Financial services are an integral part of any economy and operate in a complex and dynamic environment. These are characterized by high-volume operations conducted in real-time with a lot riding on the successful performance of financial applications. With financial services being one of the earlier adherents to the digital revolution, financial applications have become the key drivers for their successful delivery. The IT systems running financial services and delivering critical outcomes can come in myriad forms. For instance, a banking portal or application allowing thousands of customers to avail various bank-related services, a credit card portal or tool skimming through millions of transactions to detect any fraudulent activity, or an insurance application processing claims, among others.
No matter what types of financial services are being offered by the various financial applications, the accuracy of their output needs to be above par at all times. Further, the financial applications must be stable, responsive, quick, and navigable for different types of users, such asbusiness users, vendors, regulators, and end-customers, among others. With the increasing challenges of data security, customer expectations, privacy, and regulations, enterprises should mandately implement software testing for financial services. This is of critical importance given the rising number of fintech and other financial service providers positing their success in improving the digital experience for consumers.
According to ResearchAndMarkets.com, the global market for financial services is expected to reach $22,515.17 billion in 2021 at a CAGR of 9.9% compared to the previous year. And by 2025, the market is expected to touch $28,529.29 billion at a CAGR of 6%. Given that so much is riding on the successful performance of financial applications, QA software testing financial services should become the norm. So, what aspects should be kept in mind while executing financial application testing. Let us find out.
Top 5 factors to consider when testing financial apps
Before embarking on quality assurance financial services, the top 5 things to be kept in mind by testers are:
#1. Business involvement from the start: At the outset, the testers should understand the business requirements of the financial application from the business analyst and other key stakeholders. Since the application may involve the integration of various domains or contain multiple business segments within a single domain, the testers should collaborate with more than one subject matter expert. For instance, a banking services application may contain various sections for loans, transfers, trading, credit cards, bill payments, and reports, among others. Also, the expected outcome should be reviewed by multiple stakeholders, comprising development leads, QA engineers, and other business analysts. In doing so, they may check whether any new or existing workflows are being violated or whether every business scenario has been covered.
#2. Impact analysis: The process entails the analysis of changes that have been made to the application and how they will impact the application. The changes (direct or indirect) can be related to the features of the application and may necessitate the conduct of rigorous regression testing. The QA team should identify areas in the application that could be impacted due to the changes and fix them. This calls for selective retesting by reusing the already executed test cases.
#3. Functional testing: In this QA process, the test cases are based on the specifications of the software components to be tested. Here, the entire application architecture and source code are tested for vulnerabilities or bugs. The steps may include preparing, reviewing, and executing test cases. The types of testing may involve integration testing, regression testing, and usability testing.
#4. Security testing: Since financial applications deal with money held in the form of currency, stocks, commodities, and others, they are the prime targets of cybercriminals. And so, these applications should check for vulnerabilities, gaps, and bugs, and fix them. If this requires enterprises to implement finance robotics process automation by writing automated test cases and adhering to regulatory standards, then the same should be pursued vigorously. Any form of vulnerability prevalent across platforms (portals, browsers, and mobile apps) should be nipped in the bud.
#5. Performance testing: With financial applications being increasingly used across sectors, they need to be tested to meet a certain load threshold. It should not be anybody’s case that these applications show signs of latency or downtime when faced with heavy traffic. This calls for implementing performance testing to ensure stability, speed, productivity, responsiveness, and, above all, the delivery of superior customer experiences.
Conclusion
It is only by conducting proactive software testing for financial services that outcomes such as efficiency, robustness, and risk management can be ensured for financial applications. This has become a critical requirement given their interface with a large number of third-party applications and the fact that they straddle various domains.
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James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies. I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality that yields strong results and always happy to create valuable content & share thoughts.
Article Source: devdojo.com