For the consumer, the digital banking experience is supposed to be simple and intuitive. Banking transactions can be completed quickly with just a few taps or clicks and without the need for a tutorial or extensive user manual. With the growing competition across the banking industry, a financial institution is more likely to retain that consumer if the experience constantly improves in speed, reliability, and ease.
While the user experience of digital banking is straightforward, banking software is complex. The software must perform every financial transaction variation correctly, safeguard sensitive personal data, and comply with relevant laws and regulations. With thousands of dependencies within the banking software, the testing process often requires more time and resources, not to mention continuous monitoring and documentation.
Importance of Software Testing for Banking Applications
By performing rigorous automated software testing in banking applications, a financial institution can ensure that:
- Provided financial guidelines are strictly followed.
- Every transaction follows all relevant laws and regulations.
- The application and infrastructure can handle multiple transaction requests without disruption, especially during peak business hours.
- All transactions are correctly executed while protecting sensitive personal data.
- The banking software is secure and can prevent fraud, hacking, or other cyber-attack attempts.
While manual testing often complements automated testing, it cannot be 100% reliable as a stand-alone testing method for delivering successful software in the financial industry.
After generating over 1 million automated test cases, our team of 1400+ members has firsthand experience in automated software testing for banking applications. Yet, automated testing can only be as effective if implemented efficiently within your financial institution’s testing processes. Our team recommends adhering to these ten automated testing tips to ensure your automation testing delivers value:
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Future Proof Your Automation Testing
Think big picture when creating your automation testing process. Your banking software as a product will naturally evolve to meet your consumers' expectations and stay competitive in the marketplace. However, your automation process should be flexible and adjustable to undefinable changes. That way, your process for automated testing in banking continues to deliver value over time.
To accomplish this, you must future-proof the design of your automated testing protocols by constructing a framework that is:
- Modular and nimble
- Easy to integrate with the languages, technologies, and tools you plan to use across the life of your banking software
- Effective in performing automated tests in parallel so that execution across multiple machines and environments can occur
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Clearly Define Your Test Objectives
When it comes to automated testing in banking, start at the very beginning. Scoping may not be the most glamorous part of automation testing, but it can be the most effective step. It sets your team up for success and avoids pitfalls closer to launch.
The scoping phase is the first step in the testing development process, where your team identifies your test objectives and the purpose of automated testing. Scoping uncovers testing evaluation standards, any required documentation, and the stakeholders who need to be involved. By defining your goals early, your team can align the key players and resources required to reach success at the end of the automated testing process.
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Strategize Effectiveness Within Restrictions
The scoping process for automated software testing for banking applications always reveals the harsh reality of restrictions, be it a limitation of time, resources, cost, or quality. And your team must strategize how to achieve your objectives despite these constraints.
Solutions may hide within your team’s existing projects, so a full review is recommended. For example, you may discover that a high-priority project two months ago has dropped in importance today, allowing for the reallocation of resources and budget. It may be too risky to cut corners, so perhaps outsourcing to a trusted QA testing partner could be a viable solution. However, ask yourselves these questions to uncover opportunities:
- Does this project align with your financial institution’s goals? If yes, then review the remaining ongoing projects of your team. Can you reassign resources from these projects that may not be highly important for your company?
- Is the projected deadline realistic? If yes, determine how to adjust deadlines for your team’s remaining ongoing projects so that delivery for this remains on time.
- Is the cost justified? If yes, then evaluate your team’s budget. Are there opportunities where funds can be reallocated to this? Is it more cost-effective to outsource?
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Establish What Should & (Should Not) Be Automated
Automated testing is most effective in keeping on track with product delivery and promising a high-quality user experience that continuously protects sensitive data from cyber-attacks. In turn, manual testing is still required to ensure the quality of your banking software, such as exploratory testing, usability testing, and ad-hoc testing.
Compile a list of all the tests that need to be performed. Then, determine if each requires manual testing or automation. Suppose you are still uncertain as to which kind of test to perform. In that case, we recommend applying automated testing in banking software for test cases that are:
- Critical to the performance of the product
- Executed repeatedly
- Tedious and challenging to execute manually
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Select the Right Framework & Tools
To achieve value from automated testing in banking software; your team must evaluate your test guidelines, rules, and standards—in short, your test framework. The tools you select to use during your testing process should support your test objectives and the longevity of your product.
We recommend selecting tools that provide these key advantages:
- Versatility: Does the tool support all types of testing you require?
- Platform Compatibility: Can your team test across desktop, web, client-server, and mobile?
- Accessibility: Does the tool support your testers' skills and language proficiencies?
- Quality Reports: Does the tool define test effectiveness and diagnose and document the root causes of any defects?
- Ease of maintenance: Does the tool allow for test cases to be easily amended and reused?
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Confirm Your Test Automation Framework is Maintainable & Scalable
To build the right foundation for your test cases, your test automation framework must be maintainable and scalable. A successful test automation framework defines hundreds of functional operations, from how errors are logged in your system to how objects are identified.
Most importantly, customize your test automation framework to the unique needs of your banking software. Blindly following “best practices” may not apply to your product and could damage the development process.
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Establish Scripting Standards
Enforce strict specifications on scripting standards throughout the process of automated testing in banking. Establishing whole-of-cycle standards for the uniform use of scripts, comments, and error handling allows for smoother execution throughout the automatic testing process and simplified, consistent reporting. For testers to understand results and actions clearly, emphasize user-defined messages for error logging or unexpected behavior within the banking software.
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Ensure Robust Checkpoints or Verification
Regular checkpoints are the best way to ensure that the steps established by your team meet the critical requirements for your banking software. The best time to map out these checkpoints is at the beginning of your project when you determine your standards and reporting needs. Once the automated testing phase of the project starts, your team can stay on track by checking off steps for verification at predefined points of the process.
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Execute Tests in Parallel
For automated testing in banking software to perform at its best, the test suite must be broken up into groups and executed in parallel across several machines. The advantage of simultaneous testing is that it allows you to test across different elements, be it platforms, browsers, and OS. By testing across different element combinations, your banking software is better prepared for the real-world application of your product. Internally, it improves test execution time results from weeks and days down to hours and often minutes.
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Leverage the Knowledge of Experts
Your banking software development depends on the optimal creation and execution of your automated test scripts. Because of this, the dominating Agile methodology enforces the role of testing throughout the development process to deliver a strong product to the market. Even banking software built with strong code can break if the proper framework is not in place.
Don’t give test failure a chance to thrive. Experts can be just as valuable as money and digital tools during the banking software development process, so recruit an expert QA team with the right skills and experience. Financial institutions often choose an external QA partner with an established team of testing experts who can design a test framework that best suits your banking software and amplifies your automated testing process.
Reasons to Choose the Ideal Automated Software Testing for Banking Service Providers
Choosing the ideal banking service provider offers several benefits and is crucial for maintaining the reliability and security of the systems. Here are some key reasons to consider:
- Accuracy and Efficiency: Eliminates manual errors and ensures consistent and accurate test execution, resulting in reliable and secure systems. It can quickly and efficiently run tests, covering a wide range of scenarios and provide faster feedback on system behavior.
- Enhanced Productivity: Automated testing frees human resources by automating repetitive tasks. This allows the workforce to focus on other critical responsibilities, leading to faster release cycles and improved customer satisfaction.
- Cost Savings: Helps reduce costs by eliminating the need for manual testing. While there may be an initial investment, the long-term benefits of automation can result in significant cost savings for banking service providers.
- 24/7 Testing: Enables continuous testing by eliminating the need for human involvement. It means that tests can be run anytime, ensuring thorough coverage and reducing the risk of downtime during critical banking operations.
- Scalability: As the size of the regression suite grows over time, the manual execution of many test cases becomes cumbersome. Automated testing addresses this issue by offering scalability, allowing banking service providers to handle an expanding test suite with minimal supervision efficiently.
- Shortened Release Cycle: By incorporating automated testing, manual QA teams can focus on testing new features, while automated tests handle comprehensive regression testing. It reduces the overall release cycle and accelerates the development process, enabling banking service providers to deliver updates and enhancements to their customers quickly.
- Enhanced Security: Customer data security is crucial in the banking system. Hackers always try to breach security to get access to customer data. Automated security testing can help banking institutions to identify and address potential security vulnerabilities in their platform.
- Greater Coverage: Automation can cover many test cases and scenarios compared to manual testing. To a great extent, this helps to identify issues that may not have been caught by manual testing.
Testing banking applications and operations is of the utmost importance, considering the sensitive nature of handling customers' financial transactions. It requires a highly skilled team with a blend of SMEs in the financial sector and technical proficiency. removed excessive content. To achieve comprehensive testing coverage and ensure the highest level of quality assurance, partnering with a reputable software testing company like QASource can provide significant benefits.
Challenges and Solutions to Automation Testing in the Banking Domain
In the previous sections, precise automation testing for banking applications helps increase testing efficiency and effectiveness. However, this also comes with various challenges. Following are some challenges and solutions for automation testing:
- Complex Business Processes: Banking systems are integrated with multiple 3rd party systems, which makes them more complicated. Automating end-to-end business scenarios requires a deep understanding of the system, business operations, and robust test design. The solution to this challenge is to take help from subject matter experts to design the test cases to ensure they mimic real-world scenarios.
- Managing Test Data: The banking system deals with customer information and financial transactions. Effective testing and automation of banking applications require a thorough understanding of customer data. Creating and managing this kind of data can be challenging as it’s very crucial to maintain customer data security. One effective solution is using a test data management tool to help create and manage test data securely and efficiently.
- Security Concerns: The banking system deals with sensitive financial information and transactions of customers, so while automating the banking application, it is essential to ensure that the automation test suite does not compromise security. The solution is adopting a testing approach emphasizing security and penetration testing. It will help identify and fix any potential security threats.
Why Choose QASource for Software Testing for Banking Applications
QASource has established itself as a prominent player in empowering the banking and financial domains, offering end-to-end testing solutions. With a dedicated team of banking domain testing experts, we analyze customer products and pain areas to assist in designing comprehensive testing strategies that cover all recommended techniques. QASource's in-house AI and automation experts identify and implement the best-fit automation solutions, including API automation, web and mobile automation, performance testing, and security testing automation. Our expertise allows our clients to reduce QA cycle times by up to 80%, optimizing efficiency and productivity. Visit QASource now to learn more about the testing services offered.
