channa

Not at all. There are many people on this forum who make their living at executing upgrades, migrations, implementations, etc. as flawlessly as possible, so it can be done. A Fortune 100 company should have the resources and technical expertise to handle a production move such as this with minimal flaws.

This is not a simple, flat 10-page corporate website for some 10-person company that's managed by some "IT Guy." This is an Fortune 100 e-commerce site that should have a team of highly qualified staff supporting it, with the right leadership to come up with a test and migration plan to get the job done right the first time.

Regardless of how much you want to trivialize it, there is no excuse for this sort of thing, given what's at stake. And when you point out that CO is a Fortune 100 company, there's even less of an excuse.

How much revenue does CO make off its website in any given day?

Olton Hall

I wonder how much money they are loosing in lost ticket sales because people are getting frustrated and switching to other airline websites? Remember, most people do not have airline loyalties like people on FT.

entropy

We're not being harsh. If they tested it, the site wouldn't be in shambles like it is. I think they rushed to get it out the door.

Mary2e

Has Continental gone Six Sigma?

If so, that explains it. It was management driven, and heaven help the poor employee who said the planned due date couldn't be done.

suzanneaustin

Oh, noooo! Now all of my reservations are gone, too! Somebody help us!

kingalien

Sorry Cigarman, we are not even close to being harsh. When CO starts to violate privacy of others (showing itineraries other than your own) no amount of criticism is considered way harsh.

Germanfflyer

ALL saved reservation are gone and NOT A SINGLE one can be pulled up manually!!!!

Nesta

Call it what it is. Most of the people in this forum are CO supporters. These aren't folks that get off on bashing CO (for the most part). Even the biggest CO cheerleader has to acknowledge that this upgrade was pretty shoddy. I work at a Fortune 50 financial firm and if our IT folks rolled out something like this they would undoubtedly be printing out their resumes and cleaning out their desks.

With a site such as CO's you need to make sure you have power users put it through its paces before going live. So many of these bugs are embarrassingly basic that one can only conclude that no "real" beta testing was performed.

channa

Shamefully, I must admit, for the first time in history, united.com is working better than continental.com.

ijgordon

I can't recall whether, in the last 200+ posts, someone has commented on whether OLCI works. Given the problems finding reservations and changing seat assignments, seems like OLCI could be a disaster, unless it runs off a different platform.

Anyone? I'm curious.

Nicksterguy

ROTF LMAO

jguidera

I like the new look, the speed seems to be better. But it took me about 5 minutes to start finding the serious bugs. It's seemingly lost all of my reservations (including two purchased reservations, one template and one not yet confirmed). There appears to be no way to review past reservations (wonder how you go in and handle a past cancelled reservation that you should be able to select and pay the 100 change fee on).... Seemingly once again QA efforts clearly could have used some work.

DawgmanOH

Sorry, but there is NO excuse for letting me see someone else's itinerary (or for anyone to see mine). I can browse through personal info, see phone numbers, cancel the reservation, etc.

This is NOT a minor issue and is totally inexcusable. Since it has been brought up in this thread previously, I can assume CO does not care because they have not turned off the site yet. It is not ready for prime time and is probably violating several privacy laws.

Anyone able to see a couple of trips to Orlando that aren't theres? Probably mine.

bocastephen

Most likely their internal testing processes followed a fixed test plan - a preconceived set of tests that users would run through and report their findings. The results we're seeing seem to indicate the test plan was too narrow and the load too insufficient to offer accurate feedback.

This type of testing is one-dimensional and tends to uncover the most obvious bugs. What was not done, as far as we can tell, is open-ended testing...letting users bang away on the site doing all types of transactions in their own way, under high load, without a test plan to follow. That type of unstructured testing is able to uncover far more little bugs (and many major ones too).

For example, my team is currently doing such a test now as we qualify new products for deployment into our infrastructure. We have a stable of users who use the new systems when asked, we have a basic test plan which asks users to cover certain minimum procedures, but beyond that, they are on their own and we just want them to hit the new systems as much and as hard as they can, while reporting every bug they find.

I don't think anyone is really trying to bash CO here - we're all compiling and reporting bugs and providing feedback so CO can fix things for the rest of their customers and have a successful site because we care, but many of these bugs are very annoying, potentially dangerous, and one of the issues that frustrates me is the feeling that our offer to beta test the site wasn't taken seriously enough. Many of these 'live' bugs would have been corrected long before the site saw the light of day.

I have to agree with the others, at this point there are way too many bugs for the site to remain live and the old site should be brought back while the new site is shuttled off to a private link for us FTers and internal CO folks to test and bugfix. There is still time to do that.

I agree with Channa - too many different changes all happening at the same time. I strongly disagree with the change to .NET - marrying into a Microsoft product line for web development will tie one into a closed-source system that could impede Continental's ability to quickly and nimbly deploy new technologies and process improvements both internally and externally. Microsoft is great for desktop operating systems, office productivity and file servers, but for something like web infrastructure, you want more nimble technology options and the stability and security of a UNIX-based backend.

booker_26

I checked in for my flights yesterday (Sunday, July 30) from AUS to TPA via IAH using OLCI and had no problems. Was even upgraded for my IAH-TPA leg. Just clicked the "check-in now" button beside the reservation and it all came together.

So far the new site hasn't puked on me, but from the sounds of things on this thread, I've been lucky.