With over 3.6 million clients, Banco Santander is Chile’s largest retail and commercial bank. Key to its vision is putting the customer at the center of everything the bank does and operating under the fundamental concept of “Simple, Personal and Fair.”
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Chile has the one of the highest levels of online banking engagement in South America, with 90 percent of internet users having access to a banking app. As a result, electronic payment for goods and services is more common too: research shows that 35 percent of online banking clients use apps to pay in shops by mobile phone. Data analysis indicates that the use of online banking and payment apps is increasing, with the trend towards remote transactions further accelerated by the arrival of COVID-19.
Julio Franjola Armijo, Head of Quality Assurance at Banco Santander, explains how this influences strategic decisions at the bank: “We understand that the performance of our apps is vital. These are our main communication channels with our customers. We want to provide easy navigation and enable payment services within a single app. This all aligns with the digital transformation we’re undergoing as an organization. We want to make our processes more agile and add automation where we can.”
The Quality Assurance (QA) team at Banco Santander worked with local implementation partner Avattar to address these challenges for all in-house developed solutions. The bank currently has six apps, each with a different focus and audience. All of them must be developed, tested, and maintained to the highest global quality standards. Avattar recommended Micro Focus UFT One and Micro Focus UFT Mobile to accelerate functional test automation and optimize mobile apps, supporting an agile application delivery process.
“UFT One is used to develop automated tests for our web and mobile applications,” says Franjola. “It is integrated with UFT Mobile to develop mobile device tests. This leverages a mix of Android and iOS devices acquired for testing purposes and makes them available to various test teams through a device reservation and test environment creation system, either physically or through the cloud. Using mobile devices in remote work mode has been particularly helpful during the COVID-19 crisis, giving our staff remote access to our test environments.”
Some of the automated tests are developed with open source software, leveraging Selenium, Java, and Appium. UFT Mobile’s integration with Appium has been invaluable in executing these tests. To ensure quality across browsers, platforms, and devices, the on-demand device lab is connected directly to Banco Santander’s internal network so engineers can run the necessary tests from their own homes. Automated tests are launched through UFT Mobile’s integration with Jenkins, an open source automation server, and the test results are automatically captured in UFT One. “We found UFT’s openness to be a real benefit, particularly the ability to execute tests from different scripting tools and support our continuous integration practices,” confirms Franjola.
“Leveraging UFT One and UFT Mobile has improved our user experience with multi-device test coverage, increased automation, and event simulation. The level of test automation reduces our test engineers’ efforts, and UFT Mobile’s capability to regression test new features against previous versions ensures a high quality standard in app testing,” comments Franjola. “We also like that we can test event simulation with UFT Mobile, for instance testing speed changes in the network, or testing from different locations using GPS. Simulating these realistic end-user scenarios helps us prepare for every eventuality to ensure the best possible outcome for our users.”
He concludes: “Working together with Avattar and Micro Focus we have enhanced our test coverage and the majority of our apps are now tested through a 100 percent automated process, aligned with our agile processes and overall digital transformation. UFT One and UFT Mobile free up our QA team to spend more time on value-add activities such as the design and development of user-friendly interfaces. We put our customers at the center of everything we do, so being able to improve their experience with these time savings is very valuable to us.”
