Even for a global bank such as Credit Suisse, the transition to automated testing at scale for continuous app deployment is a major undertaking. It can’t be done in one leap. But, as the Credit Suisse’s head of technical testing, Christian Räss, will explain at the QA Financial Forum London on June 28th, the key decision is the decision to start the process.
Credit Suisse took that step at a senior management offsite meeting in the spring of 2014. Two years later, it is reaping the benefits of its Factory for Automated Testing (FAST), which has enabled a dramatic increase in test automation coverage to around 40%.
In his presentation, Räss will focus on the challenges the bank faced when it created FAST and the benefits in terms of coverage and delivery times for critical apps. In particular, he will cover topics such as the technologies, test environments and the working relationships with multiple external vendors of test services that were were required to to achieve Credit Suisse’s goals.
“The bank has reinvested the benefits of automation in various ways,” says Räss. “We’ve reduced the number of manual testers we use, but we’ve also retrained staff in new technologies. We’ve also been able to target investment in new app development projects that were not formerly in the scope of the business.”
“The process was a challenge in terms of achieving the right level of transparency, partly because we had to make the transformation in packets, one step at a time. At some point, people want to see the benefits,” Räss concedes.
“But it was also important that we were making the shift towards more automation given the overall trend in the industry to DevOps because benefits are not only about cost and time to market, but equally lie in the skill shift that is happening”.
Additional Information: Test automation, integration testing, penetration testing for security … these will be the key themes the QA Financial Forum at Level 39, Canary Wharf on June 28th. See the full agenda here.
We are offering VIP guest passes to the QA Financial forum free of charge to qualified delegates working in IT management roles at banks, asset management companies and insurance companies. If you work in QA, testing, vendor risk management or IT risk management then send email us at info@qa-financial.com to enquire. We’ll be delighted to hear from you.
