Southwest Airlines – Lead Web UI Developer @ Globant

About the Job
At
Client	Southwest Airlines
Role	Lead Web UI Developer
Location	Dallas, TX, USA
Duration	7 months September 2019 – March 2020
Summary	Participated in the development of a Web Application for managing payments of Southwest Business loyalty customers

Globant

Globant is an IT and Software Development company headquartered in Argentina that operates in over 14 countries across the Americas, Europe and Asia. With a roster of world-class clients, many of which are at the forefront of emerging technologies. I relocated to Dallas, Texas in September of 2019 where I was assigned to the client Southwest Airlines to work the role of On-site Lead Web UI Developer for one of the oldest living teams of Globant, Dragon POD.

Southwest Airlines

Southwest Airlines is a major american airline headquartered in Dallas, Texas, and is the world’s largest low-cost carrier. With more than 60,000 employees and 4,000 flights every day serving to 101 destinations in the United States and 10 additional countries.

The mission of Southwest Airlines is dedication to the highest quality of customer service delivered with a sense of warmth, friendliness, individual pride and company spirit. Its purpose is to connect People to what’s important in their lives through friendly, reliable, and low-cost air travel. And its vision is to become the world’s most loved, most efficient and most profitable airline.

Corporate Payment Management

This was a project that belonged to the Southwest Business branch of the Marketing Department, an area that promoted loyalty programs for corporate clients. By providing corporations with SWABIZ Ghost Cards, employees were able to book flights paying with their company’s resources instead of their own, all of this while also benefiting from the regular loyalty program Rapid Rewards.

By using the Ghost Card feature, travelers belonging to a client company could charge their reservations to the company’s credit card without ever revealing the credit card’s account or billing information. This saved managers and travelers time and money on reimbursement and administrative costs.

For this product, my team was tasked with the job of migrating the old legacy Web Application for managing Ghost Cards to the state of the art “Vision” framework, a suite of tools and components that had been recently developed by the Southwest.com area for providing the means to build Single Page Applications compatible with Southwest Airlines’ corporate image and standards, as well as supporting all the quality features required for every customer facing page offered by the website.

The Experience

As a Globant contractor I joined Southwest Airlines to participate as a Web UI Developer in one of the best development teams in the Southwest.com department. I started this assignment in September of 2019 and ended in March of 2020 after the unfortunate decision by Southwest of terminating relations with all contractors due to the novel Coronavirus pandemic that struck the world in 2020 and almost fatally reduced airline operations and revenue.

I was lucky to participate in the Southwest.com area of the Technology department, which was the area in charge of building the User Interface of the airline’s customer facing website and the main channel of sales revenue. Because of the company’s culture of customer appreciation, where they see themselves as a Customer Service company rather than an airline, I got to experience what that meant in the day to day tasks required to participate of the development process of the website. Every piece of code at Southwest was heavily scrutinized, with enforced high quality standards, proper Quality Assurance and change control processes for managing production deployment.

My team, Dragon POD, was conformed of amazing professionals with varied responsibilities and roles. About 20 members of the team were off-shore, in Resistencia, Argentina; and our on-site team communicated with them only through online means. One of the roles I adopted which provided a lot of value to the team was to act as a messenger to help with communication between the client at headquarters and the rest of the team in Argentina.

The team composition was the following

• On-site
  • Product Owner – Southwest Airlines
  • Project Manager – Southwest Airlines
  • Tech Lead – Globant
  • Business Analyst – Globant
  • Web UI Developer Lead – Globant
  • Quality Assurance Engineer – Third Party

• Off-shore – All Globant
  • Tech Lead
  • Project Manager
  • 2 Business Analyst
  • 4 Quality Assurance Engineer
  • 4 Web UI Developers
  • 4 Java Developers

Unfortunately the project was not delivered to completion. At the start of 2020 the world was struck by the Coronavirus Pandemic that forced people to do Social Distancing, stay home avoiding going out at all, and stop flying altogether. Because of this, Southwest Airlines was hit with a decrease on revenue and flights that forced it to terminate relationship with all contractors, prompting Globant’s exit from Southwest as a vendor. The project was therefore suspended at around 40% of completion.

Achievements

• Developed Single Page Application for corporate loyalty customers to manage their companies credit card payments
• Learned to work with a team conformed by more than 20 high quality professionals working off-shore and effectively communicating with them online
• Learned to deliver software features in a complex ecosystem where many actors were involved at different steps of the process with their specific roles, such as Business Analysis, Quality Assurance, Test Automation, Release Management, Environment Operation, among other stakeholders
• Got to participate and be integrated in a rich corporate culture with Southwest, a company with more than 50 years of operation following strong corporate values
• Web UI was built with full WCAG 2.1 AA and ACAA Accessibility compliance
• Used and deepen knowledge of React, Flux, AJAX, Gulp, Karma, NVDA and Scrum Agile Methodology

Technology used

• Accessibility (A11Y)
• Agile
• AJAX
• Apache HTTP Server
• AWS
• Axe
• Babel
• BEM Smacss
• Bitbucket
• Browserify
• Business Analysis
• Chai
• Confluence
• Continuous Delivery
• Continuous Integration
• CSS
• Docker
• EJB
• Enterprise
• ES6
• ESlint
• Flux
• Git
• Gitflow
• Gulp
• Hibernate
• I18N
• IntelliJ Idea
• Java
• Java EE
• Javascript
• Jenkins
• JIRA
• JPA
• JSON
• JSP
• JSTL
• JUnit
• JWT
• Karma
• Linux
• Lodash
• Mocha
• Moment
• MySQL
• NVDA
• Quality Control
• React
• Rest
• Sass
• Screen Reader
• Scrum
• Single Page Application (SPA)
• Sinon
• Sonar
• SOX Compliance
• Spring
• Spring Boot
• SQL
• SSH
• SVG
• Tomcat
• Yarn