App Argenta Banking
Setting up a new (mobile) application to innovate and digitalize the banking platform.
Customer needs
Argenta’s existing mobile app was in urgent need of renewal and expansion. Several factors were at the basis of this:
The application was no longer competitive in the financial market. New legal obligations such as PSD2 were also being introduced. Argenta had no choice but to jump on the digital express train.
The switch to a new core banking application also created a high need for a new application. The current application would not work optimally in combination with the backend platform.
Argenta always worked with a fixed schedule of 3 releases per year. This caused an enormous delay in the release of new features or improvements to the application. With the introduction of the new core banking platform Argenta hoped for more flexibility and a continuous release possibility.
With the new app, Argenta also wants to respond more and more to all target groups where the current way of working was more focused on the older audience.
High-level solution
We developed a new architecture and built the new mobile app on it.
A new API enabled a connection between Argenta’s core banking application and the new front-end. This API serves as a “translation layer” to display the necessary data from the backend in the new mobile application.
Through this architecture it is possible for the new app to communicate with Argenta’s systems without having to make certain adjustments.
In addition, we supported Argenta in the transformation to a SAFe operation. Argenta took the lead as a driver, where we were purely supportive.
Refleqt solution + deliverables
In general, Refleqt was responsible for testing the entire application, from analysis to production. The complete testing was integrated into the CI/CD pipeline of the development team where different quality gateways were introduced for each phase of the software development lifecycle.
In this way it was possible to test implemented features and check whether they functionally met the Argenta rules & requirements. The functional analysis was always challenged. The elaboration and execution of all test cases, the establishment of a custom test strategy and approach and the creation of a regression test suite were also part of Refleqt’s tasks.
Track 1: Backend
- Mocking up the test data so that the tests could run independently of other Argenta infrastructure. This mock service also had to be kept up-to-date so that it always reflected reality.
- Setting up a full regression suite using functional integration testing
- Perform static code reviews to check the quality of the code for vulnerability, bugs, duplicate code, etc.
Track 2: Front-end
- Step 1: Conducting market research into the most common smartphones on the Belgian market. A subset of this list, the stable devices, were used in testing the application. Refleqt provided the necessary advice to Argenta.
- Step 2: Development of functional test scripts using Browserstack, a cloud platform that can be used to test a mobile application on real mobile devices.
Track 3: Performance testing
- Drafting and executing performance tests for Argenta’s old and new core banking application.
- Performing load tests on the entire platform.
The Refleqt consultants were integrated into the agile teams in order to help guarantee quality during development.
Argenta could always count on timely reporting to all stakeholders. The development team received quick feedback on deploys and releases, performance reports were delivered to Business in time for a go/no-go decision.
Tools & Technologies
- Test automation: Java, Cucumber, Swagger & Swagger Codegen, JUnit, Maven, Spring, Appium, Browserstack
- Performance testing: JMeter, Kibana + Jaeger (voor logging & tracing)
- Pipeline integration: Jenkins
- Agile: Atlassian stack (Confluence, Jira, Bitbucket, Git), SAFe
- Release testing: TM4J (Test Case Management for Jira): This tool contains the manual test cycles and test plans for releases that required manual verification)
Result
Argenta Banking is a dynamic, easily extensible and customer-friendly mobile app that acts as a gateway to all of Argenta’s banking and insurance services.
The developed automated test suites ensure that new features or changes in the Argenta application are automatically tested for quality and performance.
The mobile app was rewarded with a score of 4.5/5.