Banking on Automation: Leading High Street Bank Achieves Success with Highly Complex Due Diligence Architecture

Client overview 

Our Client is a leading high street bank. They champion potential, break down barriers and build financial confidence so the 19 million people, families and businesses who bank with them throughout the UK and Ireland can thrive. They have several banking brands and a wide range of financial products and services. 
 
Their main priority as a bank is to maintain the highest standards of corporate governance, business integrity and professionalism. They have spent decades building strong relationships with millions of their customers who are at the heart of everything they do. They are committed to having a motivated and inclusive workforce who are engaged and passionate about serving their customers. 

Coining a new testing approach: identifying and fixing manual regression testing 

Our Client had automated tests that were only at a component level, with no full end-to-end automation regression testing. Significant effort was therefore required to run all available regression tests for every planned release manually. Due to this high level of effort, only 10-15% of their total regression cases were run manually per release​. 

Qualitest was engaged to help resolve this for our Client by: 

• Providing a strategic review of existing automation approaches and manual regression tests to recommend/ build a robust and scalable automation framework​. 
• Provide an integrated automation framework to support the validation of end-to-end processes that were capable of handling API’s and UI validation across different system components. ​ 
• Build end-to-end regression automation tests to validate business rules, risk rules, component level behaviours and in-depth validations handling.​ 
• Running of end-to-end regression automation testing overnight to uncover any regression issues. 
• Providing a successful handover of the automated end-to-end regression tests to our Client’s automation team.​ 

No more banking due diligence dilemmas: the journey to customer success through automation  

Qualitest implemented two well-defined phases:  

Phase 1 – the discovery phase 
Phase 2 – the build and operate phase 

Phase 1 – the discovery phase 

The scope of the discovery phase covered: 

• An analysis of their already existing automation strategy, framework and tools  
• A feasibility study and outcomes on the reusability of existing assets  
• Recommendations for next steps on end-to-end regression automation based on the above assessments.

In the discovery phase Qualitest successfully identified a suitable tool and framework which was a best fit solution for our Client and their end-to-end regression automation requirements. The frameworks that were recommended included: 

• A behaviour driven development (BDD) framework 
• A page object model (PoM) 
• Reusable actions 

Phase 2 – the build and operate phase  

 In the build and operate phase the following actions were undertaken for our Client: 

• Sprint planning:  end-to-end tests based on business priority were identified and a Definition of Ready (DoR) was agreed with our Client for these identified tests.  
• Test scripting: the automation of end-to-end tests were developed in a two-week sprint timeframe. 
• Executed and generate reports: to meet the “Definition of Done” each automated end-to-end test was successfully run consecutively to generate two reports along with the lead review of each test.  
• Test review and feedback: Qualitest conducted a technical review with our Client and their functional team to “show and tell” on each automated test. 
• Sprint review and final acceptance by our Client: Qualitest showcased the accomplishments, achieved velocity and burndown of the sprint. Our Client reviewed each shared report and provided any feedback they had or simply accepted the test results, if there was no feedback. 

Key benefits 

• 93% of planned E2E regression tests were automated within the available time so that each release could be run more effectively. 
• Just four days (90% of time) was saved to run entire regression automations when compared to 42 working days of manual effort to run the entire regression suite. 
• Depth coverage on validations was increased by 30-40%. 
• Breadth coverage on validations was increased by 30-40%, specifically on end-to-end testing functional flow. 
• End-to-end automated tests were created for the first time for highly complex workflows. 

Our Client benefitted from the introduction of three different reports to suit their customer requirements which included: 

• Allure report: dashboard level reporting along with detailed test/step level reporting.
• Extent report: test-by-test reporting to support auditing requirements. 
• Cucumber report: step-by-step reporting which allowed our Client to run their end-to-end automation pack with a time saving of up to 90% with each release.