A major American bank holding company modernizes its quality assurance practice.
SITUATION
The client’s User Acceptance Test (UAT) team was facing multiple issues related to workload and subject matter expertise required for testing products thoroughly and efficiently. Two main issues hindered their ability to achieve these goals: insufficient resources and time to validate new functionality as it was released to the UAT environment, and a dependency on outdated legacy mainframe processes. It was crucial to automate these back-end workflows to ensure future state functioning. Furthermore, automating current and future manual test cases was deemed necessary to expedite the expanding regression test suite, which must be run after every deployment to the UAT environment. To achieve the product quality expectations of the client's customers, the a modernization of their UAT process was needed.
Modernized Client QA Practice
We provided a team of five consultants including an internal consultant from Apex, a team lead, a senior automation engineer, a senior data analyst, and a senior process engineer. Our approach was twofold; establishing a strong, consistent Agile process with UAT testers as quality advocates, and automating and modernizing key workflows using a People/Process/Tooling model. Following a period of observation, documentation research, and intensive interviews, Apex delivered the necessary process improvements and roadmap recommendations to create a mature, effective Agile practice for testing the client’s products. Apex evaluated existing test and development practices and looked for opportunities to improve and implement practices geared toward improving product quality. The Apex team sought out pain points, process gaps, and ‘wish lists’ to create individual custom solution recommendations for each of the six products specified by stakeholders. Close collaboration with the client’s Business Readiness test and configuration teams provided the necessary information to tailor each solution to its associated product. Apex’s solutions focused on a ‘shift left’ mindset, starting with embedding UAT and automation SMEs dedicated to early testing, defect prevention, and test automation. This approach allowed the client to lower the cost of service for all testing and reduce time to market through sound Agile practices, paving the way to a DevOps model with CI/CD.
RESULTS
Apex’s Agile solution modernized and streamlined the client’s QA practice, allowing for iterative, continuous test cycles/sprints and frequent rapid feedback loops. We reduced defects and poor-quality code, resulting in cost reduction. In combination with the lower costs of embedded QA and automation resources, this led to significant savings for the client and an accelerated time-to-market. Embedding testing and automation engineers with developers, all practicing Agile methodology, enabled continuous improvement through the product lifecycle and increased the efficiency of all testing phases from unit testing through UAT.
