Building an Automation Testing Solution Architecture
A 3-year-old fintech product rapidly grew from the PoC to a profitable product with a high number of enterprise clients and very quick feature development (monthly production releases.) The regression test suite consisted of 1K test cases. The QA team consisted of manual testing engineers only. The product had no automation testing solution.
Industry:
FinTech
Services:
QA as a Service
Location:
US
Challenge
The product development lifecycle had several stages: development, testing, internal UAT, external UAT and production. The quick functionality increments caused a rapid increase of the regression testing test suite that needed to be executed before each production release, which caused delays and/or lowered application quality.
Solution
The QA service provided a proper technical stack for automation testing framework according to the specifics of product development technologies and infrastructure.
We built a basis of the automation testing solution, covered the most critical functionality with automated test scripts, integrated the automation solution into the CI/CD pipeline, taught existing manual QA team members how to run the automation tests in the continuous integration tool and analyzed test reports. At the final stage, our service team helped to interview an onside automation QA specialist and onboarded him into the testing framework and processes we created.
Technologies Used
A solid technology stack is essential for any thriving fintech product. The technology stack of this particular product was built to allow for the implementation of automation testing processes to speed up development.
The workflow
Investigation
Investigating existing manual QA process on the project. Investigating product development model. Investigating infrastructure, architecture and existing technical stack.
Automation
Conduct manual test case prioritization to highlight automation candidates. Set up initial architecture of the Automation QA framework. Automate the first portion of tests.
Integration
Integrate automation testing solution into the CI/CD pipeline. Setup CI/CD quality gates. Integrate automation testing process into existing development/QA process.
Setting up a team and processes
Onboard Automation QA team and align it with defined process and solution. Observe and tune the established process. Conduct demo of the process and QA team work to the project leadership.
About the team
We dedicated the Automation QA service team to building the automation testing framework, and further helped to interview an onside automation QA specialist and onboarded him into the testing framework and processes.
Impact
The project returned back to monthly releases without delays with expected level of quality. The automation testing solution we created and integrated into the CI/CD pipeline helped to cover the most critical functionality and setup quality gates for deployment of the features between product environments. The staging and higher environments became permanently stable. The automation QA specialist we helped to select and onboard continued automation testing of new features with our periodic audits.
