OP-Pohjola (OP) is a Finnish financial services group that provides its corporate and institutional customers with a diverse range of banking, non-life insurance and asset management services, and private individuals with an extensive range of non-life insurance and private banking services. Years ago, OP launched their mobile services tailored for their customers by providing easy, safe and reliable mobile applications that can take care of the banking and insurance transactions for consumers.
Due to the nature of banking services and their use of highly sensitive information, Jukka Parkkinen, VP of Application Development at OP-Pohjola Oy, was in need of a testing environment that only provides private access to the testing data, devices and assets behind a firewall. It was obvious that an in-house testing solution with Enterprise-Grade Security was the only option.
One of the major challenges we faced was the integration of source code for multiple releases during parallel development.
As OP can only release safety- and mission-critical applications, the need for testing became even more crucial. With a clear vision about what the ideal solution has to offer, the development team started to look for ways that would enable them to run automated tests for app robustness inside the firewall. “We went through a handful of automated testing solutions in this domain. In fact, many other solutions only provide automated testing in a shared cloud environment and lack the capability of hosting an on-premise environment. But only Bitbar is ahead of the game with hybrid cloud solutions for public cloud, private cloud and on-premise deployment,” said Jukka.
The company turned to Bitbar for its On-Premise solution that was identified as the most comprehensive solution and could enable OP-Pohjola to build a private cloud at local for automated Android and iOS testing.
When we started leveraging Bitbar’s integrated agile tools and services, we saw more benefits. Now we have enabled continuous integration for each build and parallel device testing. Bitbar On-Premise is a perfect solution that enables OP-Pohjola to ensure the quality and efficiency of mobile development.
Jukka explained that the company adopted Bitbar On-Premise because it was the only hosted mobile test automation solution that could meet their needs. Bitbar On-Premise provided a flexible and seamless integration with Agile processes with the help of continuous integration to test every change in OP’s mobile banking application and run it on real devices. One the most compelling features of Bitbar On-Premise for OP-Pohjola was the complete automation of tests and running of those simultaneously on hundreds of different Android and iOS devices.