MN Pension Management
Building a better world one application at a time
Company overview
MN is one of the largest pension administrators of and asset managers for Dutch pension funds, with more than 175 billion euros under management. Every aspect of their day-to-day is calculated to benefit the greater good of the people they serve to “enjoy a good pension in a better world.”
Focused on future-proof solutions, MN takes the evolution of the technology that supports its efforts very seriously. To facilitate the mechanics of supporting its customers, the IT department is responsible for maintaining and improving close to 70 tailor-made applications. These applications are critical to providing up-to-date information to customers on the balance of their pension plans, as well as facilitating payouts.
- Industry: Financial Services
- Organization size: 175,000,000,000 euros under management
- Location: The Netherlands
- Products:
Challenges
After evaluating the efficiencies of releases on critical internal systems, the team recognized there was room for improvement.
Testing had been limited to predominantly manual efforts for each of the applications as well as for end-to-end testing. Testing was often performed after the completion of development, which created a bottleneck with the limited time available to complete comprehensive testing for both the application and adjacent systems. Peter Van Dongen, head of the MN Testing Center of Excellence, said, “We needed more testing, but we didn’t have time for it.”
Progress on testing was often difficult to share and report to development and leadership, who were responsible for making the “go/no-go” decision for each release. This was especially true for communicating results of tests run on the integration of systems, where teams would share the responsibility of testing. The inability to create greater and more efficient end-to-end testing drove the decision to consider what options were available.
MN turned to their longstanding partner Sogeti to help them navigate the test tooling strategy moving forward, especially as it related to test automation.
- Manual testing limited the scope of regression testing possible for each release
- Considerable time was required to complete testing for each release
- Failure of end-to-end testing in pre-production exposed testing gaps to be addressed
- The testing team did not have the technical expertise to pick up code-based test automation solutions quickly
- Limited visibility to leadership on testing progress and ownership of testing failures
- High public visibility of defects in production
