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As part of its multi-year digital strategy, a major bancassurance institution in Australia has partnered with Elabor8 consultants to develop a new platform for enterprise test automation.
With major regulatory initiatives, rapidly changing consumer behavior and a rapidly evolving digital marketplace, the company’s strategy has been to enable an economy of speed, enabling rapid innovation, streamlined delivery and faster time to market. The basis of success was the development of a modern test strategy focused on automation.
As part of this digital upswing, the company focused on modernizing its online customer portals, consolidating its products and services into a single application, providing a better customer experience and strengthening growth opportunities.
However, with a highly silent environment and significant manual testing processes, the scope of testing quickly increased. “Teams would work in isolation, so every time they wanted to expand the scope of testing, they would either double down on building a custom automated framework or add more testers to run those test suites manually,” recalled Craig Harvey, head of Elabor8. Automation who led the project.
“They were constantly looking for more testers, and it soon became a risk to the organization.”
Not long after, the bancassurance company realized that this model was not sustainable. This is when Elabor8 entered the fold. “We helped them reframe their thinking to value,” Craig said. “Automation can bring a lot of value to an organization, but it’s about having the right testing strategy in place to ensure that automation activities deliver good ROI.”
“We worked with them over the course of two years to jointly design and implement a test strategy and automation framework that would work for them,” added Craig. “We started small, working on the migration part of the infrastructure to experiment and validate ideas while learning the culture of the organization. This was critical for the next phase as we scaled horizontally across the organization.”
“We worked with teams to build capabilities through a test-driven approach, while always learning, experimenting and validating; and feeding these ideas back into the development of the automation framework. It was this integrated growth process that really made the whole thing succeed.”
“Learning the culture early allowed us to take a systematic approach where we could look at everything from ways of working to technology and existing capabilities. We even looked at how teams were breaking the rules to get their work done – we called it ‘blackmarket engineering’, where teams bypassed the complex bureaucracy that would allow them to deliver.”
“Obviously this is not healthy behavior, but it allowed us to see the true running of the organization as it was.”
But it was this behavior that made a true digital amplifier possible. “We started looking for ways to remove the tape. We started sharing code to the point where we could upload code libraries to a repository that other areas could use – basically an internal github. We’ve also started building self-service portals for platforms that allow teams to have their own development path.”
This formalized version of black market engineering practices energized the teams and this continually raised the bar across all delivery teams. “We found that code reuse went through the roof and code quality went up again, which was extremely refreshing.”
Reaping the benefits
Fast forward to today and the bancassurance company can make changes quickly, with full confidence in a high level of quality. Craig: “They have modern and adaptive testing capabilities that consist of an enterprise automation framework focused on customer experience and business assurance, with delivery teams having the freedom to shape their individual testing needs based on the value and context of the delivery.”
“All of this is nicely wrapped in a lightweight management layer designed to enable teams, not constrain them.”
Several benefits are reaped in this process. In addition to labor cost savings from a greater focus on automation and faster delivery times with better engineering capabilities, “we’re also seeing a better customer experience from better quality deliveries, and there’s more confidence in the delivery process across the organization.”
“We keep in mind the benefit of being able to develop APIs and test suites in parallel for shared learning between developers and testers,” concluded Craig.
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