Building a culture of quality through automation: CoE model in action increases quality and reduces regression testing efforts by 55%

Challenge

A mortgage provider based in the U.S. struggled with inconsistent software quality and slow release cycles These issues impacted the customer experience and operational efficiency.

As digital transformation accelerated, the organization needed to scale its testing capabilities without compromising speed or accuracy.

Legacy testing practices and a lack of centralized governance made it difficult to maintain quality standards across teams and applications.

In addition, siloed quality assurance (QA) efforts and limited automation led to high defect rates and increased manual workload, slowing down development and deployment processes.

The company recognized the need for a structured, organization-wide approach to quality assurance that could align teams, standardize practices, and embed automation deeply into the software development lifecycle.

Solution

After studying the client’s key needs, Marlabs decided to create an automation strategy to ensure higher application quality and leverage test automation to speed up the time to market.

To complement this, a Center of Excellence (COE) for governance and best practices were put in place. Marlabs established a Qualitia automation-specific quality engineering practice to deliver the following:

• ‍CI/CD automation process setup: Helped the client’s team with CI/CD setup for automation of smoke execution using Azure DevOps pipelines to enable continuous testing -- and to reduce the manual triggering of execution under production and other environments.‍
• Automated regression testing for all channels: Eliminated 100% manual testing of regression processes across retail, wholesale, and direct-to-customer (DTC) business lines.‍
• UAT/SIT/Stage/Training: End-to-end execution for all environments for various channels.‍
• API testing: Implemented API testing as part of the automation.‍
• Reports and dashboards: Made Qualitia automation reports and dashboards available to provide automation execution trends and step-wise reports.‍
• Training and support: Trained more than 50 people on Qualitia automation and created best practices documents and four knowledge bases, while providing technical assistance as required.

Results

The client met its key goal of improving application quality across the organization, while the training, best practices, and knowledge bases we provided helped the cross-skilled teams become more productive.

The company-wide approach to QA brought greater consistency to quality practices across teams and applications.

The reusable functions we created also ensure that the products are easy to maintain. Any issue with components found in one product can be fixed automatically for all products, helping achieve faster development.

Impact

• 100% elimination of manual testing of regression processes
• 55% reduction in effort on each regression cycle, demonstrating Qualitia automation ROI
• Created 300+ reusable functions that make it easy to maintain products
• Created 4 knowledge base articles, including best practices, CI/CD pipeline, and more
• Drastic reduction in defects leaked to higher environments

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is a Center of Excellence (CoE) model for automation?

A Center of Excellence (CoE) provides a centralized framework for managing automation, including standards, best practices, governance, and training. It helps teams use automation consistently and effectively across the organization.

How does a CoE improve quality in mortgage operations?

A CoE standardizes testing practices across teams, reduces reliance on manual testing, and promotes greater consistency in application quality. This can help mortgage organizations identify defects earlier and release applications more efficiently.