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Case Study
Testing Services

Banking on test automation

Global bank embraces quality engineering for speed and agility.

Call for change

It’s all about speed and quality

For today’s enterprises, software applications are both a crucial part of running the business and a key source of competitive advantage. As such, quality development—at speed and scale—is essential.

As these applications keep increasing in importance, enterprises must rethink how they build and test them, moving away from reactive issue-based testing toward embedding quality engineering throughout the whole development cycle.

At one global bank, this need to reimagine application testing led to a quality engineering transformation. Despite investing heavily in Agile development, the bank found it was still hindered by a manually intensive testing regime. That was not only creating redundancies, but also impeding its speed to market.

The bank recognized change was needed. The goal? To deliver better software faster and more cost-effectively. The plan? To consolidate two separate testing organizations and reimagine end-to-end application testing with greater automation—in conjunction with Accenture.

When tech meets human ingenuity

From deep analysis to holistic redesign

We began by working with the bank on a holistic analysis of its testing organization, across the entire application portfolio.

Leveraging our High-Performance Banking Platform, we designed a new unified testing model. And thanks to the iterative optimization capabilities of the Accenture Touchless Testing Platform, we helped the bank weed out redundant test cases. That meant we could maximize testing coverage while reducing effort and cost.

Next, as part of the bank’s pivot to a Quality Engineering organization, we created a transformation roadmap to automate every aspect of the end-to-end testing lifecycle. This involved redesigning the current testing solution, moving away from a use-case design approach and toward a business-process-driven application model.

Talent, transformed

Our work also involved equipping testers with a “low-code” automation capability. Thanks to new visual application models built on Broadcom’s Agile Requirement Designer (ARD), we eliminated the need to create tests manually.

On top of this, we provided the testing team with CI-/CD- enabled, unattended, and parallel execution capabilities by integrating with the bank’s Jenkins-based platform and standing up an on-premise Selenium grid to support the execution infrastructure. This was supplemented by a Function Feature Library to help with requirements traceability, effort sizing and risk assessment.

One of the most important aspects of our work on this testing transformation has been a rigorous focus on upskilling the testing team with future-ready capabilities. That includes skills in the latest automation tools, languages such as Gherkin, and the underlying custom automation framework—as well as CI/CD integration, parallel execution via a grid-based environment and DevOps.

A valuable difference

Faster testing, faster speed to market

The success of our testing transformation hinged on improving three critical factors: speed to market, extent of automation, and application quality.

So how did we do?

Our unified testing model helped cut the testing cycle by almost two-thirds—from 12 weeks to just 4.5. Combined with significant reductions in regression test execution times, this has shortened the bank’s overall time to market by more than 60 percent. Now, it can launch new products and services faster than ever. The bank’s new end-to-end testing solution means it can automate a huge 84 percent of its testing—with scope to go further. What’s more, this automation capability has also now been extended to the bank’s branch locations, cutting the effort required to run tests onsite.

Together, these initiatives have had a transformative impact on the quality of testing. Defect leakage has been cut by a massive 75 percent. And productivity savings have been accelerated, allowing the bank to redeploy resources to support more value-adding demand from the business.

60%

Reduction in overall time to market

84%

Test automation coverage

75%

Reduction in defect leakage

Future-ready testing

We not only exceeded the bank’s expectations on all three indicators during the first year of the program, but also helped cut the cost of testing by 31%, setting the stage for further improvements on the transformation journey.

And, by upskilling manual testers in automation, CI/CD, DevOps and emerging technologies, we’ve positioned the testing team for future success as the bank’s IT organization adopts modern quality engineering practices in pursuit of speed, quality and excellence.

Most importantly, with application testing now an integral part of the end-to-end software development process, the bank has the modern quality engineering processes it needs to deliver better applications faster than ever, empowering it to get products and services to market at the pace demanded by the digital economy.

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