When your financial institution releases a new banking application, you want everything to go right. You want the customer user experience super simple and as seamless as a habit. You want to see an increase in customer use of your application. And, you want to see more likes on social media, more five-star online reviews, more positive press about your brand across every media platform.
Most importantly, you want to maintain the trust of your customer - by continuing to protect their PII from cyberattacks and data leaks while providing a product that is consistently reliant.
So, why would you chance launching without a thorough and reliable QA testing process?
The testing of your application is just as crucial as the development of your banking application. Automation testing, specifically, provides more insightful results in a shorter span of time so that there are no bad surprises when you launch.
So What Makes Banking Application Automation Testing the Way to Go?
Financial application testing has no room for errors. Yet, that’s exactly what could happen when only relying on manual testing for your banking application.
While there may be a time and place for it, manual testing means there’s always the possibility of human error. Even the most skilled QA analysts are prone to making mistakes when manually testing intricate transactions and calculations that involve complex processes with multiple, day-long cycles. And more often than not, it’s difficult—often impossible—to adequately record manual testing sessions, making it harder for your team to locate an identified issue within the application.
In short, manual testing alone can be time-consuming, costly and inefficient.
Enter banking application automation testing to complement your testing process. Because this approach faster and more efficient, your testing process can quickly see an increase in productivity and produce more accurate testing results.
By automating your banking application testing, your team can:
- Uncover more bugs and issues than a human tester - much faster
- Record the testing process so that the same kind of testing operations can be reused and executed
- Conduct testing with the latest software tools that don’t succumb to fatigue or distraction
What Does Successful Banking Application Automation Testing Look Like?
Success with automation testing doesn’t happen with a flip of a switch. How you implement automation testing defines how successful your team’s testing processes can be. Ensure that your team has the following practices in place so that automation testing can thrive within your banking application testing processes.
Define Your Objectives
Before testing, everyone needs to be on the same page on what results should be delivered during the banking application automation testing process. Your team can only measure success by having defined standards and expectations written down clearly and concisely.
As a team, ask yourselves:
- What are the needs of your users (in relation to your application)?
- What solutions does your application aim to provide?
- What are the desired outcomes for your users?
- What would your users expect out of your application?
By establishing answers to these and more before the testing process, your team can spend less time on refining the automation code and more time on analysis.
Be Agile
The Agile methodology aims for software development to be completed and approved throughout the software development lifecycle. The Agile approach often reduces development risks and improves software quality, as bugs are detected and fixed in the earlier phases of development instead of discovered in the final rounds of automation testing.
The result of implementing Agile practices within your banking application automation testing process is transparency. Benchmarks are set for every sprint in order to improve test automation, starting with the highest priority. Development milestones can be tracked from sprint to sprint, allowing for traceability and accountability. A collaborative space for team members is created during the Agile testing process where open feedback can take place, such as automation engineers providing insights to manual testers.
Prioritize Your Test Cases
To ensure that every automated test is performed in a logical order, your team should establish a standard convention for prioritizing test automation within your banking application automation testing process. That way, the results received from the round of testing are more reliable and consistent.
List out every test to be performed, including test cases that verify the flow and dialogs of the UI. Next, classify each test by risk associated with the test as well as how expensive it is to test manually vs automated. For example, sanity tests and testing around fragile application features are often at the top of the list to be automated because of their level of risk and importance. From here, you can rank every test case in priority order.
Create a Test Plan
Think of a test plan like a blueprint for your banking application automation testing activities. It serves as a guide that helps the testing team determine the amount of effort required to validate the quality of the application. In addition, it helps align objective parties outside of the testing team—such as developers, 3rd party resources, business managers and stakeholders—so they understand what’s expected during the testing process.
A Test Manager is typically the architect of the test plan, particularly aligning it with the test strategy and closely monitoring and controlling the entire testing process. The test plan is then agreed upon by key stakeholders before the testing process can begin.
A successful test plan typically features:
- A thorough analysis of the product and UX requirements
- A defined test strategy outlining the scope of testing, types of testing, risks and issues, and testing logistics
- Test criteria, including suspension criteria and exit criteria
- Resource planning designating the right players and systems mapped to the process
- An established test environment
- A schedule with estimated effort
- Defined test deliverables
- A documented approval process by key stakeholders throughout testing
Ensure Your Test Automation Framework is Modular & Maintainable
A modular test automation framework requires testers to divide the application testing into separate sections that are then tested in isolation. The test script is created for each of these modules which are then combined to build larger tests that represent various test cases within the testing process. This approach is designed to pinpoint where any bugs or problems exist in the product so they can be identified and corrected by the development team.
What makes a modular test automation framework maintainable and successful is how testing elements can be duplicated across the testing process, saving time and effort for your team. With a common library of functions and shared object repository that maps objects to their associated actions, reusable action code can be applied to multiple test scripts.
To conclude - the financial industry is always under significant pressure to provide the simplest, most user-friendly experience to customers. Yet leveraging advanced technology has to ensure safeguarding private information from data breaches and attacks as well as meet stringent regulatory compliance standards. Brands and reputations depend on it - especially in the sea of competition. Adopting and streamlining automation testing within the early stages of your company’s banking application testing process leads to stronger test case scenarios, improved quality of your banking applications, reduced risk and faster time to market for your software.
Because who doesn’t want to get it right the first time around? Visit qasource.com/banking-and-financial-application-testing to learn more about QASource’s banking and financial application testing expertise.