Airpelago – Scaling Drone Operations with Reliable End-to-End Testing

Company: Airpelago

Industry: Power line inspection using autonomous drones

Size: ~30 employees

Locations: Sweden, UK, Germany, France & Portugal

Interviewee: Tobias Fridén, CTO & Co-Founder

Challenge

By mid-2025, Airpelago faced mounting pressure to improve software quality in production. The platform was growing rapidly, and they wanted to onboard more external stakeholders like customers, partners, and operators. But quality issues in production made this process harder. To keep pace, they needed testing to be reliable and automated.

“We were pushing fast with new features, but the cracks started showing in production. It wasn’t sustainable to scale customer usage with confidence,” said Tobias.

They tried to expand their end-to-end (e2e) test coverage internally, but it quickly became a bottleneck. Their Playwright setup struggled with flakiness as well as handling complex map interactions.

“Testing the map-based interfaces was almost impossible. Every interaction was flaky.” Tobias explained.

Solution: QA.tech

In June 2025, Airpelago adopted QA.tech to automate their most important e2e tests. They began by defining their 20 main user journey. Everything from planning a drone inspection route to exporting reports for utility clients.

QA.tech’s AI-powered testing, which acted as an actual end-user, solved what manual Playwright scripts couldn’t:

• Complex Map Interactions: Stable automation of their interactive widgets.
  
• Scalable Test Coverage: High-quality tests created faster than before.
  
• Integrated Workflow: Tests run alongside unit and integration tests, giving complete coverage across layers.
  

The Airpelago team also integrated QA.tech with their GitHub. Their tests are now triggered automatically whenever a commit message contains “e2e,” letting developers choose when to run the full suite.

“That flexibility is golden. We don’t want every commit to run the heavy suite, but when it matters, it’s just a keyword away,” Tobias noted.

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Results

Today, Airpelago runs their QA.tech suite multiple times per day, ensuring stability across their platform:

• Confidence in Production: The core user journeys are always covered, even after major changes.
  
• Faster Development Velocity: Developers focus on building features instead of debugging flaky test scripts.
  
• Seamless Scaling: With reliable quality, Airpelago can onboard external users without hesitation.
  

“Before QA.tech, we tiptoed when releasing. Now, we move with confidence. That’s a huge shift for a small but ambitious team like ours,” said Tobias.

Looking Ahead

Airpelago continues to expand both its drone capabilities and its testing suite. Their focus is on maintaining high product reliability while adopting more AI-driven tools across the stack.

“The drones keep evolving, and so does the software. Having QA.tech as our guardrail means we can keep pushing the envelope without breaking trust,” Tobias concluded.

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