves development efficiency, but also prevents omissions in tests that tend to occur during manual testing,” says Iwata. Overall, a total of 300 people use CircleCI per month, and the reduction in man-hours is approximately 1,000 hours on average.

Another major benefit is increased efficiency in security verification. Previously, the company conducted security verification immediately before the application went live, resulting in major rework if a flaw was discovered. “With CircleCI, by incorporating security verification tools during testing, we are able to perform verification from an earlier stage and more frequently. This reduces major rework,” says Iwata.

The company also takes advantage of paid premium support provided by CircleCI. Among other things, code reviews by CircleCI experts are especially helpful.

“They understand our needs, such as shortening the time to deployment and reducing credit usage, and provide advice on writing pipeline source code that meets our goals. We receive in-depth support and feel that this has enabled us to implement a very efficient pipeline,” emphasizes Iwata.

As of May 2023, the Next Domestic Passenger Project is still in progress and the company will continue to explore more advanced ways to use CircleCI and derive even greater benefits.

“Currently, CircleCI is only applied to the development system, but in the future we would like to apply it to releases to the production environment as well. In the production environment, there are strict requirements depending on the timing of testing and release. However, I think CircleCI can be applied without any problems,” said Mr. Iwata, “making it possible to eliminate vulnerabilities in applications in production and speed up maintenance response.”

In addition, for the Next Domestic Passenger Project, we are also proceeding with a transformation from a huge monolithic system to a microservices architecture. Under these circumstances, the company’s important missions include further improving development productivity, increasing speed, and optimizing costs. CircleCI’s strengths should come into play here as well. “We look forward to continued strong support,” Maeda said in conclusion.

About ANA Systems Co., Ltd.

ANA Systems Co., Ltd. (official website) As an IT company under the umbrella of ANA Holdings, are responsible for the design and development of information processing systems and communication systems.