Bank of Queensland delivers Quality as a Service with continuous test automation and management—in the cloud and beyond

Bank of Queensland wanted to take advantage of third-party SaaS and PaaS platforms where they could use single platforms across multiple applications to establish some commonality and reduce technical complexity.

Utilizing Tosca and qTest, Bank of Queensland delivers Quality as a Service by centralizing its testing model across all platforms and looking at quality and testing at a portfolio level rather than the individual programs, change, or streams of work levels. This centralization also lets Jay Williams and his team standardize automation metrics.

Bank of Queensland was able to implement end-to-end continuous automation, run daily health checks across the majority of non-production environments, and schedule automation runs each morning to uplift their CI/CD processes. This allowed them to provide quality feedback to their developers promptly and shift their load testing further left.

Jay Williams highlighted that the ability to centralize their testing not only reduced test cycle time, but also helped identify the most ideal window. While most organizations run tests at night, when systems are far less occupied, banking systems keep working to process batch runs and payments. Run smoke tests too early, and issues would arise between test completion and the next morning.

“We started kicking them off at night, but after we finished, third-party servers would go down or restart improperly. Every morning there was a scramble to figure out what’s wrong,” he said. “Now we run tests in the morning, from 3 a.m. to 9:30. We can pinpoint issues and assign people to fix them, rather than find them.”

Tosca’s low-code and codeless functionalities empowered Bank of Queensland’s manual testers with limited automation experience to build out their automation suites without the support of more experienced developers.

“Tosca’s UI-level automation is key.” Williams shared, “It was way easier to get my team onboarded with Tosca than it would have been with Selenium. Even testers with no automation experience could easily build their own automation suites.”

Williams also notes that one of the most significant benefits he noticed with implementing qTest was the ability to move requirement tracing and management from Excel spreadsheets into Jira. This reduced double-handling allows linking between test cases and requirements, and gives their testers visibility to see which test cases and executions are being run across different business requirements.

With these process improvements, Bank of Queensland have seen increased ROI through test automation by reducing the time it takes to run regression and ultimately gaining confidence in a new build. Before implementing Tosca and qTest, it would take Bank of Queensland 5-6 weeks from the build stage until they were confident that the build was ready for release.

Within 18 months of partnering with Tricentis, BoQ has reduced its full regression cycle down to under five days—an 80% reduction—giving them a clear view of their new build and providing confidence in those build’s releases.