Fortune 100 financial services company

Objective

Create an automated testing process to leverage current company processes and resources while introducing industry testing best practices.

Background

A large financial services organization was having trouble validating their credit eligibility application for new credit applications. They were not able to manually test their maintenance update within the time frame of the update schedule. They were in the middle of a critical project where they were outsourcing their credit booking and could not risk releasing software that wasn't tested. After this risk was identified, members of the Coveros team were brought in to define and develop an automated testing solution that would work within their current testing process.

What we did

After a three week problem identification and requirements gathering session several solutions were identified including the automation of the test data generation process and subsequent running of the credit eligibility application using the generated test data. Coveros team members developed a test automation plan that leveraged the test assets and process the client currently used. We worked with their employees to automate the manual process they used to produce test data and run their tests once the data was generated. We worked with their test experts to select tools and with their system architectures to install and deliver the test process according to their internal standards. Part of the clients internal QA standards was integrating with Test Director because their internal policy required all test results to be stored in Test Director.

The specific work activities used to implement this test process included:

Processes

• Develop a project plan to understand that specific test process, design a solution and implement that solution.
• Interview the client's employees that performed the manual tests using generated test data and record their process, what system they used and how they reported the results of the tests.
• Design an automated process to perform the same work as the manual tests and generate reports the testers could evaluate. The solution was designed to allow the testers to focus on the getting the correct input data and focus on verifying the test results rather than focusing on the manual process of running the tests.
• Implement the solution working within out client's organizational constraints and standards.
• Work with the testers as the adopted the test automation process and fix any issues that where discovered during the adoption process.
• Transition maintenance and ongoing support of the test automation to client resources.
• Remain on call to address any client issues as the test automation process was introduced to new test automation groups.

Results

• Reduced product time to market by 50%. Via introduction of process and supporting automation reduced the time required to create and run an end-to-end regression test of the companies credit eligibility and scoring application from 1 week to 1 day. This effectively doubled the number of annual product releases.
• Reduced cost of testing the product suite by $640,000 per year; 25% of annual labor cost associated with product testing.