With competition from the likes of Apple and Google, the payments division of ANZ, which processes upwards of $600B per day, can’t rest on its laurels. Having an esteemed 175+ year history and reputation as APAC’s top institutional and corporate bank is great – but continued success requires a new level of speed and agility. That’s why ANZ’s CEO vowed to “blow up bureaucracy and take the bank agile.” They reorganized their business and technical teams into cross-functional teams: squads and tribes that are each focused on a specific customer need. It soon became clear that the speed of testing was holding them back.

Portfolio Test Director Alex Kyriazis was brought in and given a not-so-simple directive: “Testing is too slow; make it faster.” However, they could not relax their stringent quality standards. “We process about $600B worth of payments a day in a highly regulated environment with strict SLAs,” explained Alex. “If we miss $1 of that $600 billion, we’ve got the regulator on the phone asking why we missed it.“

Industry: Banking
Organization size: 28,000 employees
Location: Global
Products:

Challenges

Testing transactions across web, APIs, mainframes, middleware, and data
Transitioning to a more modern and flexible application architecture
Transitioning from quarterly waterfall releases to Agile
Adopting a new way of working with the Spotify model
Outsourcers paid-by-the-test created 30K+ automated tests, but few were actually run
Limited automation at the application level, but none across end-to-end transactions
Testing typically didn’t start until after implementation was complete
Minimal business risk coverage
Quality information scattered across tools and reports; difficult to assess overall release readiness

Solution

With Alex driving the vision, Jitendra Vysyaraju managing the implementation, and Tricentis supporting them at every step of the journey, ANZ charted a path to “quality@speed.” Their goal was achieved by 1) making a “quality engineering” mindset part of the tribes’ DNA, 2) aligning testing to business risks, and 3) incrementally introducing automated testing and integrating it into the delivery pipeline. Tricentis Tosca and Tricentis Data Integrity have been pivotal to this transformation from the start; more recently Tricentis qTest was introduced to streamline agile test management and gain centralized visibility and control across their entire testing toolset (including open source).

The resulting fast (and business-focused) feedback means that developers ship working software faster and stakeholders know when it’s safe to release. Testing cycles that used to take approximately 3 weeks now take hours—supporting the corporate shift from bi-annual or quarterly releases to 2-week release cycles. The organization also reduced testing headcount 25% and is achieving a level of risk coverage that would have cost 200X more with their previous approach. Platinum Support dedicated support engineers, unlimited access to Tricentis’ online Training Academy and certifications, and a Customer Success Manager provide proactive guidance, fast resolution to requests, and a foundation for sustainable success.

Results

Shifted from bi-annual or quarterly releases to 2-week delivery cycles with in-sprint testing
Increased risk coverage 6X (to 90%)
Implemented end-to-test automation that covers more than 60+ apps and services + data
Full regression test suite executes in hours (previously weeks)
Integrated testing into CI/CD pipelines and agile toolsets
Reduced testing headcount 25%
Formalized environment-agnostic continuous testing strategy and guidelines across squads
Converted manual testers to skilled automation engineers
Test automation implemented across 80% of apps

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