From Silos to Synergy — How INGenious is transforming ING’s testing approach

A story of building a Community of Practice

They say, when teams work in silos, they build walls instead of bridges.

A prime example of this, at a Global scale, is the COVID-19 Vaccination Protocol. During the pandemic, independent vaccination strategies from different countries initially caused delays in manufacturing, distribution, and administration. However with the help from WHO, the adoption of standardized protocols for vaccine development and distribution transformed the global efforts. Standardized mRNA technology accelerated vaccine production and approval. The world witnessed an unprecedented Global Collaboration — Countries shared data, research, and manufacturing resources efficiently. Also, uniform labeling and storage requirements reduced logistical challenges.

And for the very first time in human history, a vaccine was created in less than 12 months, that too against arguably the deadliest pandemic, the world has ever seen.

Just to put things into perspective, the second fastest vaccine to go from development to deployment was the mumps vaccine in the 1960s, which took about four years.

This shows, Silos with fragmented approaches don’t just divide teams, they divide progress.

In ING Bank, we have thousands of squads in Tech, each with a common goal — Create and release high quality software to provide a superior customer experience that’s personal, easy, relevant and instant. We are unified by the end goal, but divided by the means to reach there, specially when it comes to automated testing. Every squad seemed happy in their own bubble, using a wide variety of automation tools for testing the same technology.

For example, to do browser based testing some squads were using Selenium with Java, while some were using Playwright with Typescript, while some others were using Cypress with Javascript. There were squads who were even using licensed products like Katalon Studio.

Similarly, for API based testing, some squads resorted to Rest Assured with Java, some used Python [Requests](https://pypi.org/project/requests/) module while others just simply settled with the good ol’ Postman.

Similar chaotic scenes were evident when it came to using a testing framework. There was a plethora of usages — From Cucumber to Serenity, from Robot to Pytest, from Tricentis Tosca to basic home grown ones — You name it, you had it 🤪

What this means in real world, is that the art of testing and quality assurance has shifted from being a craft rooted in critical thinking to an automation-focused practice. In a constant race to use and maintain various automation tools and frameworks, we are losing the essence of analytical thinking and the art of designing thoughtful test cases.

One of the many ways in which we are trying to address this in ING is by propagating the concept of — Test As One : One framework, one vision, one success.

**INGenious** is one such solution, which unifies teams and unlocks true innovation. It is an effort to give every team, enough ammunition so that they can fire on all cylinders to write and automate impactful business driven test cases. Let’s try to understand how.

⚡ Innovation through unification

When Teams and Technology align, possibilities multiply

INGenious brings different testing capabilities like :

🟢 Front End — Browsers 🌐, Mobile Devices 📱, Fat Clients 🖥️ , etc. 🟢 Back End — APIs 🔗, Databases ⛁, Messaging Queues ⏳, Kafka, File Systems 📄 etc. into a unified testing solution.

INGenious Architecture

INGenious has 3 layers :

1️⃣ Layer 1 (or the bottom layer) comprises of all the open source libraries meant for automating various technologies. For example — Playwright for Browsers, Java HTTP Client for APIs, Appium for Mobile Devices and Fat Clients, etc. At any point of time, any new library can be added to automate the desired technology. For instance — we recently added the kafka-clients library to create kafka producer and consumer tests.

<!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.apache.kafka/kafka-clients -->
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.kafka</groupId>
    <artifactId>kafka-clients</artifactId>
    <version>3.9.0</version>
</dependency>

2️⃣ Layer 2 (or the middle layer) comprises of more than 400 built-in test actions ranging from front end actions like Click, Fill, selectbyVisibleText to back end actions like setEndPoint, addHeaders, postRequest to validations like assertElementIsVisible, assertElementTextMatches, assertJSONelementEquals etc. At any point of time, any new test action can be added or existing action can be modified to suit the needs. This is explained with examples in this documentation.

3️⃣ Layer 3 (or the top layer) is what differentiates INGenious from other testing frameworks. It provides an intuitive IDE for easy and fast test design. It allows following design patterns like Page Object Model and creation of Reusable components and facilitates driving the tests using test data. This top layer also helps to easily configure test suites to run on parallel threads, integrate test results to Azure DevOps Test Plans and even implement Behavior Driven Development. The image below shows how in a single view one can get a complete understanding of which test cases you have written, which reusables you have created, the object repository and the complete test data set. To know more, visit this documentation page.

INGenious IDE

🤝 Collaboration through simplicity and unification

Collaboration transforms isolated efforts into collective triumphs

There is an active community of 250+ INGenious users in ING who are catering to automation of testing for nearly 80+ applications across various domains and entities like Wholesale Banking, Retail Banking etc.

With the adoption of INGenious for automated testing in ING, we witnessed collaboration of 2 types among teams —

1️⃣ Test Engineers and Business Analysts (a.k.a. Customer Journey Experts) The simplicity of INGenious has shifted the focus from writing a lot of test code, to creating good quality business driven tests. This has attracted a lot of discussions and brainstorming with business users who previously could not contribute as much to automated testing as the previous code-only frameworks were complicated to understand. There is a significant shift in focus that we have noticed from the management as well towards facilitating these collaborations.

2️⃣ Test Engineers across domains and geographies We witnessed a rise in discussions and mind-sharing among engineers belonging to various domains across different parts of the globe. For instance, someone working for Wholesale banking in Geneva, could easily interact with someone working for Retail banking in Romania and try to find an answer to a common question. ✅ Standardization allowed teams across regions to share reusable components, best practices, and solutions to common challenges. ✅ Regular workshops, forums, and documentation built a community of practitioners who continuously improved the framework. ✅ Testers, developers, and business analysts could work in a shared context, making defect resolution faster and smoother.

The journey from Inner source to Open Source

With the adoption of 𝑰𝑵𝑮𝒆𝒏𝒊𝒐𝒖𝒔 by various pockets in ING, we saw some major possibilities and opportunities.

🚀 Scalability: A common framework scales easily as teams or projects grow. ⚖️ Governance: Consistent frameworks provide better control and compliance with industry regulations. 💬 Faster Feedback: Shared tools allow for quicker identification and resolution of defects. ♻️ Resource Mobility: Test Engineers can easily switch between projects without needing extensive retraining. 🌟 Cross-Domain Insights: Shared practices lead to innovative solutions applicable across different areas of the bank.

This led us to believe that having benefitted so much from the open source world, it was about time that we gave something back to the community. So we decided to make 𝑰𝑵𝑮𝒆𝒏𝒊𝒐𝒖𝒔 open source and available via GitHub. Major considerations behind this decision —

1️⃣ 𝘊𝘰𝘭𝘭𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯: We’re excited to engage with the broader Quality Assurance community and collaborate with champions like Playwright, to continuously enhance 𝑰𝑵𝑮𝒆𝒏𝒊𝒐𝒖𝒔 and integrate the best practices of software testing. 2️⃣ 𝘐𝘯𝘯𝘰𝘷𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯: By opening the doors to community contributions, we aim to push the boundaries of what’s possible in automated testing. 3️⃣ 𝘌𝘮𝘱𝘰𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵: This initiative enables both engineers and business users worldwide to leverage 𝑰𝑵𝑮𝒆𝒏𝒊𝒐𝒖𝒔 for their testing needs, fostering a culture of shared knowledge and efficiency.

𝑰𝑵𝑮𝒆𝒏𝒊𝒐𝒖𝒔 is a testament of how at ING we are looking at Quality and Reliability — with openness, innovation and collaboration!

We look forward to seeing how the community uses, improves, and contributes to this project. Together, let’s build something amazing! 💡

→ Find out more about 𝑰𝑵𝑮𝒆𝒏𝒊𝒐𝒖𝒔 :

[embed]INGenious Playwright Studio INGenious enables easy and effective test automation for everyone. Developed and perfected by ING Bank for over 4 years…ing-bank.github.io

→ Check out the repository below and start contributing!

[embed]GitHub - ing-bank/INGenious: INGenious Playwright Studio INGenious Playwright Studio. Contribute to ing-bank/INGenious development by creating an account on GitHub.github.com