OVO Energy
UK’s largest independent energy supplier — greenfield green-energy portal
Greenfield portal. Real billing. Real data, validated.
We led QA, ETL and data validation on a brand-new portal that lets OVO customers and customer-service agents manage solar and wind generation, exports, and complex green-tariff billing — all on top of a Snowflake-backed analytics layer.
A green-energy portal, built right.
OVO needed a brand-new portal for customers and customer-service agents to manage accounts, billing, and the complex business of energy exported back to the grid via solar, wind and the Smart Export Guarantee. We were brought in as QA leadership to set the quality bar and architect the testing programme from day zero.
From zero to a working pyramid.
We pioneered the test infrastructure from scratch — tooling choices, environments, fixtures, CI integration and the in-team conventions that made it actually used.
- QA leadership across both manual and automated streams
- Test pyramid spanning unit, component, integration, API and end-to-end
- Shift-left culture — tests written alongside code, not after
- Shared fixtures and seed data across environments
Cypress with BDD on the front, Playwright on the API.
A Cypress + Cucumber BDD suite covered the customer and CSA journeys in TypeScript, with strict adherence to SOLID principles so the tests stayed maintainable as the product grew. On the API side, we built a Playwright-based REST automation framework alongside extensive Postman work for CRUD operations and integration testing.
- Cypress + Cucumber BDD for UI flows
- Playwright API library for REST automation
- Postman collections for integration & CRUD ops
- SOLID-driven test architecture
Validating the data engine behind every bill.
The portal sits on top of an analytics platform handling solar, wind, customer and payment datasets. We supported validation of big-data pipelines end-to-end — ingest, transform, report — making sure every number that hit a customer’s invoice was accurate and reconciled.
- End-to-end ETL validation across raw, transformed and reporting layers
- Snowflake-backed data models and batch jobs validated against rule sets
- Identified mismatches in mappings, aggregation logic and downstream reporting
- Heavy use of SQL for spot-checks and reconciliation
Payments, refunds, exports, reconciliation.
Energy billing is more than a sum — it’s tariffs, refunds, reconciliation, levelisation, exports, and a different ruleset for commercial vs personal customers. We architected the financial-operations test programme so every calculation could be defended in writing.
Payment journeys. Direct-debit setup, amendment and cancellation; card-on-file management; bill-pay confirmations; top-up flows for prepay segments; mid-cycle payment-method changes; failed-payment retries; refund issuance and partial bill adjustments. Plus the Smart Export Guarantee export-payment journey end-to-end — where the customer gets paidfor the energy they put back into the grid via solar or wind.
Payment integrations. Validated the integration layer behind those journeys — direct-debit cycles with the clearing system, card-processor webhooks, statement generation, VAT handling on commercial accounts, and reconciliation across the raw, transformed and reporting layers in Snowflake so the finance team could trust the books down to the penny.
- Direct-debit setup, amendment & cancellation flows
- Card payments, saved-card management & mid-cycle changes
- Smart Export Guarantee export-payment journey end-to-end
- Levelisation & billing-period edge cases
- Refunds, credits and partial bill adjustments
- Statement generation & VAT handling for commercial accounts
- Reconciliation across raw, transformed & reporting Snowflake layers
- Permission-based and feature-flag testing across admin tiers
Lighthouse, k6, and an inclusive UI.
Performance matters when customers are checking bills on their phones at the kitchen table. We used Google Lighthouse for UI performance benchmarks, k6 for backend API load and stress testing, and ran non-functional accessibility testing to keep the portal usable for everyone.
GitHub Actions, 3 amigos, agile delivery.
We built CI pipelines in GitHub Actions with tests as a first-class quality gate, championed 3-amigo meetings for requirements and bug triage, and led the test & QA requirements gathering inside the team’s Scrum cadence.
What we delivered
- Test strategy
- Test infrastructure from scratch
- Cypress + Cucumber BDD
- Playwright API
- Postman / REST
- ETL & big-data validation
- Snowflake data validation
- SQL reconciliation
- Payment journey testing (direct debit, card, SEG export)
- Payment integration validation (clearing, webhooks, statements)
- Financial-operations testing & reconciliation
- Feature-flag & permission testing
- Performance (Lighthouse, k6)
- Accessibility
- CI/CD (GitHub Actions)
- Manual + automated QA leadership
Tech & tools
- TypeScript
- JavaScript
- Cypress
- Cucumber
- Playwright
- Postman
- Snowflake
- SQL
- Docker
- k6
- Google Lighthouse
- GitHub Actions
- GitHub
Selected reporting and official material on the OVO Solar / SEG programme this work supported.
- OVO GroupHere comes the sun — OVO Solar will help customers save over 90% on energy bills
- OVO EnergySmart Export Guarantee Tariff (SEG) — get paid for the energy you export
- OVO ForumThe Smart Export Guarantee — getting paid for the energy you export to the grid
External links open in a new tab. Coverage attributed to its respective publishers; QA Tech is independent and not affiliated with OVO Energy.
Got a high-stakes data programme?
If your business runs on numbers customers can see, we’d love to talk.