What ProofIT heard at Airspace World, ILA Berlin and the CANSO Asia Pacific Conference? Three events, three regions and one consistent message: as air traffic management systems evolve faster and become more interconnected, regression testing can no longer depend on manual effort alone.
ProofIT’s 2026 event season began in Lisbon at the CANSO Leadership Summit on May 25, where senior aviation leaders focused on turning industry vision into coordinated delivery. The following day, Airspace World opened for three days of discussion, demonstration and collaboration across the global air traffic management community. As an exhibitor, ProofIT met existing partners and new contacts from across the ATM ecosystem. We also held a roundtable discussion, bringing together ANSPs, system manufacturers and system integrators to discuss the challenges of regression testing in the emerging SoA ecosystem.
In June, we continued the conversation as an exhibitor at ILA Berlin 2026. Bringing together aviation, space, defense, technology and policy, ILA offered a broader view of the forces reshaping critical aerospace systems.
In July, our journey continued to Da Nang, Vietnam, where we joined the CANSO Asia Pacific Conference as a participant and exchanged perspectives with ATM leaders from one of the world’s most dynamic aviation regions.
Across these events, we spoke with all three groups whose decisions shape the evolution of ATM technology: air navigation service providers (ANSPs), ATM system manufacturers and system integrators. The contexts differed, but the underlying challenge was remarkably consistent.
ATM systems are being asked to absorb more frequent software changes, new integrations, evolving operational requirements and increasingly complex dependencies. Each modification can affect multiple interfaces, workflows and safety-relevant behaviors. As change accelerates, the regression scope grows – not only in volume, but also in the number of combinations that must be verified before a new release.
This creates a structural problem. Manual testing capacity scales with the availability of specialized people, while system complexity scales far more quickly. Domain experts are indispensable, but their time should be spent on high-value analysis, non-nominal scenarios and operational judgement – not executing the same baseline regression checks over and over. At a certain point, adding more manual effort no longer closes the gap.
The conversations in Lisbon, Berlin and Da Nang showed that this is no longer a theoretical concern. ANSPs increasingly recognize the strain on internal testing capacity. Manufacturers face pressure to validate more product variants and integrations. System integrators must demonstrate confidence across heterogeneous environments. Each group sees the same equation from a different angle: more change creates more regression risk, while manual execution becomes less sustainable.
Automated regression testing does not replace ATM expertise. It preserves and multiplies it. When operational knowledge is translated into reusable, system-level test scenarios, critical workflows can be executed consistently and evaluated with traceable results. This gives expert teams a stronger evidence base for release decisions and makes it possible to repeat broad regression suites whenever the system changes.
ProofIT’s ATM System Test Tool is designed for black-box, system-level functional regression testing in complex ATM environments. Its vendor- and technology-agnostic approach supports the automation of realistic end-to-end scenarios while allowing domain experts to remain at the center of test design. The goal is practical: help ATM organizations keep testing capacity aligned with the pace of modernization.
Our trips in the first half of 2026 confirmed that the industry is ready for a deeper conversation about testability. The question is no longer whether ATM systems will become more complex or change more frequently. They already are. The real question is whether verification can scale with them.
If your regression scope is growing faster than your test capacity, let’s identify where automation can reduce release risk first. Talk to ProofIT about your hardest-to-test ATM scenario at atm@proofit.tech.
