Enterprise Integration Test

Client: Multinational Bank

Category: Quality, Transformation, Knowledge Transfer, Vendor, Infrastructure, Program Management

Two banks of nearly equal size were merging and even though both sets of teams were top-notch experts at what they did, none of them were experts at integrating two banking systems.  ETHITEQUE was called in to help.  The migration decision was that the cutover from one set of systems to the new set of systems would occur over a 3 day period, starting on a Thursday night and ending on a Sunday morning.

After evaluating the test plans of the 30 projects, we very soon understood that there was a fundamentally critical test missing:  the Customer Experience Test of the “before, during, and after” migration.  We quickly established a 31^st project to test the customer experience and aligned senior business executives to focus on this important test phase.

Integration tests are tricky and this was one of the trickier ones we’d encountered.  To begin the process, we workshopped with the senior executives and asked, “What are the 10 most important business functions that absolutely must work correctly for the merger to be considered a success?”

Once this was identified, we built teams of both Business and Technology staff to build the right detailed test plan with supporting test cases and data.

Our 3-month Enterprise Integration Test involved up to 700 people at varying points and we identified 1,200 customer-facing defects (or glitches) which the banks were able to fix prior to the migration weekend.

Many of the senior Technology executives did not originally support our Enteprise Integration Test approach.  However, when they saw how we integrated both business and technology perspectives during a major test and uncovered so many incidents that they were able to fix prior to launch, they were very pleased and welcomed our test processes into their operations.