Handwritten C, a Tuxedo table, and the start of everything
Santander was the beginning of my professional career. A Spanish bank that had just taken over Serfin in Mexico and was standardizing everything on Linux. I walked in as a QA Junior and learned to test with my bare hands.
Testing before there were tools
My first tool was the orchestrator — the predecessor of QTP, from Mercury, the name escapes me now. And the software versions were so old they were not even forks anymore, they were just ancient.
Most of my early testing was artisanal. For Tuxedo tests, we wrote scripts by hand, and then we wrote the load generator itself in C. A program we built to inject load into the Tuxedo servers.
Tuxedo, unencrypted by design
The Tuxedo servers were not encrypted. The ATM network used a table to encrypt point to point from the teller machine automatically up to the central, so the plain text traveled inside, encrypted by the hops. And in C we wrote the functions and the repetitions we needed on the test data for Tuxedo scenarios: withdrawing cash from the ATM, balance inquiries, credit card operations.
Mainframe, batch, and Unix
We pressed against the mainframe with batch processes. The environment was a lot of Unix and Linux, and Santander had created a test application for the people who service the ATMs. It was the standardized Linux environment of a Spanish bank arriving in Mexico.