Roq Supports UK Bank’s Digital Transformation Journey

The Client 

This engagement was with a major UK high street bank who had taken a decision to transform their operations to become a truly digital business.

The transformation would create both internal and customer-facing benefits that would strengthen its competitive position in the marketplace.

Digital transformation efforts – on this scale – are often highly complex and politically charged, taking many years to gain traction and deliver business value. Equally, however, the payoffs for getting it right, the first time around are compelling.

The bank knew that the best way to approach this transformation effort was with a clear strategy and a step-by-step approach to lock-in changes in a systematic way. This started paving the way for digital banking by re-platforming and redeveloping much of its ICT infrastructure and application assets – including their desktop and mobile websites.

One of the key internal benefits of these changes would be cost effectiveness and process efficiencies and so any changes made – and any approaches used – would have to be both fit-for-purpose and future-proof.

The bank had an existing arrangement for the majority of its application development and testing efforts, but one area where they were lacking was in Test Automation – recognised as a way to reduce manual testing over time. Various off-the-shelf tools and frameworks had been assessed by the bank, but they determined that a more bespoke framework would be most beneficial – particularly given some of the legacy applications within their estate.

Roq’s Solution

Roq was engaged to create a wholly bespoke Test Automation Framework covering their online banking web application, accessed through a range of desktop and mobile devices – which would also need to be fully expandable to other applications and platforms in the future.

For the framework to be successful Roq ensured that it exhibited a high degree of interoperability with the bank's internal applications and legacy systems. This established a way for the framework to interface seamlessly with tools such as HP ALM – including Quality Center and QuickTest Pro.

The solution was built with agile methodology in mind – interfacing with a behaviour-driven development (BDD) tool ‘Cucumber’ to ensure a ‘single version of the truth’ when it came to test documentation and other related test artefacts. The approach was also highly user-intuitive as it allowed a broad range of staff (some of them non-technical) to develop and assess test scripts based on a ‘given-when-then’ methodology.

The initial framework was developed in Java – which most closely aligned with the client’s existing environment – over a period of 3 months, after which point, further developments were put into production to expand capabilities and increase the return on investment.

The Outcome  

Some of the benefits relating to this engagement were as follows:

• By demonstrating clear alignment to the bank’s strategic vision – and a detailed understanding of the corporate objectives – Roq ensured a robust, fit-for-purpose and future-proof digital platform

• Roq delivered this project at a third of the costs proposed by other bidding parties – due to a more logical approach to team size, use of the Roq Test Lab vs. onsite working and by leveraging proven best practices relating to Test Automation

• As Roq’s Bespoke Test Automation Framework is technology agnostic, we were able to select approaches and technologies that exactly met with the client needs

• The UK based Test Lab allowed for a greater level of responsiveness and proactivity during the development process – saving the bank time in bringing the new framework into active use

• As the framework can be executed by non-system specialists, ongoing resource costs at the bank will be significantly reduced

• Our openness, flexibility and ability to work with the bank to co-create the right solution meant there were no unmet expectations or surprises during the development process

If you’d like to find out more about how Roq can support your business, please email us at ask@roq.co.uk.