Success story - ABANCA

Implementation and operation of the QA strategy

The project

Abanca was looking to improve various quality and process standardisation initiatives in the different project teams. The Process Governance and QA Directorate strategically selected nine diverse projects for an overall process and quality analysis during the development cycle. This analysis identified opportunities for improvement in several areas and projects, addressing key aspects such as roles, processes, tools and environments.

Areas for improvement identified:

Specialised QA: need for specific roles to ensure quality.
Test automation: poor implementation of automation tools.
Traceability of tests: difficulty in tracking and reporting results.
Training and capacity building: need for ongoing training for the team.

The challenges

Fostering a culture of quality
Identify, define and monitor key indicators
Standardising processes and methodologies
Implementation of automation tools

The solution

Phase 1 - Pilot projects: The AQA strategy was initially implemented in four key projects: Electronic Banking, Lending, Insurance and APIs, for a period of 6 months (December 2,024 - May 2,025). Specialised QA roles were incorporated and close collaboration was maintained with areas such as Architecture and Engineering. An automation framework based on Karate DSL has been implemented for backend testing, integrated in GitLab. For frontend testing, the Playwright framework is being incorporated. The Izertis team plays a key role in mentoring and training project teams. Feedback from various areas has been very positive, reflecting a marked improvement in the quality and efficiency of our performance and the way we have added value to the project teams, strengthening the foundations for continuous improvement and scalability in future projects. As a result, the Process Governance and QA Directorate has decided to continue with a second phase of the project.
Phase 2 - Evolution and scalability: The second phase, from June 2,025 to December 2,025, pursues two main objectives:

-Continuity of current projects: continue to work on ongoing projects and implement new initiatives, such as: monitoring compliance with some DORA requirements, introducing new types of testing (such as Chaos Engineering or Failure Injection Testing), and building a unified dashboard for continuous monitoring and evaluation (KPIs and Quality Gates).

-AQA implementation in new projects: introducing the AQA strategy in new projects.

Objectives to be achieved:

-Improving the quality of soware: implementation of quality standards and best practices.

-Time and cost reduction: test automation and CI/CD flows.

-Increased visibility and traceability: monitoring and reporting of test results.

-Training and capacity building: strengthening the team's skills in new tools and methodologies.

-Scalability and sustainability: quality strategy replicable in other projects and teams.

The result

With this project, Abanca has managed to establish a common strategy and, at the same time, adapted to each of the pilot projects to help it take a step further in the quality assurance of its software. Today, their teams are more aware and more involved in ensuring that quality, automation allows them to speed up delivery times, and thanks to metrics, they have more control and visibility of the status of each application. The project has grown to continue supporting the 4 initial applications and to include 4 more, which has required the expansion of the team with an additional Agile QA and more dedication of the cross-cutting profiles of DevOps QA and QA Architect.