Crédit Agricole
Crédit Agricole Group (CA-GIP) ensures top-notch infrastructure performance with Tricentis NeoLoad
fewer incidents in production
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deployments per month
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Company overview
As digital transformation accelerates, proactively ensuring smooth application performance is more crucial than ever. Crédit Agricole Group (CA-GIP)’s infrastructure platform, which handles more than 80% of the company’s IT production, has made performance testing a key pillar of its quality assurance strategy. To meet increasing demands for regulatory compliance, continuous deployment, and user experience, CA-GIP relies on Tricentis NeoLoad to optimize its testing processes and ensure production stability.
Given the scale of its digital ecosystem, ensuring the reliability and scalability of applications is essential to maintaining customer trust and regulatory compliance. As the Group’s IT backbone, CA-GIP operates six data centers, manages over 70,000 servers, and administers more than 190,000 workstations. The platform handles more than 4,000 deployments per month, making robust performance testing indispensable.
Industry: Financial services- Organization size: 85,000
- Location: France
- Products:
Challenges
- Strict regulatory compliance
- High volume of application deployments
- Short timeframe for roll-out of changes
- High business risk for errors entering production
The challenge: ensuring application stability and performance
Ensuring application stability and performance before an incident occurs is crucial, especially as regulatory requirements impose tight deadlines for launching new financial products. Often, the time between a legislative change and full production deployment is less than a month. It became essential to integrate performance testing into the development cycle to anticipate and correct issues before going live.
The solution: NeoLoad’s speed, simplicity, and scalability
CA-GIP began searching for a load testing tool that could meet its performance requirements while remaining simple and efficient. NeoLoad quickly emerged as the ideal choice, combining functionality, ease of use, and speed. “NeoLoad offers a very intuitive interface that enables quick onboarding and efficient script creation,” said Laurent Bourgeois, Head of Performance Testing at CA-GIP. “Its seamless integration with our existing monitoring tools, including Dynatrace, allows us to deeply analyze performance test results.”
Over the years, CA-GIP has continuously expanded its capabilities with NeoLoad. The adoption of NeoLoad Web in 2022 enabled the team to automate performance testing and begin integrating it into CI/CD pipelines, making load testing an integral part of continuous deployment. By adopting a ‘shift left’ testing strategy with quality gates and leveraging NeoLoad’s as-code functionality, CA-GIP empowered developers to participate in validating application performance from the earliest development stages—reducing the risk of late-cycle defects that are far costlier to resolve.
Implementation and impact
Today, CA-GIP’s performance testing strategy rests on three core pillars:
- Increasing the volume of component-level testing to detect performance issues earlier,
- Optimizing and reducing the time needed to execute end-to-end application tests once integrated, and
- Embedding automated performance tests into DevOps workflows using NeoLoad’s as-code feature, allowing for optimal flexibility in tailoring test scenarios to the appropriate context as business requirements change
This structured strategy has led to remarkable improvements:
- The number of incidents has decreased by over 30% in the last six years thanks to earlier detection and faster issue resolution.
- By prioritizing component-level testing, CA-GIP has accelerated testing cycles while maintaining full validation capabilities.
- Integrating performance testing into CI/CD pipelines and sharing insights across teams through NeoLoad Web has streamlined deployment processes, accelerating the performance validation phase and ensuring testing does not delay the launch of new services or compliance with regulatory changes.
“The key to securing production is to test early, automate as much as possible, and make performance testing a standard practice,” said Bourgeois. “NeoLoad has played a crucial role in helping us anticipate performance risks and improve the overall quality of our applications.”
Looking ahead: expanding test automation for greater resilience
Looking ahead, CA-GIP plans to further strengthen performance test automation. The 2025 roadmap includes broader adoption of as-code, enabling developers to run performance tests within their own environments without needing to launch the Controller, providing greater speed for tailoring test scenarios for new business requirements, and shifting quality even further left within the SDLC. The team also aims to enhance AI-based performance analysis to improve predictive testing capabilities.
“Performance testing isn’t just about preventing incidents; it enables us to innovate with confidence,” concluded Bourgeois. “With NeoLoad, we’re building a more resilient digital infrastructure, one that can evolve to meet our future challenges.”
As CA-GIP continues its journey toward increased automation and testing maturity, NeoLoad remains a trusted partner in delivering high-performance, high-quality applications to millions of users around the world.
Results
- Over 30% fewer production incidents
- Accelerated test cycles
- Testing no longer delays the launch of new services or compliance with regulatory changes
