Our client, a challenger bank specialising in credit card provision, was enjoying significant growth. The bank had a portfolio of in-flight and upcoming agile projects to deliver new products and processes to facilitate this growth and the build teams were delivering components such as mobile applications and application programme interfaces (APIs).

Our client’s business-critical digital projects were focused on the delivery of a new mobile application for credit cards and a set of APIs, which would integrate with and provide services to various third parties. Speed to market was of the essence and central to this was the use of agile and DevOps, which would allow the bank to release code swiftly. To enable the rapid launch of these products, test automation plays a vital role, as continuous testing is needed to keep pace with the development cycle. Triggering automated tests gives developers the instant feedback they need to find out what is broken, enable them to quickly fix it and move on.

Our client needed a partner, with the expertise to develop and deliver test strategy, and a deep understanding of how test automation helps facilitate agile and DevOps, which help to deliver quality products within short timescales.

We conducted an assessment to ascertain the bank’s testing requirements and enable it to propose the best solution. The client’s development environment meant that continuous testing was a vital element of the test strategy. P2 Consulting mobilised its people to support the bank’s scrum development teams through a number of ways. Where test automation was concerned, the team wrote automated contract tests to ensure the API conformed to its service definitions. The team also oversaw integration with Xamarin Test Cloud, to enable the testing of multiple devices, writing Business Driven Development (BDD) tests in Cucumber.

The continuous delivery environment meant we needed to keep pace with new features, as well as regression testing. Exploratory testing was employed to supplement the automation effort. The team also provided guidance, support and governance of acceptance testing and oversaw defect management and the production of status reports.

All members provided a flexible approach to deploying the test team, ensuring the right skills were provided at the right times and that the solution was cost effective for the client.

Continuous testing and automated testing accelerated the speed to market of the bank’s new mobile application for credit cards and helped establish the set of APIs. Ultimately we provided manual testing and testing during sprints and applied subjective evaluation of product quality, in addition to driving the testing automation. We also helped the bank exploit their test tools to facilitate continuous testing and continuous delivery to enable them to deliver quality products quickly. The cycle of continuous testing and the improvements to the testing and QA strategy meant there was no disruption to customer experience.