How Ascentic helped Icomera build a confident, AI-accelerated testing practice

Icomera is a technology company specializing in onboard connectivity and digital services for public transportation. Their platforms deliver passenger Wi-Fi, infotainment, and real-time digital services across trains, buses, coaches, and other transit systems for operators worldwide.

As Icomera's platform expanded to serve more operators and more passengers, the team recognized that their approach to quality assurance needed to scale with it. Releasing reliably and iterating quickly are not optional in a market where onboard connectivity is core to the passenger experience - they are a competitive requirement.

With a growing platform and increasing complexity, Icomera made a deliberate decision to invest in structured test automation. They partnered with Ascentic to design and implement a QA practice that could keep pace with their engineering ambitions.

The Challenge

Icomera's platform had grown significantly in scope and complexity. Like many fast-scaling engineering teams, they needed a strong verification strategy. As they looked ahead, they identified several areas where a more structured automation strategy would strengthen their release confidence and engineering velocity:

•  Moving beyond manual testing

◦  Testing was largely handled by product owners alongside their core responsibilities. As the platform grew, this approach made it difficult to maintain consistent, comprehensive coverage across all areas of the system.

•  Protecting external API reliability

◦  Icomera exposes a set of external APIs to third-party integrators who depend on them for real-time operations. As integration complexity increased, ensuring that changes to these APIs were tested automatically before release became a priority.

•  Enabling faster, safer engineering iteration

◦  With a complex platform spanning end-to-end device configuration flows, the development team wanted greater confidence when making significant architectural changes. A structured test suite would give them the safety net needed to move quickly without introducing risk.

•  Building QA capability efficiently

◦  Rather than going through a lengthy in-house recruitment and onboarding process, Icomera wanted to move quickly. They needed an experienced partner who could embed into the team, get up to speed fast, and deliver results without disruption.

The goal was clear: a scalable, automated QA practice that could grow with the platform and give the engineering team confidence at every stage of the release cycle.

The Solution

Ascentic's QA automation engineer was tasked with designing and implementing a test automation strategy covering both UI and API layers for Icomera's platform. The approach included:

1. Defining a scalable automation strategy

◦  Collaborated closely with Icomera's product owner and development team to assess existing QA processes and identify automation opportunities.

◦  Selected Playwright as the single framework for both UI  and API automation - reducing tooling overhead and keeping the test environment consistent across layers.

◦  Designed the framework to integrate into Icomera's existing CI/CD pipeline for continuous, daily test execution.

2. Building the API automation framework using AI

◦  Rather than constructing the API framework from scratch, used GitHub Copilot to generate reusable 'skill sets': structured code patterns and best practices derived from an existing automation repository.

◦  Because the skill sets established consistent patterns and best practices from day one, the generated automation framework and test scripts were maintainable and reliable without requiring considerable manual cleanup.

3. Enhancing test automation

◦  Introducing auto healing to UI Automation -  AI was applied to automatically 'heal' test scripts when front-end locators changed, removing the need for manual updates.

◦  Added third-party integrations in the final phase: connecting test results to a test management system and implementing schema-based validation for API responses.

4. Collaboration and knowledge transfer

◦  Collaborated with the product owner and developers through daily standups to clarify domain questions and surface product context.

◦ Leveraged direct access to the development codebase during API test generation, reducing dependency on knowledge transfer and accelerating test authoring.

◦  Built the framework to be self-documenting through skill sets, enabling future QA team members to onboard and extend coverage without full context transfer from the original engineer.

The Results

The automation practice delivered measurable improvements to Icomera's engineering process, giving the team the confidence and coverage to move faster with less risk:

•  Greater confidence in major engineering changes - With both automation suites live, Icomera's development team moved forward with significant backend refactoring and architectural changes. Defects were caught before reaching production, and developers could iterate with confidence knowing the system was being validated daily.

•  Reliable external API coverage (still in progress) - The API was brought under automated test coverage, giving Icomera and their third-party integrators greater assurance that changes were validated before release.

•  Faster release cycles with less manual overhead - End-to-end flows that previously required manual verification could proceed based on automated pass/fail reports, freeing product owners to focus on higher-value work.

•  60% reduction in framework build time - Building the API automation framework manually would have taken approximately 2 weeks. Using Agentic AI skills, the same framework was delivered in 4 days - a 60% reduction in time without compromising structure or maintainability.

•  80% faster test script development - Reusable AI-generated skill sets significantly reduced the time needed to create new test scripts, accelerating coverage across the platform as it continues to evolve.

•  A foundation built to scale - The skill-set-based framework is designed to grow with Icomera's platform. New QA engineers can onboard and extend coverage quickly, giving the team long-term flexibility without dependency on any single contributor.