After the recent events surrounding a certain social media forum and fintech startup, it’s safe to say that the financial services industry is undergoing a radical and rapid transformation that puts the digital experience front-and-center. Particularly with the ongoing and likely long-term shift to more remote services, financial institutions and startups alike are centering their products around mobile and desktop access.
While we can’t comment on the previously mentioned viral startup, we can say that when it comes to the software that connects them to their money, people have zero tolerance for glitches, bugs, or unworkable features. Quality needs to be a central pillar of the development process from the first lines of code to deployment.
Friend of mabl NCR is the world’s enterprise technology leader for restaurants, retailers and banks. For over 135 years, they have led the digital revolution in payments, from the electronic cash register to magnetic credit card strips to the latest in contactless transactions. As a leading provider of point-of-sales software for SMBs and global enterprises, NCR is the lifeline for businesses working to become digital-first.
Nathalie Charlot leads the Test Management Office within the IT Department at NCR. As she developed a new testing strategy, she discovered an interesting research study which found that the majority of defects in software development are caught in the requirements stage. The study became a driving factor in Nathalie’s decision to embrace a shift-left approach and embed more testing earlier in the development process, even as early as the user story stage. The focus on quality earlier helped their team boost productivity while allowing for more focused risk-based testing later in the development process, alleviating potential roadblocks to deployment.
As the pandemic spurred significant growth and interest in contactless payments, NCR realized they needed quality engineering in place to rapidly deliver products and features to a growing number of customers, many of which were relying on NCR’s digital infrastructure to keep their small businesses afloat.
Nathalie and the NCR team kicked off a project where they hired 12 interns focused exclusively on creating a culture of quality through test automation. Using mabl’s low-code interface and features like reusable flows, the interns were able to automate tests for nine applications in just two weeks. The center of excellence (COE) team leads thought this would be nearly impossible, but the team was able to accomplish their goal with the help of mabl. This project was a critical milestone in Nathalie’s plan to shift testing to the left as it proved that everyone, including a business analyst or product owner, could contribute to quality engineering without having to rely entirely on a separate team or developers to create and run the tests.
With a shift-left testing strategy and more effective test automation with mabl, NCR was able to shift focus to the most business-critical priorities. As NCR and their clients raced to adapt to the new demands of payments in 2020, their team was able to start working on putting critical applications in the hands of customers, including a new contact-less application for the hospitality industry and new methods for cleansing and sanitizing hardware devices.
Whether it’s e-commerce, payments, or investing, financial services and fintech are rapidly evolving to meet user needs in a digital-first world. Leaders like NCR have set the pace for over 135 years, setting the standard for payment technology in critical industries like healthcare, hospitality, and retail. To keep pace in this complex industry, NCR recognized the need to break down knowledge and workflow silos to catch bugs earlier in the development pipeline, reducing the risk of bottlenecks in the final QA checks before production. With intelligent test automation from mabl, everyone from developers to product owners to business analysts are able to participate in improving application quality.
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