How Australia's central bank used a Test Capability Review to find out whether its testing could scale before the pressure hit.
Engagement at at a glance
- Duration: 12 weeks
- Portfolio: $120 million
- Scope: Tier 1 and key Tier 2 systems
- Tools reviewed: HP ALM (requirements traceability, test repository, defect management)
The challenge
The bank had a largely stable production environment. That stability came at a cost: with a low appetite for risk, its teams stretched themselves to meet quality benchmarks before every release.
A large pipeline of projects was forecast over the next 18 months to two years. As the volume and complexity of change grew, that approach would reach breaking point. IT changes would be more likely to fail in production, or be caught late in change approval and delay projects with remediation and rework.
The bank wanted an independent view of whether its testing could scale, and a roadmap to get there.
What we were asked to assess
- Testing practices across the software development lifecycle, in both Agile and Waterfall delivery
- Whether test environments and test data supported end-to-end testing across business processes and infrastructure
- Whether the test process could scale to meet future project demand
- The maturity of test metrics, reporting and stage gate controls
- How the bank's capability compared with other Australian banking organisations
Our approach
We ran a formal 12-week review in three phases:
- Interviews and documentation review (six weeks). We interviewed key stakeholders, reviewed existing testing deliverables, tools, methods and team structure, and defined a baseline of the bank's testing competency.
- Benchmarking and metrics analysis (four weeks). We compared the baseline against industry best practice and other Australian banks, and analysed testing metrics.
- Findings and recommendations (two weeks). We prepared a current-state report, prioritised improvement actions aligned to business needs, and presented our findings to leadership.
Throughout, we focused on four outcomes: reducing risk across software and infrastructure changes, avoiding and reducing testing costs, improving the quality of solutions released to production, and giving management better visibility for decision-making.
The results
We delivered a roadmap of recommendations to improve delivery across the bank's Tier 1 and key Tier 2 systems. Adopting a standard approach was expected to deliver:
- Fewer production incidents
- Greater system resilience and a better customer experience
- Lower testing costs across IT
- Stronger business confidence and a higher profile for the IT team
- Greater market confidence in the bank's delivery capability
- Better productivity and resource allocation
- Clearer career progression and a stronger sense of belonging for the test team
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