ING

THE GOAL

ING aims to be industry-leading and get things right first time. To that end, it empowers its employees to step up, make their mark and help the company shine.

Its experts in the Netherlands work in small, multidisciplinary, self-organising teams known as squads, which have end-to-end responsibility for their customer journeys. This minimises handovers and maximises autonomy while providing an excellent customer experience. To support the autonomy of these teams, ING provides an environment in which they can easily create processes and communicate with their customers. 

When it came to creating an app to facilitate this, ING needed to ensure it would be immediately useful to the business. Hence there was a need for a rigorous, automated test tool compliant with internal development rules and security guidelines. The tool needed to be user-friendly for non-IT personnel – the typical users of the Mendix platform at ING – and a key requirement was the creation of reusable test scripts to be used across app environments by the Mendix team and their testers.

THE APPROACH

ING’s Document & Content Services (D&CS) department worked with low-code and no-code specialists CLEVR to build and test a Mendix app to facilitate outbound processes and transactional communications with its customers in the Netherlands.

The development cycle included a crucial testing stage with the Mendix Application Test Suite (ATS) – a cloud service designed for non-IT personnel. Created specifically for the Mendix platform, it is built on top of Selenium (the standard at ING).

The Mendix team (EmpowerING) consists of Mendix developers, testers and customer journey experts. By using the Mendix ATS, a constant feedback loop was established, providing information for developers by reproducing issues found by the testers. The user story acceptance criteria included a test-automation requirement. To date, ING has run more than 2,200 automated tests. If the tool is unable to follow the path, one of the team members builds an action to assist. The team is fully capable of doing all this by themselves.

THE RESULTS

Thanks to Mendix ATS, ING was able to launch a fully tested app on time. The team achieved complete test coverage, ensuring the quality of the app and its immediate adoption, as well as meeting internal development and security guidelines. They got it right first time, and without needing IT engineers.

Using the same test cases in different app environments, ING saves considerable time as it can continuously repeat automated test cases, without rewriting them each time. The team can also identify issues they wouldn’t find testing the app manually. For example, ING found a major database issue that otherwise wouldn’t have come to light. Mendix ATS has also improved feedback within the team.

Even beyond the modelling phase, Mendix ATS enables the ING team to have continuous control. Every four-hour automatic test run provides proof the app is working, proving that each use case of the application is fulfilled. As an added bonus, the quality of the app has motivated ING to deliver more Mendix apps, and has reinforced acceptance of the Mendix platform at ING.

CUSTOMER QUOTE

“By using ATS, we increased the immediate adoption of the app by the business. This is one of the most important success criteria for us”

Ed Spitteler, expertise lead outbound communication, ING