Consolidating a federated QA estate

Client and industry context

Bank of Queensland is a well-established, multi-brand Australian banking group operating nationally across retail and commercial segments in a highly regulated environment. At the time of engagement it was undergoing a significant digital and quality transformation — uplifting delivery capability, modernising legacy platforms and improving customer and operational outcomes — where quality engineering, automation and streamlined delivery were critical to success rather than incidental to it.

The challenge

BOQ operated a federated QA model spanning multiple delivery areas and vendor teams — a baseline of 97 FTEs across permanent and vendor resources. The federated model had produced predictable fragmentation across tools, practices and ownership.

• Multiple frameworks and tools in parallel — Tosca for UI and API, Postman and others — generating technical debt and high maintenance effort across a duplicated toolset.
• Each vendor had built its own automation framework, so reusability was limited and the bank retained no intellectual property from the automation it had paid for.
• Inconsistent practices across delivery areas, with limited integration between manual and automated testing.
• Sequential execution with slow feedback cycles, delaying delivery.

Innovo's role

Innovo was engaged to deliver end-to-end quality-engineering transformation across three domains usually managed separately: test automation, test data and environment management. The core of the role was consolidation — taking a federated estate built by multiple vendors on multiple frameworks and bringing it onto one standardised platform, one set of practices and one governance model, while migrating the existing automation investment rather than discarding it.

Critically, Innovo brought its own reusable automation framework, iACE, which changed the IP position: rather than adding another vendor-specific framework, the transformation moved BOQ to a consolidated asset it could actually retain.

The solution delivered

• A standardised test lifecycle — templates, governance and delivery processes applied consistently across delivery areas, replacing area-by-area local practice.
• Tool consolidation onto Tricentis as the single automation standard, rationalising the parallel frameworks and tools already in the estate.
• Migration of approximately 3,000 existing automated test cases using a proven transformation approach — carrying the existing investment forward rather than rebuilding from scratch.
• Integrated test data and environment management, brought into the same governed lifecycle as automation rather than treated as downstream dependencies.
• Balanced-scorecard governance measuring performance, risk and value on a six-month cycle, so benefits were evidenced on a recurring basis.

Capabilities involved

• iACE Automation Framework — Innovo's own reusable framework, giving BOQ a distinct, retained and portable automation asset in place of frameworks it did not own.
• At-scale automation migration — roughly 3,000 automated test cases transformed onto a consolidated platform using an established migration method, preserving prior investment.
• Multi-tool estate consolidation — rationalising parallel frameworks and tools into a single platform standard.
• Integrated test data and environment management.
• Parallelised execution, compressing feedback cycles that had run sequentially.