Banco República Success Story: How Automation Solved the User Acceptance Testing (UAT) Challenge

Success Summary

Client: Banco República (BROU), the largest bank in Uruguay.

Challenge: To lift the burden of User Acceptance Testing (UAT) from the administrative areas, resolve internal friction, and establish a non-existent regression testing process.

Solution: A team from Software Testing Bureau used STELA to create automations based on the business areas’ use cases, execute them, and deliver result reports for final approval.

Key Results

A 70% savings in the execution time for regression tests once they were established.

Complete coverage of critical tests for the first two phases of the new BANTOTAL core banking system.

Detection of critical failures that would have had a major negative impact on operations.

Increased confidence and speed in the release of new software versions.

The Challenge: Organizational Tension and the Risk of No Regression Testing

The project was led by the QA area of the IT department, but the problem went beyond technology. The bank’s policy of having administrative staff test software changes created a constant dilemma. Business area managers had to assign their staff to perform testing tasks, pulling them away from their primary responsibilities. To make matters worse, users often couldn’t complete the tests due to IT environment issues, leading to frustration and delays.

This inefficiency had an even more serious consequence: the bank was not performing any regression testing. The common practice was to test only the new functionality, with no systematic method to ensure that changes hadn’t broken something elsewhere in the system. For an institution of BROU’s size and importance, this represented a huge hidden operational risk.

The Solution: STELA as a Trusted Technological Mediator

The strategy was revolutionary for the bank: instead of forcing users to test, they hired Software Testing Bureau to take responsibility for the process using STELA. The new workflow was as follows:

1. The STB team met with the user areas to gather the test cases.
2. Using STELA, automations for UAT and regression tests were created.
3. When IT implemented a change, the STB team executed the battery of automated tests.
4. A detailed results report was sent to the user area, which could now approve or reject the change based on clear, objective evidence, without having invested their own time in the execution.

Initially, the automations focused on the “Foreign Business” module. Later, when the bank began its migration to the new BANTOTAL central system, these automations were migrated and expanded, becoming the safety net for this critical project. STELA’s flexibility was key, as it seamlessly adapted to both legacy desktop applications and the new web applications.

The Results: From Zero Regression to 70% Time Savings

The implementation of this new model not only resolved the organizational tension but also introduced a culture of quality with measurable results:

• Creation of a Regression Safety Net: The bank went from having no regression testing to having complete coverage of critical processes in the first two phases of its core banking project.
• Proactive Error Detection: Several critical failures were caught during testing that would have generated a major negative impact on the bank’s operations had they reached production.
• 70% Time Savings: Once established, the execution of the automated regression tests was 70% faster than if they had been attempted manually.
• Business Benefits: The bank achieved a triple impact: valuable time saved for the administrative areas, greater speed in software releases, and, most importantly, much higher confidence in the stability of its systems.