This banking company launched an initiative to modernize its loyalty and rewards platform globally. To ensure that they met their timeline & milestones they needed to enhance engineering efficiency by resolving some challenges within their current testing suite. The specific test suite has become increasingly unwieldy due to its substantial size and inherent non-determinism, primarily stemming from its distributed system architecture. Ippon was brought in to review the multifaceted challenges posed by the client test suite's growth, including race conditions, shared resources, and inefficiencies in test execution. By analyzing specific problem areas and providing empirical evidence, the team highlighted critical issues hindering the test suite's effectiveness and proposed strategic solutions to enhance its reliability and maintainability.

Ippon embedded a team of engineers with proven enterprise quality and GoLang testing experience within the client's existing QA department to build a rapid understanding of priorities and federate out feature teams to facilitate testing implementations. Ippon implemented a “player-coach” approach, actively contributing to testing implementation while also mentoring and guiding the partner team on best practices and strategies for application testing. The outcome of this work was that the Ippon team was able to identify multiple opportunities to optimize the existing testing process which included Non-Deterministic Tests, unpredictable test behaviors, test instability, lack of test isolations, performance bottlenecks, complex maintenance requirements, codebase complexity issues, and redundant/duplicate test scenarios.

After identifying the problem areas, the Ippon team implemented various tools and process changes to significantly stabilize, optimize, and enhance the QA process. As a result, these changes led to the following outcomes:

• Identified the hundreds of test cases that were either duplicated or were no longer relevant to the existing testing process
• Created and implemented a tool to identify inefficient tagging processes
• Created a system to automatically tag tests with the components that they belonged to, this saved a significant amount of time in the testing process and reduced the complexity
• Optimized the inhouse testing tool to reduce the overall testing timeline
• Refactored the test suite code to remove large global structs that were overly complex to maintain and manage, resulting in the client being able to reduce the debugging timeline and infrastructure overhead
• Created an additional layer of testing on top of the existing regression testing suite which resulted in a reduction of overall alerts in production and SLA breaches

The company is an American bank holding company and multinational financial services corporation that specializes in payment cards. They are one of the top 5 networks, based on purchase volume, and are now looking to expand into other banking services.