Streamlining Card Art Validation: Enhancing Efficiency and Accuracy through Automation
By: Karthik Murali Chandramohan, Product Delivery Manager, Chase
In the world of financial services branding, maintaining the visual integrity of credit and debit card art across various platforms is crucial. Card art is often the first impression a customer has of their card with Chase and our co-brand partners. Ensuring every card art refresh is executed with precision and efficiency is a top priority.
Here’s how we’ve tackled the challenges of card art validation through automation, saving time and improving customer experiences.
Understanding the Challenge: The Traditional Manual Process
Refreshing card art is a complex process that involves multiple teams and numerous manual steps. Over time, the storage of card art has organically expanded across various systems, with each team following its own manual update procedures. This necessitates thorough testing to ensure that our web, mobile, and print channels display the correct card art.
Although ‘automation’ might seem straightforward, the reality is much more intricate due to these complexities. Developing a platform to establish a single source of truth for card art and implementing a standardized card lifecycle process is a multi-year endeavor currently underway. Nevertheless, incorporating automated testing to validate card art would provide both short-term and long-term value, regardless of the platform’s development stage.
Whenever a card art refresh is initiated, our team receives a request and agrees on a timeline. We start by creating test accounts for the refreshed brand art and develop manual test cases tailored to the product line. This initial phase typically takes two to three days.
The manual testing process involves meticulous verification and validation of card art across every screen it appears on within the Chase.com web flow. Each card appears on more than 15 screens. For extensive product lines, like an airline partner with seven active and 14 legacy cards, this task becomes monumental. We must ensure that the card art and ID match the specifications provided, including new card art IDs and reference images.
This rigorous process is repeated for every card art refresh, whether for a brand or co-brand product line. Running regression or sanity checks involves covering numerous screens, requiring significant time and manpower. Given that Chase conducts card art refreshes several times a year, resource allocation becomes a recurring necessity.
The Creative Solution: Shifting to Automation
Recognizing the inefficiencies and potential for errors in the manual process, we identified this as an ideal candidate for automation. Leveraging our testing framework, we developed a robust and reusable automation script. This script ensures that the card art on each screen matches the reference image and ID provided. Additionally, it checks for default Chase card art in case of mismatches, ensuring no broken images are displayed.
Our automation covers both web and mobile flows, with extensive reporting capabilities. These reports provide detailed Behavior Driven Development (BDD) steps indicating the actions performed on each screen, complete with screenshots. In case of a failure, the report includes a screenshot of the screen where the card art did not match the reference, and the scenario is marked as failed.
Significant Effort and Time Savings
The transition from manual to automated testing has resulted in substantial time savings and efficiency gains. What previously took days of manual effort can now be accomplished in a fraction of the time. The automation script can run continuously, ensuring that any discrepancies are identified and addressed promptly. This not only reduces the workload on our team but also minimizes the risk of human error, ensuring a higher level of accuracy and consistency.
For example, validating card art across 15-plus screens for multiple product lines manually would require significant time and resources. With automation, this process is streamlined, allowing us to focus on more strategic tasks and deliver faster results. The ability to run these tests frequently, even every hour or 30 minutes without additional effort, further enhances our operational efficiency.
The manual testing effort previously took close to 11 days, and with automation, it has been reduced to one hour for a given co-brand product line, including both active and legacy cards.
Current Implementation and Future Enhancements
Our team has successfully implemented automation for 10 screens in the web channel, with plans to cover the remaining five screens over the next several weeks. On the mobile channel, we have automated validation for four screens and are actively working toward expanding this coverage.
Continuous collaboration with the brand and co-brand team ensures that any new or additional screens are promptly identified and included in automation.
Our automation leverages open-source libraries for image comparison, allowing us to fine-tune the match level for greater accuracy. Additionally, we plan to integrate AI tools that will perform tasks similar to the “human eye” to further enhance visual validation.
Looking ahead, we aim to improve reporting and dashboard capabilities and integrate with our internal continuous integration continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform for scheduled and on-demand runs. This integration will enable us to execute automation with each code change, at regular intervals or as needed, thereby enhancing efficiency and accuracy. As part of our future enhancements, we will explore options and feasibility to run as part of product validation tests on a scheduled interval, as well as opportunities to leverage this platform approach for card product launches to solve challenges at scale.
Conclusion
By automating the card art refresh process, we have significantly reduced the time and effort required while minimizing the risk of errors. This initiative not only streamlines our operations but also ensures that our customers experience consistent and accurate card art across all platforms. As we continue to enhance our automation capabilities, we remain committed to delivering excellence in every aspect of our work.
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