Securities market self-regulatory organization

Modernized QA practice for highly-regulated financial services client.

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Challenge

The client needed experts in highly-regulated financial technology to modernize its QA practice and meet growing business needs.

Outcome

Catalyte implemented a new automated testing framework and training that improved speed, scale, stability and coverage for the client’s testing environments. The client’s evolved QA team is now more responsive to business needs and can quickly respond to new and emerging challenges.

The organization regulates firms that engage in municipal securities and advisory activities. Given its oversight mandate, it requires IT partners who can navigate the highly regulated financial services sector. Catalyte had previously worked with the organization on several projects involving QA. Seeing the QA benefits Catalyte provided, the client chose Catalyte to help modernize its QA organization and implement best practices across the board.

Current QA not meeting business needs

The client’s QA organization met the basic requirements of testing. But, it lacked the structure and best practice experience to offer full business value to the company and the ability to scale as it expanded.

Areas that needed modernizing included accountability/review for testing, expanded browser coverage, implementation of behavior-driven development and improved email reporting mechanisms.
With Catalyte’s help, once these areas were improved, the QA team could conduct non-brittle tests and share outcome data across the organization, not just with the internal QA team.

Catalyte implements new testing framework

To ensure the QA team was providing full business value to the self-regulatory organization, Catalyte helped implement and train team members on a new, modernized testing framework.

This framework consisted of business readable tests that improved QA’s speed and stability. Tests were no longer brittle and the application didn’t need to be treated with kid gloves when tested. The framework also improved reporting and organizational access. Results could be automatically emailed in an easy-to-understand format to business stakeholders for more comprehensive project oversight.

Catalyte’s QA experts upskilled the client’s QA team with training on emerging QA best practices for the new framework. Catalyst also trained the team on Docker containers to meet cross browser testing requirements without having to use physical hardware. This decreased the time each iteration of regression took to run.

Improved collaboration and modernized QA practice

With the combination of Catalyte’s new testing framework and training, the self-regulatory organization now has a modernized QA practice. It now experiences improved collaboration not only within the QA team, but also between QA and the rest of the business. QA can be more responsive to business needs and drive projects forward, rather than hinder progress and reporting. The client now has improved speed, scale, stability and coverage for its testing environments. As the business continues to grow and become more reliant on technology, QA will be able to quickly respond to new and emerging challenges.

Key takeaways

Modernized QA organization
Implemented new testing framework and trained team on best practices.
Demonstrated financial tech knowledge
Produced results in highly-regulated industry.
Outcome aligned QA with business
Team now more responsive to product owners and can scale with business growth.

Key technologies/skills

  • Selenium Grid
  • Docker
  • Canopy F# testing framework
  • Specflow +
  • Behavior-driven development
  • QA automation
  • Reporting tools

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