Over a period of five months, Sparekassen Kronjylland gained a clearer overview of its testing activities and established a structured approach that enabled faster time to market and improved the quality of new features and solutions.
Sparekassen Kronjylland is a Danish savings bank with guarantors, founded by the local community in and around Randers in 1829. Today, it is one of Denmark’s largest savings banks of its kind and continues to expand its network of branches across the country.
As part of the financial sector, the bank is subject to extensive regulatory requirements, which create considerable administrative demands. At the same time, Sparekassen Kronjylland aims to maintain its personalized customer advisory services, tailored to individual needs, with response times of no more than 24 hours in most cases.
The combination of these factors means that the bank needs to digitize and automate more of its business operations and internal processes, allowing employees to devote more time to their customers. As these digital processes become increasingly business-critical, quality assurance and time to market play an even more important role in the bank’s operations.
The development department was not accustomed to taking a structured approach to testing and quality assurance. Testing was often ad hoc, inefficient, and allocated relatively few resources. As a result, newly developed features could remain ready for testing for extended periods. The team was also unsure when sufficient testing had been performed, creating a risk of both overtesting and undertesting. Testing practices varied between individuals and from one occasion to the next.
This lack of structure meant that the bank had limited visibility into software quality, faced a high but poorly understood risk of defects in production, and experienced longer time to market than necessary. In the worst case, these challenges could hinder the bank’s digital transformation, which is essential to supporting growth and customer satisfaction.
Sparekassen Kronjylland therefore wanted to establish a more structured and efficient approach to testing and reduce the time to market for new features.
Testing is now something we do together as a team, rather than something one person handles alone. For the first time, we have established a proper structure for our testing activities, making both testing and risks more visible to the team, management, and business stakeholders.
Relevant stakeholders, including developers, Scrum Masters, Product Owners, and business representatives, received training in Fundamentals of Structured Testing. The aim was to establish a foundational understanding of software testing and quality assurance, develop a consistent approach to future testing activities, create a shared terminology, and equip participants with the essential skills needed to work effectively with testing.
Building on this shared knowledge, a workshop was held to review the entire development process. During the workshop, the team identified opportunities and initiatives for improving both the product and the processes related to testing and quality assurance. Based on a risk assessment, the team then prioritized the most important initiatives to implement.
A mentoring programme lasting three to four months helped Sparekassen Kronjylland implement the selected improvements, while providing ongoing guidance and support to ensure the initiatives were successfully put into practice.
The three main initiatives were:
Sparekassen Kronjylland now has a more structured approach to understanding, discussing, and carrying out testing and quality assurance. In addition, the programme delivered the following benefits:
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