IcelandAir, Iceland’s flag carrier, partnered with Dreamix to carry out a major platform migration. In doing so, they identified the opportunity to set up a more reliable and scalable QA practice. Dreamix helped them build a QA practice from the ground up - defining the strategy, establishing standards, and implementing the tooling to support it. Within the first three weeks, the team caught five critical defects before they reached production, and the new testing framework is saving an estimated 1,500-2,000 hours of manual effort every year.
The Story of our Partner
Our partner, IcelandAir, is Iceland’s flag carrier and a leader in the competitive transatlantic aviation market. With a fleet of 42 aircraft and transporting 4.7 million passengers annually, the Reykjavik-based carrier has built its business model around Iceland's position as a natural midpoint between North America and Europe.
With over 3000 employees, the airline has become synonymous with accessible transatlantic travel. IcelandAir is recognized as one of Europe's most punctual airlines during peak travel seasons - a reflection of their operational efficiency. With a focus on continuous innovation, IcelandAir continues to modernize its fleet and expand its network of destinations across both continents.
The Challenge
IcelandAir was in the middle of migrating away from a legacy integration platform toward a more modern, service-based architecture built around Windmill. This kind of initiative creates a natural opening to rethink how testing and quality assurance are done.
Testing responsibilities were distributed across multiple roles. As the platform expanded, the flag carrier’s team recognised that a more structured, consistent approach would help them move faster and with greater confidence. With dozens of services(including Salesforce) interacting across APIs, automation tools, and backend systems, there was a clear opportunity to build something more scalable.
The Dreamix Solution
We started by embedding QA directly into the development process via a shift-left approach, rather than treating it as a final checkpoint. That meant getting involved early, during requirements analysis, to define clear acceptance criteria and standardised test plans that all teams could work from.
From there, we built an automated testing framework designed specifically for the Windmill platform. The framework gave teams a ready-made structure for validating their workflows and services, without each team needing to build their own testing infrastructure from scratch. We designed it to be scalable from the start, so new teams could adopt it as the platform grew.
We connected automated tests directly to the development workflow. Tests run on every proposed change, with results posted directly in the developer's workspace for immediate review. A broader set of regression tests runs overnight, and teams receive a summary each morning, giving them a clear picture of system health before the day begins.
We also established consistent test documentation standards and led the evaluation and adoption of a centralised test management platform, giving the organisation a single source of truth for test coverage across all teams.
As the practice matured, we expanded our automation capabilities to cover UI and end-to-end testing using Playwright - a framework we selected for its speed, scalability, and ability to handle the full application flow in a single framework.
The Results
The impact was fast and measurable. Within the first three weeks, the team caught five critical defects before they reached production, exactly the kind of early visibility the new practice was designed to create.
The automated testing framework is saving an estimated 1,500-2,000 hours of manual testing effort annually, freeing teams to focus on building and improving services rather than manually checking them.
IcelandAir now has a documented, scalable QA practice built to grow alongside the platform. Teams ship with greater confidence, issues surface earlier, and the organisation has the foundation it needs to keep expanding without adding risk.
