Building QA From Scratch for a Fintech Payment Platform

Challenge

An online payment platform supporting SEPA, SWIFT, and FX had no dedicated QA function. Testing was performed sporadically by the Product Owner — manually, on demand, with no documentation and no automation. As the platform grew in complexity and began serving fintech companies and payment institutions across Europe, the absence of structured QA became a serious risk.

The team needed someone to build a testing architecture from zero: strategy, documentation, manual coverage, and automation — all at once.

Solution

We embedded two QA automation engineers and started with a full QA audit to understand the state of the product and define priorities. From there, we built the entire QA process ground-up.

Test documentation and strategy

• Developed 305 test cases covering all critical functions and edge cases
• Documented 600+ test cases in total for full traceability and onboarding
• Created test plans, checklists, and execution logs
• Introduced structured defect management in Jira with standardized bug reports

Automation and CI/CD

• Built an automation framework using Playwright + TypeScript
• Integrated autotests into the Bitbucket CI/CD pipeline with parallel execution across 3 streams
• Configured automatic report uploads to FTP for centralised analytics
• Implemented real-time test execution monitoring

Coverage expansion

• Functional, regression, exploratory, API, and cross-platform testing
• API testing via Postman and Mailsac — covering SEPA, SWIFT, and FX integrations
• UX/UI testing with an average run time of 15 minutes per cycle
• Test data management using Faker.js for realistic, repeatable scenarios
• Introduced QA KPIs to measure and continuously improve process efficiency

Tools used: Playwright, TypeScript, Postman, Mailsac, Faker.js, Qase, Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, FileZilla, Miro

Results

Within the engagement, the platform moved from zero QA infrastructure to full continuous testing coverage:

• 85% of defects detected before development completed — dramatically reduced post-release bug costs
• 50% reduction in manual testing — freed team resources and accelerated regression cycles
• 40% reduction in full test cycle time — faster releases without quality trade-offs
• 60% reduction in manual checks via CI/CD automation
• 30% reduction in average bug fix time — faster turnaround between detection and resolution
• 25% reduction in overall bug processing time
• 90% system test coverage achieved across all product versions
• 305 test cases built from scratch; 600+ documented in total
• 100+ critical defects recorded and resolved before release
• 100+ reports generated automatically per month — full testing transparency
• 3 parallel test execution streams — reduced test runtime significantly
• Real-time test coverage monitoring in place from day one