Basler Kantonalbank is an institution over 100 years old that serves private customers and small to medium-sized enterprises in Switzerland.
Like other leading financial institutions, Basler Kantonalbank relies on Avaloq for its core banking activities – such as customer information, transactions, and balance sheet information. Furthermore, its other critical applications (e.g., mobile banking and fintech microservices) rely on Avaloq to improve operational efficiency.
Basler Kantonalbank wanted to stay ahead of the curve and provide its customers with more features faster. The pace of Avaloq releases increased, while at the same time the applications became increasingly interconnected (with ever more complex integration layers). Basler Kantonalbank recognized that more rigorous testing was a crucial component of the company's success. However, the existing manual testing methods were no longer a viable option for achieving the desired "quality with speed.".
ON-SITE AT THE CUSTOMER'S PLACE, WITH THE CUSTOMER – AUTOMATION MUST ALSO BE FUN
Because Avaloq is a data-intensive system, manual testing had long been a challenge. At Basler Kantonalbank, 10,000 manual test cases were performed with Avaloq for the five annual releases, covering only 42% of the application's business risk. This was in addition to the rigorous testing required for mobile, e-banking, and related applications for each release. To keep pace with ever-accelerating innovation, testing also needed to be accelerated, necessitating test automation.
“We focused on the right architecture and built up our tests slowly to achieve a well-maintainable setup. We could have focused on running a lot of tests instead of the right tests, and we managed to get most things right.”
challenges
Basler Kantonalbank chose Tricentis test automation to increase the speed and efficiency of its end-to-end tests. They selected Tricentis Tosca because it can automate both data-intensive applications like Avaloq and a wide variety of other applications commonly used in banks' application stacks (mobile, APIs, microservices, SAP, etc.).
Challenges
- Agile implementation accelerated the pace of innovation.
- The aim was to increase the frequency of Avaloq releases.
- Avaloq became increasingly integrated with other components (microservices, mobile, etc.), all of which evolved in parallel and rapidly.
- The 100% manual testing process was slow, cumbersome, and offered only limited coverage for business risks.
- Critical defects escaped manual testing.
- The aim was to avoid the costs and complexity of using different testing tools for each technology being tested.
- Minimal resources available for test maintenance
- Highly regulated industry with strict data protection and reporting requirements
To achieve rapid scaling of test automation, Infometis, a leading IT service provider in Switzerland, was brought in to develop the test automation architecture. Using risk-based testing, the initial focus was on covering the most critical business risks, and this was then expanded.
“Normally, management wants to achieve a high degree of test automation very quickly. Our approach was to create a solid, low-maintenance foundation that can be managed by a small team for the entire banking system,”
explains Serge Wolf, Co-CEO of Infometis AG.
In just 24 months, Basler Kantonalbank has tripled the number of test cases it performs annually using Tricentis test automation and aims to reach 50,000 tests for Avaloq alone next year. Furthermore, the newly achieved speed of testing has enabled it to increase the number of Avaloq releases per year by 15% (and rising).
The automation process with Tricentis Tosca ensures that each nightly test automation run can be thoroughly analyzed, enabling the early detection of critical errors and a dramatic increase in efficiency. This process, combined with exploratory testing performed in Tosca, has virtually eliminated production errors over the past two years.
“Our plan was to automate our core banking system with Tosca and create a foundation for further automation in adjacent systems such as mobile and e-banking, given their increasing integration. While others in the industry use one solution for Avaloq and other solutions for parallel systems, we knew it would be more efficient to use a single platform that could cover as many of our different applications as possible.”
Anthony Aston, Head of Testing and Release Management at Basler Kantonalbank
Test data management
Test data management quickly proved to be the unexpected hero on their road to success. As they began implementing test automation, they realized they needed to master test data management before configuring the automated execution of their critical scenarios. There were two key challenges. First, they had to create a set of GDPR-compliant test data required to execute realistic banking transactions. This included, for example, creating complex bank customers with realistic account histories. Second, they had to feed the data in and manage it via Avaloq, integration layers, connected microservices, and so on.
Under the expert guidance of Infometis and with the help of their first-class Tosca plugins, this challenge—generating and managing stateful test data for complex end-to-end transactions spanning multiple technologies—was quickly overcome. TAMI plugin simplifies data management for Avaloq by pre-configuring Tosca to create Avaloq objects such as business partners or cash accounts. TAMI works seamlessly with TACC Tosca plugin , which simplifies and streamlines Avaloq test automation with a best-in-class module generator. With this solution, Basler Kantonalbank synthetically generates and manages the data it needs for its demanding end-to-end tests.
The organization remains focused on agile development practices. The shift to automation has significantly reduced time to market, a key priority for stakeholders within the company. With so many interconnected systems, testing is seen as essential. The volume of tests performed per release cycle and the efficiency in delivering high-quality releases have steadily increased thanks to the benefits of test automation.
“Our plan was to automate our core banking system with Tosca. A key component of our testing is the synthetic test data we generate. We have a core banking system as well as integration layers to other systems and fintech microservices from [third-party providers]. Across the chain of different applications, all of them require synthetic test data in Avaloq. We were able to implement efficient test data generation that is consistent across the layers for the various test systems, including e-banking and ATM tests.”
It was worth it
We look back on a successful joint venture. A long-term partnership has developed. For this project alone, we were able to achieve the following:
- 50–60% fewer manual tests across the entire IT infrastructure
- 15% more Avaloq releases per year
- Synthetic test data is generated quickly and easily and is available for testing
- More than 30,000 automated tests are performed with Avaloq each year, and this number is increasing
- Risk-based testing aligns testing with business professionals.
- Virtually no errors reach production.
- Synthetic test data is generated for Avaloq and related technologies.
The story continues
As recently reported in the media , Basler Kantonalbank and Bank Cler will be using Avaloq's web and mobile solution in the future. We are very grateful to have been selected by Infometis for the automation and consulting services during the testing of the new e-banking solution and look forward to another successful collaboration!
Click here for the English version of the article at Tricentis
