People Spotlight: Meet Chloe Yin, one of GBST’s Composer Test Team rockstars

Chloe Yin is one of GBST’s Testing rockstars. She’s been leading her busy team through an impressive number of new product releases for the past eight years, including GBST’s Composer Technology Transformation Project in Australia and the UK. Find out how Chloe keeps her team motivated and what her signature dish is. You’ll want to accept that dinner invite!

How long have you been at GBST, what’s your role and what do you enjoy most about it?

I’m a Test Lead at GBST and currently oversee the testing activities in the technology transformation project for Composer. I’ve been working at GBST for eight years. I was originally based in Sydney, but five years ago I had the opportunity to move to Melbourne, and I love it here! I love helping people, improving testing processes and contributing to the success of every sprint, milestone, and release. I’ve been given so many opportunities to learn about new products and technologies by working across so many different projects and with different people. GBST provides complex FinTech solutions that require me to keep learning new things which is sometimes challenging, but extremely rewarding. I’ve grown in my role through advancement in both my technical skills and my wealth domain knowledge.

What has been your favourite project at GBST?

My favourite project so far is GBST’s Composer technology transformation. Composer is a unique and complex product, having around 1000 transaction types, 5000 configuration/reference codes, 300 batch processes, and nearly 5000 stored procedures and thousands of domain API services. The transformation project focused on transforming the existing Composer application into a new customer-first digital platform, with domain-based microservices. The introduction of a new technology stack has brought me so many opportunities to make significant change to the way we carry out testing, such as increased test automation and shift left testing for domain API services.

What’s the key to successful software testing?  

For me, the key to successful testing activities comes down to three key elements. Planning, support and reward.

At GBST we have a clearly defined roadmap for each release cycle. We plan test activities and resources around the release delivery scope we are provided to ensure we meet key dates. Every member of the team is supportive as we all share the same goal – deliver on time and provide quality services to our clients. I always encourage my team members to raise more extensive questions about our products and support them to seek answers, which can be tough at times, but is also motivating and has inspired us to learn new processes. At GBST, we also have monthly Shout Outs and quarterly Stand Out awards to recognise those who have made outstanding contributions to our company which is great.

What’s so innovative about GBST’s approach to testing with Composer?

I think the adoption of BDD/TDD Testing methodologies is one of the most innovative testing approaches at GBST.

Test Driven Development (Design) is a testing methodology/programming practice which is implemented from a developer’s perspective. In this technique, a developer/tester starts designing and writing test cases for every small functionality of an application. In a TDD approach, automated test scripts are written before functional pieces of code.

BDD (Behaviour Driven Development) is the extension of TDD and is more focused on business scenarios. It helps the team to improve communications between the developer, tester, and business analyst (the three amigos). The most common approach used for BDD testing is dubbed as ‘Given-When-Then’.

Considering the complexity of our products, we have created a maturity model to control, manage, and improve our processes step by step. These testing approaches can improve work efficiency and effectiveness tremendously and reduce many testing efforts in terms of software development processes. By advancing our testing, we have been able to reduce the time taken to perform testing and can get new versions of our product to market quicker.

As part of BDD/TDD, we also developed a handy and productive automation framework for API testing. With the capability of data-driven and configurable modes, a tester can run hundreds of API test cases within a day. Most API testing can achieve 100% coverage using this framework. No doubt, it is one of the most efficient automation frameworks that I have ever known anywhere.

How has Artificial Intelligence (AI) changed the testing landscape?

As a high-tech FinTech company, there is huge potential for AI to have a broad application within our automation testing landscape. AI provides a computer program or machine the ability to think/reason for itself and learn by collecting data and modifying future behaviour. The use of AI in software development is still evolving. In software test automation, AI provides a self-healing mechanism. For example, in our UI automation framework, the tester needs to spend a lot of time to maintain thousands of scripts once any UI changes are affected and original locators stop working. With an integrated AI framework, spending time to maintain large volumes of scripts and fix those errors one by one is not required, as AI can help to correct those locator issues by itself during the regression testing phase. This can save numerous hours of testing.

How do you keep abreast of continuing changes and technical advances within the FinTech space?

Wealth domain knowledge is quite complex and is evolving around legislative changes all the time. I have learnt a lot of my product knowledge over the years through each of the projects I’ve worked on. I invest time reading existing design documents to familiarise myself and I am supported by GBST’s Business SMEs and Technical Solution Architects to perform my role and have had exposure to many different technologies that have been adopted by different projects. This really motivates me and provides me with personal learning which help me keep up with the latest technology in the market.

What do you love about working at GBST?

GBST has a very open-minded culture, warm and comfortable atmosphere with a flexible working environment. People are genuinely nice and supportive. Some of my colleagues have worked at GBST for more than 20 years, and some until retirement. They are very knowledgeable, professional, and passionate. I enjoy working with them and learning from them every day.

What is one interesting fact about you that people may not know?

I love to cook. My signature dish is homemade dumplings. In my hometown many people learn to make dumplings at a young age. Dumplings are a very popular food in China, traditionally served at Spring Festival. The shape of the dumplings resembles a gold ingot, which is believed to bring wealth and treasures in the upcoming year. Dumplings have stuffing, in which people often add auspicious materials. In some places, people even put a clean coin into the dumplings, because they are of the opinion that the one who eats the coin will become wealthier. Nowadays, dumplings have become a fast food as well, and I make dumplings in my spare time and put them in the fridge or freezer. They can easily be put in boiled water and cooked for 10 minutes and are simply delicious.

Read more about GBST’s wealth management administration platform, Composer. 

Posted in: Wealth Management Administration