Banco Bolivariano doubled automation coverage by killing the maintenance tax
How a 20-person QA team in an Ecuador bank expanded automated test coverage
from ~25% to ~65% across web and mobile, without writing more Java.
Banco Bolivariano is one of Ecuador’s established private banks, serving customers across web and mobile channels. The QA team, twenty engineers strong — is responsible for keeping the bank’s digital products safe to ship. They had the skills. They had the tooling. What they didn’t have was the time.
The challenge: a maintenance tax that capped coverage
Before the move to a low-code platform, Banco Bolivariano’s automation strategy ran on Selenium and WebDriver. Tests were Java scripts. Every script worked. Every script also took engineering effort to build and maintain. With the bank’s applications changing often, the result was predictable.
Coverage stalled at around 20–30% of critical scenarios. Mobile automation, on Android and iOS, barely existed. The team had tried, but the technical complexity and the maintenance burden kept the mobile track stagnant.
Danny Rios, the testing engineer leading the initiative, named the trade-off in plain terms:
We create test scripts in Java with Selenium and WebDriver. This involves time and effort, which we want to avoid.
Danny Rios
Software Testing Engineer, Banco Bolivariano
The deeper issue wasn’t the framework. It was who could use it. Selenium-based automation demanded developer-grade skill from every tester on the team — a bottleneck that capped how fast Banco Bolivariano could expand coverage, no matter how many people were on the rotation. The QA team spent its hours maintaining what existed instead of building toward what was missing.
What Banco Bolivariano was looking for
Four criteria mattered most for the team:
- A low-code approach, so QA engineers could build and run automated tests without writing Java — letting adoption scale across the full 20-person team.
- Multi-application coverage in one platform: web, mobile web, Android, and iOS, centralized instead of fragmented across separate tools.
- Flexible execution, with the choice to run tests locally or through a managed execution lab depending on the scenario.
- A short learning curve, so onboarding the team would take weeks, not months.
Testsigma matched all four in a single platform. And rollout began.
The shift: a team that grew without hiring
The first change after rollout was who was building tests. Under the old framework, automation was effectively a developer activity dressed up as a QA function. With the new platform in place, the entire QA team participated. Engineers with deep test design expertise translated that knowledge directly into automated scenarios — no Java prerequisite.
The second change was where the team’s time went. Maintenance effort dropped sharply. When the application changed, updating a test was faster and didn’t require pulling someone off another priority to debug a script. The team redirected those hours toward expanding functional coverage instead of repairing what already existed.
Centralization compounded both shifts. Web, mobile web, and mobile applications now live in one platform instead of fragmented tooling per surface. Script management, execution orchestration, and reporting all collapsed into one workflow.
The results: coverage doubled, mobile unlocked
- Automated test coverage grew from ~20–30% to ~60–70% of critical and regression scenarios.
- Mobile automation went live across web, mobile web, Android, and iOS — a category that had been stagnant under the previous framework.
- Regression cycles improved. The team now runs tests more frequently and more consistently, with execution capacity that scales with the platform instead of with headcount.
- Maintenance overhead dropped, freeing engineering hours that now go into functional coverage and broader quality strategy work.
The numbers tell one story: a two-to-three-times jump in automated coverage. The bigger story is what that coverage now spans. Banco Bolivariano’s customers move between web and mobile constantly. Before, mobile was a blind spot. It isn’t anymore.
In Danny’s words
Testsigma allowed our team to move faster with automation, especially in scenarios where we previously faced technical or maintenance limitations. It significantly reduces the entry barrier to automation and helps QA teams scale their efforts more efficiently.
Danny Rios
Software Testing Engineer, Banco Bolivariano
The team also points to the responsiveness of the support relationship. Response times are usually almost immediate, and the support team is consistently willing to collaborate on resolving questions and issues as they come up.
Looking ahead
With foundational coverage in place across web and mobile, Banco Bolivariano’s QA team is shifting focus from script maintenance to broader quality strategy — expanding functional coverage and bringing automation deeper into the bank’s release process.
