ING Drives Business App Adoption with Mendix Application Test Suite

Challenge

ING creates an environment that empowers employees to step up, own their position and make ING shine. That’s why employees in the Netherlands work in small, multidisciplinary, selforganizing teams (squads). The teams have endto-end responsibility for their Customer Journey purpose (tasks) to minimize handovers and maximize autonomy while providing an excellent customer experience. To maintain the autonomy of each of these squads, it was necessary to build an environment that allowed employees to create process and transactional communications within their particular Customer Journey. For this purpose, in collaboration with Mendix partner Emixa, a platform was built to enable employees to communicate with customers.

ING has the ambition to be leading in the industry as well as the aspiration to do it firsttime-right. This strategy led to the selection of an automated test tool to be compliant with internal development rules & security guidelines, ensuring apps are tested rigorously. The new automated test tool had to be user-friendly to non-IT personnel, the typical users of the Mendix Platform at ING. The simple creation of reusable test scripts by the Mendix team and their testers, to be used across app environments, was a key requirement.

“By using ATS, we would increase the immediate adoption of the app by the business. Of course, this is one of the most important success criteria for us”, according to Expertise Lead Outbound Communication at ING, Ed Spitteler.

Emixa introduced Mendix ATS, a cloud service designed for non-IT personnel, to ING. As it was built specifically for the Mendix platform, and is built on top of Selenium (the standard at ING), the tool was adopted.

The Mendix team (EmpowerING) consists of Mendix Developers, Testers and Customer Journey Experts. By using Mendix ATS, a constant feedback loop was set in place, providing developers information by reproducing issues found by the testers.

The user story acceptance criteria included a test automation requirement. At this moment, ING has run over 2,200 automated tests. If the recorder is unable to follow the path, one of the team members builds an action to help the recorder. The team is fully capable of doing this by themselves.

Results

With Mendix ATS, ING & Emixa launched a fully-tested app on-time. They secured complete test coverage, ensuring the quality of the app and immediate adoption, and meeting internal development & security guidelines.

By using the same test cases on different app environments, ING saves a great deal of time. ING does not have to rewrite test cases and can endlessly repeat automated test cases. They find issues which they would not find testing the app manually, as Mendix ATS follows the same route continuously, diminishing test mistakes. For example, ING found a major database issue which they would not have found otherwise. And, Mendix ATS improved the feedback loop within the team, providing information to reproduce issues found.

Even after the modeling phase, Mendix ATS provides continuous control for the ING team. Moreover, with every four-hour automatic test run, they provide proof the app is functionally working, proving that each use case of the application is fulfilled.

Finally, the quality of the app motivated ING to deliver more Mendix apps and ensured acceptance of Mendix at ING.