The existing mobile app was urgently in need of renewal and expansion. Several factors were at the root of this:
The application was no longer competitive in the financial market, and new legal requirements, such as PSD2, had been introduced. The bank had no choice but to jump on the digital fast track.
The transition to a new core banking application also created a strong need for a new app. The current application would not work optimally with the backend platform.
The bank worked with a fixed schedule of three releases per year. This caused major delays in delivering new features or improvements. With the introduction of the new core banking platform, it aimed for more flexibility and the ability to release continuously.
With the new mobile app, the bank also wanted to better serve all target groups, whereas the previous way of working was mainly focused on an older audience.
We developed a new architecture and built the new mobile app on top of it.
A new API was created to connect the core banking application with the new front end. This API serves as a “translation layer” to display the required backend data in the new mobile app.
With this architecture, the new app can communicate with the bank’s systems without requiring changes to those systems.
In addition, we supported the customer in the transition to a SAFe way of working. The bank took the lead as driver, while we acted purely in a supporting role.
In general, Refleqt was responsible for testing the entire application, from analysis to production. All testing was integrated into the development team’s CI/CD pipeline, with several quality gateways introduced for each phase of the software development lifecycle.
This made it possible to test implemented features and verify that they met all functional rules and requirements, while continuously challenging the functional analysis. Refleqt also handled the design and execution of all test cases, the definition of a custom test strategy and approach, and the creation of a regression test suite.
Track 1: Backend
- Mocking of test data so tests could run independently of other infrastructure. This mock service also had to be kept up to date so it always reflected reality.
- Building a complete regression suite using functional integration tests.
- Performing static code reviews to check code quality for vulnerabilities, bugs, duplicate code, and more.
Track 2: Front end
- Step 1: Conducting market research into the most common smartphones on the Belgian market. A subset of these, the most stable devices, were used for testing the application. Refleqt provided the bank with targeted advice on this.
- Step 2: Creating functional test scripts using BrowserStack, a cloud platform used to test mobile applications on real devices.
Track 3: Performance testing
- Designing and executing performance tests for both the old and the new core banking application.
- Running load tests on the entire platform.
Refleqt consultants were integrated into the agile teams to continuously help safeguard quality during development.
In practice, the bank could always rely on timely reporting for all stakeholders. The development team received fast feedback on deployments and releases, and performance reports were delivered to the business in time to support go/no-go decisions.
Tools & technologies
- Test automation: Java, Cucumber, Swagger & Swagger Codegen, JUnit, Maven, Spring, Appium, BrowserStack
- Performance testing: JMeter, Kibana + Jaeger (for logging & tracing)
- Pipeline integration: Jenkins
- Agile: Atlassian stack (Confluence, Jira, Bitbucket, Git), SAFe
- Release testing: TM4J (Testcase Management for Jira) – this tool contains the manual test cycles and test plans for releases that needed to be verified manually.
