Building a culture of quality through automation: the CoE model in action for a US mortgage provider

Challenge

The U.S.-based mortgage provider struggled with inconsistent software quality and slow release cycles, which impacted 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.

Additionally, siloed 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 DTC (direct-to-customer) business lines.‍
• UAT/SIT/Stage/Training: End-to-end execution for all environments for various channels.‍
• API testing: API testing was implemented as part of the automation.‍
• Reports and dashboards: Qualitia automation reports and dashboards were made available to provide automation execution trends and step-wise reports.‍
• Training and support: Provided training and created best practices documents, four knowledge bases, and technical assistance as required. Trained 50+ personnel on Qualitia automation.

Results

The client’s key goal of improving application quality was met while the training, best practices, and knowledge bases ensured that its cross-skilled teams became more productive. The reusable functions we created also ensure products are easy to maintain. Any issue with components found in one product can be fixed automatically for all the products to achieve faster development.

Impact

• 100% elimination of manual testing of regression processes
• 55% reduction in effort on each regression cycle
• 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
• Qualitia automation ROI by reducing effort by 55% on each regression cycle