Steps Banks are taking towards Digital Transformation Journey

Digital Transformation

The digital transformation journey is gaining momentum in the banking and financial industry. But when did the journey first start? As per a Gartner report, 69% of organizations believe that the Covid-19 global pandemic has accelerated the digital initiatives, 60% have increased the focus on improving the operational excellence through digital businesses, 50% have increased the focus to drive higher levels of cost optimization through digital initiatives, and 48% are investing on digital initiatives. Covid-19 may not be the sole reason for the growing digital business, but it has sparked the growth.

Banks are adopting new technologies on their digital transformation journey. They are taking every step to digitize the services and move processes online. Banks are also accommodating backend changes which is an essential step towards digitalization and supports the transformation. Any digital move is incomplete without ensuring security against scams and fraud risks. Banks initiate many digital moves but eventually strive to succeed or manage the pace. It is because they lack support or skill in many aspects, which are essential to compete with digital-native solutions. Digital transformation does not end with the integration of digital systems. It is a move that includes meticulous attention to ensuring user experience, security and performance of applications, monitoring infrastructure and more.

In this article, we will explore the objectives and goals banks and financial institutions are setting up for themselves and the steps they are taking toward the digital transformation journey.

Goals and objectives for digital transformation journey in banks and financial institutions

The digital transformation journey of banks and financial institutions did not start overnight. There was a pre-conceived idea behind such a revolution. Banks and financial institutions envisioned their goals and objectives before their journey. Let’s explore them one by one.

  1. Improving customer experiences

Customer requirements have changed with the passing years. Today, customer demands quick and easy solutions. They require digital solutions (mobile devices & digital apps) integrated with new technologies, improved use of data and analytics and more. It enables the customers to get the exact services quickly whenever they want them.

Consumer behavior has changed the way banks look and offer services to their customers. Banks and financial institutions are customizing digital solutions to create digital engagement for customers of different segments, based on the factors such as age, preference, location and more. Consumers have moved to digital platforms from the traditional model of banking services, which facilitates digital transformation.

Consumer’s changing needs are compelling banks to re-evaluate the services and future scope of the branch network. Banks are increasing their digital footprint by moving the branch footprint to a digital platform. They are aligning the services to meet consumer behavior and building new omnichannel sales and service models. Based on consumer trends, they are enhancing cross-channel marketing communications.

  • Improving time and team efficiency

As the digital footprint is increasing, branches have lesser footfall. The banks are offering their services on the digital platform. Even the critical transactions are done using digital platforms. Organizations like banks and financial institutions are investing in the digital transformation journey and improving time and team efficiency. The investment includes expanding the talent base using training and cross-functional deployment to ensure that organization can save a significant amount of time from project initiation to completion.

Domain & application knowledge is critical to facilitating the digital transformation journey of an organization. Many organizations, so far, have been using legacy systems. Handling and managing the system workflow requires hard skills & knowledge. As the process changes by adapting to digitalization, organizations are putting more time and effort into building strong management and highly experienced project teams. Organizations are moving beyond the traditional outlook of using legacy systems. They are adopting digital frameworks to ensure using technologies to their maximum benefit.

Organizations are currently focusing on process and coverage repository. After undermining investment in tools and training for so long, organizations realize the importance of investing in tools and training. They are investing in training employees to be more skilled to keep up the pace of digital transformation. Organizations need the most effective solutions to help them with the quality product launch and faster time to market. 

  • Using modern technologies for maximum advantage

The digital transformation journey is incomplete without development in technologies. Organizations are harnessing the unconstrained potential of technologies and digital solutions. But it is not just about digital solutions; digital transformation involves other aspects of the organizations too.

Modern digital technologies are crucial to transforming the process of organizations. We need a solid technical team to unleash the potential of digital solutions. The entire digital transformation process includes outstanding digital solutions and a competent workforce to handle them. Thus, technology and people work together to transform the organization digitally.

The organizations aim to reduce the time to market quality products, change the approach of the operation, and deliver value to customers. The organizations are deploying new technologies in all their business areas. Banks are among the pureplay in embracing new technologies. Since increasing competition threatens the stability of the banks continuously, they cannot help but emerge much stronger digitally with time. From customer onboarding through video KYC to 30-minute paperless loan approval and virtual customer assistance, banks and financial institutions are leveraging digital technology to their maximum benefit.

  • Promoting Innovation

Innovation is the key to the digital transformation journey. Organizations have come to terms that to move ahead with the digital transformation journey, they must innovate. As digital transformation and innovation are interconnected, innovation drives digital transformation. Hence, in the digital transformation journey organization must be open to an innovation culture.

Let’s consider the Pandemic scenario. As per a report, 70% of complex and large-scale organizations failed to reach their digital transformation goals. Organizations now have an understanding that it is critical to embrace innovation in the digital transformation journey. Thus, banks are changing their ecosystems by promoting innovation to drive a successful digital transformation journey.

Banks and financial institutions are changing the work culture and ecosystem, encouraging employees and consumers to try new technologies and innovations. The changing customer requirement plays a massive role in strategizing the digital transformation goals for the organizations. Technology empowers people and processes to add value to the customer experience. Hence, enterprise solutions are more innovative at the current time with the latest technologies to ensure an outstanding customer experience.

  • Updating process and systems

There are many organizations which still use legacy systems. Organizations spend 75% of their IT budget on supporting legacy systems. There is only 25% of the IT budget is allocated to digitalization. One of its many goals and objectives for the digital transformation journey in banks and financial institutions is to shift the budget allocation to digitalization.

Banks and financial institutions are building strategies for digital transformation. Many banks are digitally transforming the front-end and back-end processes completely. The banks and credit unions are rapidly adopting digital solutions to keep up with the pace of marketplace changes, and many firms are moving to cloud computing and adopting agile principles. It helps processes with enormous amounts of data and insights in real-time and reduces costs.

However, some banks and financial institutions store a massive amount of data on their old legacy systems. The modernization of these legacy systems would either take longer than the anticipated time or would be impossible to migrate. Many enterprises have found solutions to this issue. They have digitalized their entire front-end process while operating a few back-end processes through their legacy systems. 

As a part of their digitalization goals and objectives, organizations are integrating various technologies like Cloud computing, mobile technologies, advanced analytics, cybersecurity, etc. The strategy has enabled financial institutions to offer superior digital experiences to their customers. The digital transformation journey is more of an inside-out approach that focuses on speed, ease of use, and user experience.

  • Preparing the team for the digital transformation journey

The bank’s digital transformation journey is more than using the most updated technology or digital applications. It is about how prepared you are to adapt to the changes. The banks and financial institutions’ goals and objectives are to prepare the team for the digital transformation journey.

Hence, organizations must focus on informing the team about the positive impact of adopting digital technology. The banking and financial ecosystem is changing, and technology plays a significant role in offering value proposition, greater efficiency, and higher profitability.

Steps banks are taking toward digital transformation journey

Being an integral part of banks’ transformational journey, we have seen a few steps that banks are taking towards digitalization. Below are a few instances.

  1. Banks have been undergoing massive digital transformation in the last couple of decades. They are transforming the entire banking workflow and moving the current manual processes into the digital mainstream across all banking verticals and multiple business portals. By now, banks have digitally transformed 40% of their banking workflow, but 60% of the workflow is still manually done. Since the effect of the Covid-19 global pandemic, banks can no longer delay their digital transformation journey. Hence, they are speedily adapting to the changes around them.
  2. Trade Finance has been essentially a back-office platform. However, due to Covid-19, many organizations decided to digitalize their back-office processes. Banks realized the necessity of streamlining the process to seamlessly work with front-office, mid-office, and back-office workflow transformation.
  3. Banks are moving all credit lending from non-system to digitalized workflow systems. Banks have introduced digital platforms to handle the end-to-end lending process, from loan onboarding and video KYC verification to the collection process.
  4. The banking industry is moving to the web, online applications, and mobile applications from branches. Mobile applications are improving the speed, making the process simple and enhancing user experience with continuous service.
  5. Banks are integrating the latest technologies like automation and AI with their online services. Many banks and Credit Unions are integrating these technologies into their service line and functions as robotics and AI technology improve the online services. It allows banks to save money, improve the solutions, and delegate their people to other important assignments.

Conclusion

Typically, a bank’s transformational journey is two ways. The broader categories are application upgrades and new implementation. As we were a part of a transformational journey for multiple banks and financial institutions nationally and internationally, we have executed end-to-end testing and supported the banks in their transformational projects helping them to go-live within strict project deadlines.

We follow a managed testing framework for the transformational projects of banks and FIs. From gathering functional and non-functional requirements, designing, and rescheduling projects, to managing code installations, release notes, and test data. Our process flow includes strategizing, planning, preparation, and execution. We define metrics based on defects management, test effectiveness, test efficiency, and test coverage. We also track defects, test efforts, status, schedule, risks, and issues.  

Our end-to-end testing services include requirements assurance, integration assurance (application suite & system landscape), functional assurance (pre-migration & post-migration), non-functional assurance (performance testing, security, and usability), and test automation, pre-launch testing, regression testing, and testing CoE.

Do Banks Need Special Approaches to Manage and Test NRI Banking?

Test NRI Banking

Every bank has specially curated services for their customers residing anywhere around the world. But why would an NRI need special financial services? The NRI (Non-Resident Indian), Person of Indian Origin (PIO) or Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) needs NRI accounts to allow a smooth flow of funds within India and overseas. With an NRI account, it is extremely convenient for account holders to access their funds and income from abroad. 

What is NRI banking?

The NRI account or NRI banking is a critical process that requires many financial regulations and has many obligations. Banks authorized under the Reserve Bank of India can open NRI accounts for Non-Resident Indians, Persons of Indian Origin (PIO), or Overseas Citizens of India (OCI). Banks provide various banking services to NRIs. NRI may receive funds from any foreign countries or within India. The money received from any foreign country can be deposited in the NRE account and money received within India must be routed through the NRO account only. The amount received in either of the accounts is taxable. The amount they may receive from primary income sources (jobs or business) or any other investment of NRI customers.

Different types of accounts that an NRI can open in Indian banks

The NRI Accounts are classified into three types, Non-Resident External (NRE) and Non-Resident Ordinary (NRO), and Foreign Currency Non-Resident Account (FCNR). Each of these accounts offers specific services tailored for its NRI account holders. It helps the account holder to manage their investments, remittance to their home country, payments, and more. The salient features of the different accounts make it easy for the Government and banks’ regulatory systems to track the inward and outward movement of money.  

NRE saving accounts – The NRE saving account is created to help people save their foreign income earned outside India. Indians residing in foreign countries can freely deposit money in their account. They can also enjoy the full repatriability of their money with the tax being waived off as of now in India. NRI family members living in India can access the account anytime and anywhere only either by Power of Attorney or a consent letter. A few of the banks do offer NRE accounts to marine officers as well as students pursuing careers abroad. 

The NRIs can open and maintain NRE Accounts with the income they earn from their employed country. The accounts must be denominated in Indian Rupees. An NRI can and can open a current, savings, recurring deposit account, or fixed deposit account and jointly maintain and operate the NRE account only with another NRE account holder. The deposit maintained in this account can only be from the money earned in foreign countries and not from India. An NRI can withdraw the saving in the country currency where the NRI resides. Hence, the amount may fluctuate based on the current currency exchange value.

The account holder can transfer the fund of one NRE account to another NRE or NRO without disruption. The principal and interest amounts are exempted from taxation, making the income from the NRE accounts a tax-free account. The NRE accounts allow the NRIs to invest in India. NRI customers however cannot deposit cash in Indian Rupee Currency in the NRE accounts, but they can withdraw the Cash in Indian currency. No cash in Indian currency can be deposited in the NRE Accounts.

NRO saving accounts – The NRO saving account is created to help people save their funds gathered from earnings in India. Indians residing in foreign countries can freely transfer money at competitive exchange rates to the NRO accounts, which the NRI family members or dependents living in India can also access through Power of Attorney or consent letters.

An NRI can open an NRO account with earnings arising from India. The source of income can be many like rent, pension, dividends, interest, and more. An NRI can deposit in Indian INR or other currency in an NRO account but can withdraw the amount only in INR. The NRO account can be managed or operated jointly by an Indian resident or an NRI. The interest accrued on the income in the NRO account falls under taxation. The main objective of the NRO account is to save the amount that the NRIs earn in India.

FCNR accounts – FCNR is a kind of fixed deposit account opened to deposit income earned overseas. The accounts are maintained in foreign currency. NRIs, a Person of Indian Origin (PIO) or Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) can deposit amounts in FCNR accounts. The amount in FCNR account can be deposited in currencies like US dollar (USD), Pound Sterling (GBP), Japanese Yen (JPY), Euro (EURO), Australian Dollar (AUD) & Canadian Dollar (CAD). In India, the Reserve Bank of India approves the currency in which the money is deposited in the FCNR account.

FCNR accounts are term deposit accounts instead savings accounts. Fixed Deposits (FD) are designated in INR currency popularly known as NRI FDs. The interest rates do not fluctuate throughout the tenure of the deposit. As deposits and withdrawals are made in foreign currencies, the rate of interest remains stable in FCNR accounts till maturity. The NRI account holders can jointly operate and maintain the FCNR account.

The tenure of maintaining an FCNR account can be in between 1 year to 5 years. The minimum period of opening an FCNR account is 1 year or above. If the term deposit account is pre-mature and closed within a year, the account holder will not be paid any interest amount. The principal and interest amounts are exempted from taxation as income from the FCNR account are tax-free. A roundabout of 360 days is considered one year for FCNR deposits.

Irrespective of the types of accounts NRIs hold in banks, there are many rules and regulations applicable for the NRI account holders to operate and manage their accounts in India from foreign countries. However, the applicable rules and regulations may vary from country to country for transferring the money and repatriating the amount.

Common issues faced by NRIs to invest or house their money in India

NRIs face many issues and complications whether they wish to open an account and invest in Indian banks. A few of the common issues are mentioned below, 

  • Investing in the Indian market for the NRIs is complicated as an NRI must undergo stringent regulations while investing in the Indian market. There are many restrictions applied to NRIs investing in the Indian market. Let us take an example to understand the limitations fully. While accepting investments from US-based NRIs, only a few banks acknowledge investments from NRIs living in the US. Let us consider a US-based NRI willing to invest in Mutual Fund in India; they must sign many formalities (paperwork and compliance) to gain investments from the American and Canadian NRIs. It is after the Government implemented Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FACTA) over the NRI investments. On the contrary, the NRIs residing in other countries must update their residential status by submitting necessary documents.
  • NRIs also face two common issues avoiding tax or double taxation. If an NRI earns income in India that exceeds the specified amount through interest from the NRO accounts, mutual funds, equity shares, domestic fixed deposits, rents, capital gains, etc., they must file income tax. Vice versa, an NRI might end up paying double taxes against their investment in some countries. However, India has signed a treaty with over 90 countries known as the Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement (DTAA) to avoid the issue of paying double taxes. NRIs can pay taxes in either of the countries – a country they currently reside in or in India, where they have earned their capital gain.
  • NRIs most commonly invest in traditional fixed return assets in India, like fixed deposits in banks, gold, real estate, etc. There are many regulations, transactional compliance, limited information on the Indian market, market volatility, applicable taxes and more that restrict NRIs and refrain them from investing in other assets. However, NRIs have multiple investment options that can offer them high returns in investments, like mutual funds, IPOs, direct equity, ETFs, and more.
  • Millennials and Gen-Zs NRIs are driven technologically. They wish to invest in digital assets like NFTs and cryptocurrencies. However, the market volatility and ambiguity and the apprehension regarding their legality in the Indian market do not allow the NRIs to explore the possibilities and put their financial portfolio at risk. 

Why do banks need special approaches to manage NRI banking?

Security, flexibility, accessibility, usability, and functionality are the main aspects of managing the NRI accounts. For a complicated process like NRI banking, validating the touchpoints are essential. NRI banking involves a massive volume of critical transactions. Hence, banks must protect the NRI accounts from Anti-money Laundering and cyber threats, maintain system compliance, follow strict regulations, and more.

Banks nominate Relationship Managers / Officers to focus more on NRI clients. They treat them with special attention by bundling services like Portfolio Management Services, Handling Execution of Wills / Power of Attorneys, Taxation etc., and linking these special services with the deposit accounts of the NRI clients.

The banks that offer specially tailored services to their customers are less in number. A few that offer all the banking services may not have branches in all the countries. Sometimes the representatives would not be able to guide the customers adequately. These create roadblocks for the NRIs to bank conveniently, efficiently, and safely. Banks must adopt special approaches to ensure they do not disappoint their NRI customers. Let us break down the approach banks must take to offer the services anticipated by the customers from their banking partners. We will further explore why the customers need these approaches.

  1. Digital experience – An NRI needs many online banking and financial transactions like new bank account opening, investments, remittance, loan applications, etc. Banks can tailor digital services and offer strong digital banking support to the NRI customers based on their specific requirements. Since NRI customers live in countries that may be in different time zone and have many constraints, NRIs require 24/7/365 digital support. They must be able to access the banking services without any disruption. Hence, offering an outstanding digital experience becomes necessary for managing NRI banking.
  2. System support – An NRI may send transaction requests anytime. It is hard to determine the traffic of these requests. Sometimes it may arrive in bulk, and other days it can be significantly less in numbers. The banks’ systems should be up and running without any performance and functionality errors to ensure that the NRI customers do not face any inconvenience in transactions due to system errors.
  3. Security measures – An NRI may face multiple security breaches owing to the massive number of transactions. NRI accounts are highly vulnerable to a security threat and come under direct cyber-attack. The NRI banking requires special security measures to prevent cyber-attack, anti-money laundering, and other security threats. NRIs tend to have confidence in banks that take extra care to ensure platform security. 
  4. Grievance redressal – NRI customers require a specialized grievance redressal cell to resolve many technical, system, and process errors that may arise during a transaction. Banks must efficiently and promptly resolve issues; so that the customers do not face any significant loss because of delays in addressing the errors. Also, the errors must not affect the transaction flow.
  5. Customer support – NRI customers require outstanding customer support. Banks cannot delay responding to customer requests as it may disappoint them. If there is any delay in response, customers will not think twice about discontinuing the services. Banks must manage their NRI accounts by addressing customer requests quickly.

Testing approach for NRI banking

Security – Security is a vital factor when it comes to testing the NRI banking process. As cited early in the document that NRI accounts are a mesh of critical transactions, which requires thorough testing to ensure that the remittance and other transactions are carried out without violating the secured account information of NRI customers. It puts banks in a bad light if banks fail to maintain sensitive account information for both them and the customers.

Functionality – Banks must handle multiple requests from NRI customers. The entire customer request and system entry require special attention and testing practice so that banks can smoothly execute and validate test results. Banks must enter the details like onboarding customers, feeding the information in their systems, converting to foreign currency on repatriation, calculating interest (360 days for FCNR), and handling the maturity phase. Functional testing becomes an essential part of ensuring that the system allows the entry of multiple information at the same time.

Performance – Not all NRI customers will send transaction and remittance requests at the same time. Hence, the traffic for NRI customers will vary from time to time. Sometimes there will be a bulk of requests sent by the NRI customers, and at times the requests will be fewer. The performance testing is crucial to validate the performance load on the system with multiple requests at a specific time. It confirms the system’s sustainability to withstand the performance load on a busy day.

Accessibility – Accessibility testing is critical to ensure that all NRI customers and their dependents of all ages, and physical or cognitive conditions can access the banking services without any inconvenience. NRI customers demand user-friendly applications, platforms, and solutions that offer ease of use.

Usability – Difficulty in using the application can be one of the reasons that NRI customers might discontinue using the applications. Users require interactive applications that work efficiently and meet all the user requirements. NRI banking must undergo thorough usability testing to check the user-friendliness, efficiency, and accuracy of the user platform.

Digital – The NRI customers require digital platforms for online banking, remittance, lending, and more. Banks are extending round-the-clock digital banking support to their NRI customers. Hence, digital testing is an essential factor for NRI banking. The quality performance, security, and functionality determine that the online transactions and other banking processes are carried out safely without any errors or disruptions.

User acceptance – Banks build applications keeping users in their minds. User acceptance is based on how users use the service and applications offered by the banks. User acceptance testing confirms that the NRIs can use the applications conveniently.

System Integration – Banks build their systems with adequate and applicable features and functionalities. However, there are frequent changes in the application features that can create issues if banks fail to test them on time. System integration testing helps bank test their application to ensure that all their system integration points are functioning without errors. Banks want to ensure that their NRI customers receive the apt services by addressing all customer requests without delay.

Conclusion

NRI banking is a little sensitive area of service because of its high volatility in compliance and vulnerability in maintaining security. Banks must be extra vigilant while catering to their NRI customer. NRI customers are maximum susceptible to cyber-attacks. There are multiple guidelines that banks and their customers must follow while investing and withdrawing the amount entirely to their current residing country. The Government imposes multiple rules on customers residing in countries under strict scrutiny. Banks have a very different approach while dealing with their NRI customers and must be extra vigilant towards managing and testing NRI platforms.

Yethi’s testing experience with NRI banking

Yethi has executed several transformational, business-as-usual, and upgrade projects across multiple services modules and platforms. We have tested numerous applications, including core banking solutions, channels, lending, payments, trade & treasury, etc.

Our 5th generation robotic test automation solution, Tenjin, is easy to integrate with all leading platforms. It reduces your testing time to 45% and enhances the quality of financial and banking software.

Test Automation ROI Primer

Test automation ROI primer

Software Testing Automation has gained significant acceptance in enterprises in recent years. Many organizations struggle to identify the value drivers in a test-automation purchase and might take decisions based on partial data. 

This article is an attempt to help people understand why automation would make sense, how to understand the various platforms out there, how to balance the economics and present an ROI to ensure proper communication of the expectations.

Let us start by understanding the need for testing automation –

Software is consistent – Any software will consistently perform actions as per the instructions. While the instruction set might be suspect, the software would be consistent irrespective of the day of the week, the temperature outside or any of the factors that impact humans.

Software is exact – Logical structures have no room for common sense.  So, the onus on the developer to understand intent and implications is high.  Given that majority of enterprise software, today consists of a myriad set of options, the chances that a particular combination of options (an option set) might work contrary to intentions is high. 

The software will evolve – Any software that you use is amorphous and would continue to evolve as long as there are customers and/or developers that wish to tinker. Change is typically due to innovation, competition, regulation, or adaptation. 

Software is fragile – New features and options must be delicately introduced, considering the existing options and their usage.  It is very much possible to unintentionally “break” an “option-set” while bringing in some new capabilities. 

Software Testing – Considering these attributes, it is imperative that software is tested – when it is designed, built, deployed, or modified. The discipline of software testing has been evolving in parallel to software development, albeit in the shadows. Considering the repetitive nature of software testing, a lot of research and effort has been spent on reducing the “drudgery” of the repetitive tasks by adopting automation in the practice of testing.  Automated testing is a large part of the public debate and we have explored why exploratory and automated testing needs to coexist in our article here.    

In this article, we would attempt to share how test automation supports the mission of consistently deploying reliable software and how one could explore the ROI of these efforts. This is important as Test Automation is primarily a tool to improve efficiency and not a tool to improve the effectiveness of your tests.  

What Constitutes Test Automation

The practice of software testing essentially is a stimulus-response study. You provide stimulus to the software (“Application under-test” or AUT) and validate if its response meets a predetermined criterion. 

The profession of software testing is to

  1. identify various stimulus-response conditions (test-cases) that could be encountered during the use of the software
  2. plan and execute a sequence of such test-cases
  3. capture and report software behavior,

Test Automation is an aid to a software tester, where the execution and reporting of a certain subset of cases are delegated to the automation software. 

 Automation allows teams to focus on “net-new”

As software gets enriched, the testing burden shifts from testing “new” feature to testing the “existing” features.  In the graph, we have shown 5 sprints where each bar represents newsprint.  The “new” functionality in each sprint is shown in “blue” and the “existing” features from previous sprints are in “grey”. You would notice that while the volume of new features is relatively steady, the volume of “existing” features has grown with every release.    

While leaders are happy to spend time/effort on testing the blue portions, the repetitive testing of the grey portions is a shoe that pinches. Re-testing of functionality that has been available for a few releases represents a unique set of challenges across all stakeholders. From a tester’s perspective, it is repetitive and therefore boring. It is very likely to only get a cursory look-over and not an in-depth review.  From a sponsor’s perspective, it represents an ever-increasing volume of work that often has a low-return element.  Therefore, we risk under-testing and letting defects slip into “deemed-stable” portions of our software.  Test-automation represents a middle path, where the code can be tested for a larger sample of usage conditions at a lower cost-time construct where only the exceptions are picked-up for further evaluation. 

What benefits can I expect? What benefits should I not expect?

The investment in the right automation tool once set up offers potential benefits like:

Coverage: You could achieve a higher test coverage / larger sampling of the software functionality, faster and at a lower execution effort, than what you would get with pure manual efforts. 

Speed:  Automated tests can run faster and round the clock.  These could reduce your overall time-to-test significantly, giving more time to development teams to fix any potential issues. 

Consistency: Test automation tools offer maximum consistency. The same test case runs multiple times without even a minor deviation.

Effort:  Test Automation can be set up to run with little or no manual intervention. 

The Caveats

Setup: Setting up tests on any automation tool is a laborious task.  It requires planning and foresight that only experience would bring. Knowledge of how data changes across time, what variables would need to be dynamically updated and how to validate expected outcomes etc. require experience and time. 

Maintenance:  Once you have set up a large library of cases to be automatically executed, it should be smooth sailing; or so we think!!  The challenge of test automation (and therefore where money is generally made or lost) is how easy it would be to maintain this comprehensive library when your underlying application changes. When the “Application-Under-Test” changes, you would have to identify all aspects of your automation that consequently need a change.  

Test Automation – Understanding Costs & Benefits

Companies are increasingly investing in test automation considering the increased frequency of changes and anticipated cost-benefit. The investment in the right automation tool is worth it, as it offers potential benefits like:

Coverage: Test automation offers high test coverage with nearly 100% results, which otherwise cannot be achieved by manual testing.

Consistency: Test automation tools offer maximum consistency. The same test case was run multiple times without deviation.

Speed: Automation is multiple times greater than the manual testing speed. 

Effort: The manual effort in executing a test automation tool is almost negligible.

Test-automation solutions are varied and bring different categories of over-bearing costs

The cost of the test automation can be categorized as:

  • Acquisition cost
  • Maintenance cost

Acquisition cost: There are some free test automation tools available in the market. The free versions mostly perform basic functions and are not recommended for thorough end-to-end or regression testing.

To buy an efficient test automation tool, you will require to make some investment. A licensed and open-source automation tool may start with as low as $4000, depending on the brand and functionality it offers. The total acquisition cost is often inclusive of the tool cost and construction cost. Before investing in the tool, it is recommended to do thorough research and understand the right tool that will complement your requirements perfectly.

Maintenance cost: The maintenance cost of automated tests drives expenses up. Maintenance may involve a range of factors:

  • Process
  • User interface
  • Data
  • Environment

However, maintenance of automated tests may cost you a bit, statistics reveal the fact that maintenance can be a lot cheaper affair than creating new test scripts. Furthermore, frequent maintenance will keep the system efficient and seamless. Maintenance is a good option while considering the cost model of the project, as manual testing or implementing new automation tools can be expensive and time-consuming.

Diagram Description automatically generated with medium confidence

Test Automation ROI

Now that we have given you an understanding of the costs and benefits of test automation, we go further deep into exploring the ROI of these efforts. Companies are constantly investing in test automation, but investment in test automation without proper calculation of ROI would be a half-baked effort, which is unacceptable for the companies.

At the beginning of this article, we have stated that test Automation is primarily a tool to improve efficiency, and the calculation of ROI determines the efficiency of your test automation process. Test automation is a one-time investment. Configuring the test automation at the initial stage of project inception can maximize the benefits in the long run. By calculating ROI, companies can decide to invest in test automation.

Calculating ROI does not necessarily mean that we would focus on the overall cost, which is required to evaluate the quality of the product. ROI calculation also includes the parameters like late releases, defects overlooked, and lack of quality.

One of the biggest challenges that the companies face is investing a large sum of money for conducting the end-to-end testing of software, which often they are unable to recoup. Once the companies decide what test sets or subsets they must automate, they will generate a high return on investment.

Due to poor decision-making, companies may spend a lot to adopt automation at the later stage of development, and if the project fails, they may incur a high loss. ROI-based automation testing resolves this issue. The Quality Assurance team decides which section must be automated based on the clients’ environment, system, and machine. They can do a cost comparison analysis of manual test runs and automation test runs and determine the types of scripts that can be automated.

Following are the significant metrics, which can be considered while calculating automated testing ROI.

  • Measure product quality – Ensuring the overall quality of the product by identifying defects and mean time to detection of defects.
  • Test execution speed – Comparing the test run duration percentage between automated and manual testing.
  • Thorough cost and resource analysis – Analyzing cost and resources are important as the test automation process involves software and hardware costs, prioritizing defects based on their severity, operational costs, the requirement of new resources, training costs, and more.

With the metrics mentioned above, we can calculate Automated Testing ROI. The cost that companies bear on resources, tools used, setting up the testing framework and more fall under companies’ investments. The net gain that the companies receive over their investments would be the ROI for the automation testing.

Following are the parameters required for performing ROI calculation.

Automating new tests – There are always a certain amount of costs involved in automating new tests. Before initiating the automation of new tests, companies must consider the predictable costs of developing, executing, and maintaining the tests. Based on the test categorization, you would segregate the test to automate or run manually.

Automate regression testing – Adding new features or changes in software would introduce new bugs in the existing modules. It makes regression testing one of the most expensive phases of testing. It is a necessary step to calculate the cost of automating regression testing.

Managing Multiple Environments – As companies develop products, they must be convinced that their product works equally in different environments. Hence, companies set up multiple platforms, devices, and browsers to ensure the success of their products. For organizations, it is necessary to calculate the ROI while setting up test environments.

Minimizing Defect Leakage – There are instances where bugs were detected at the production phase, as they were not resolved at the development stage. It often leads to defect leakage in the production phase, making it an expensive issue for organizations. Calculating ROI is necessary for companies to control such overhaul expenditures in certain instances.

Reusable test cases – Using reusable test cases saves time and effort by avoiding task duplication. When you already have created test cases, you can reuse them in multiple scenarios. Hence this will impact while calculating ROI.

Protecting product knowledge – Companies may still gain control over their systems and software, but they need to take a calculative risk on their resources. If an engineer leaves, the company must look for a replacement and provide training for the job. It may impact the company’s long-term automation testing ROI.

Ways to improve Automated Testing ROI

Instead of automating all the tasks at hand, it is best to automate repetitive tasks. Automating the applications, which are not steady, may not show an accurate result. Moreover, it may increase your team’s effort and affect while calculating ROI.

Automation testing works best for regression testing. Hence, when new tests and integrated with the older ones and applications are tested across various platforms, automation testing can be implemented to save time, effort, and overall costs. Further, if you need to complete the test run in a shorter time, you can run parallel testing like a smoke test.

Changes are introduced frequently in software. Hence, the developers and testers are relying on exploratory testing which is widely used in agile models. The focus of exploratory testing is discovering, investigating, and learning through the process. The testers here own the freedom and responsibility to think and note down ideas before the test execution. As exploratory testing is strategic, it helps in improving automated testing ROI.

The testing process has evolved, and today shift-left testing is a popular step in the software development lifecycle. Shift-left testing allows you to detect defects in the early stage, which helps in reducing effort, time, and money. You could also use test management tools to identify redundant test cases at the early stage of the development process. Finally, keep thorough documentation of the process so that the newly hired resources can pick up where your previous resources have left.

Conclusion

The company adopts automation testing to improve its test efficiency and test coverage. Of all the possible methods, which could be applicable for calculating the automated testing ROI, the company must adopt the strategies, which work best for them and suffice their requirements.

When it is about improving the quality of your product, the right methodology would be to test your applications simultaneously while developing them. If defects are detected at the postproduction stage, the company will suffer monetary loss, which may be unacceptable for any organization. Hence, a little strategy, the right tool, and differentiation between manual and automation testing can successfully help you implement test automation ROI.

5 challenges of testing ERP systems in the banking sector and ways to overcome the challenges

Testing ERP systems in the banking sector

There are multiple reasons why the banking and financial industry needs enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. ERP system facilitates agile delivery in the broader spectrum of banking and financial services and solutions. The system is used to understand the implementation at a large scale. The ERP systems offer solutions to multiple issues in the banking industry and help with thorough insights for upcoming projects. The ERP system helps in resource planning and increases the efficiency and productivity of an organization. The organizations have seen visible results by implementing ERP systems due to their benefits like,

  1. Improves business reporting – ERP creates one integrated database for all business processes and provides real-time information and comprehensive business reports.
  2. Improves customer services – ERP systems offer better accessibility to customer information with an improved response time, on-time delivery, and order accuracy.
  3. Better inventory costs – ERP systems include only the most essential inventory and avoid common problems like higher overhead costs and longer customer fulfilment times.
  4. Improves cash flow – ERP systems offer better invoicing. It is a superior collection tool that enhances cash flow. Faster cash inflow allows adequate investment for the business.
  5. Improves cost savings – ERP system allows cost-saving with improved inventory planning, customer services, procurement, and vendor relationship management.
  6. Improves data and cloud Security – ERP system has dedicated security resources, which prevent installing malicious software. It improves data and cloud security as the data is spread across multiple servers.
  7. Improves business process – ERP system helps improve mundane or manual tasks and implements smarter workflows allowing you to work more efficiently.
  8. Manages supply chain – ERP systems effectively forecast demand and lean inventory. It reduces the production bottleneck and offers greater transparency in your business.

However, the organization cannot always guarantee the successful implementation of ERP systems. ERP implementation can fail at its pilot phase due to multiple reasons. Poor project management, data inaccuracy or quality issues, implementation without adequate planning, ineffective consultation, inability to reduce the implementation cost, and more are a few reasons for ERP implementation failures. ERP implementation depends largely on the organizational approach. The organization may invest time and money only to see process stagnancy with little to no significant growth.

Testing of ERP systems in the banking and financial industry

ERP systems in banks and financial institutions are a procedure to plan and are commonly used by banks and financial institutions because of time constraints. ERP implementation works best with the right planning and strategy. It enhances the productivity and effectiveness of the process and people, supports business operations, and helps in business decision-making. ERP systems in banks and financial institutions can be tested at the core level and implementation level. The core team validates the static functionality of ERP systems, while the implementation team validates the dynamic and tailored features and functionalities.

The changes in features and functionalities, as we know in the banking industry, are extremely frequent. A small change in the system features can affect the workflow of multiple modules. The changes must be recorded and validated accordingly to ensure that none of the changes alters the system configurations. A system with a massive amount of data requires test automation. The organization analyzes the requirements and designs the automation test framework based on organizational infrastructure.

Challenges of testing ERP systems

  1. Frequent changes and inaccurate data – The ERP system implementation is a long process during which the system performance can fluctuate a great deal. The entire implementation process involves multiple risks that must be addressed in time. Banking systems are vulnerable and open to frequent changes. Due to the frequency of changes in the banking structure, the update must be constant and continuous, which also requires system receptibility. The changes must reflect in the system without delay. If there is a delay in data reflection to the system, there will be a discrepancy in available data that leads to data inaccuracy.
  2. Integration of new data with old legacy systems – Banking ERP systems have a broader scope. The dataset entered in the bank ERP systems is used in the various processes throughout the organization. The data is used in Marketing & Sales, Accounting & Finance, Supply Chain Management, Human Resources and many more. The data is stored centrally in the old legacy systems and referred to by various organizational verticals for different purposes. The main challenge here is it often becomes hard to test these legacy systems due to the absence of adequate tools. As the legacy systems store a high volume of data, the end-to-end testing of the legacy systems becomes necessary. It is a time-consuming and tedious task to test the legacy systems. In the case of banks migrating data from legacy systems to new ERP platforms, there can be a delay in the entire testing project leading because of slow data migration and unavailability of data, which can lead to multiple errors in the systems and banks’ internal processes.
  3. Implementing ERP in rush and without planning – This challenge is common when banks start their operation for the first time. Due to rising demand and customer requirements, banks and financial institutions are sometimes in a rush to implement ERP systems and critical aspects of the ERP systems can be overlooked. The urgency of implementing the ERP systems always leads banks to ignore the critical aspects of ensuring system quality. It also leads to implementing ERP software without adequate planning. If the systems are implemented in rush it might lead to multiple performance issues, data integration and security, data migration issues and more.
  4. Lack of project knowledge – Lack of project knowledge can lead the team to witness challenges of testing ERP systems. The team must have adequate project knowledge and training to learn about the project requirements. Adequate communication and training about project requirements make the ERP testing process easy and convenient for the team. With adequate project knowledge, the testing team can validate various aspects of ERP implementation at the various phases across the business operation.
  5. Lack of technical knowledge and absence of specialized team – ERP testing in banks is not a mission-critical practice, which leads backs to ignore a few critical aspects of ERP implementations. Banks and financial organizations execute testing ERP implementation along with other crucial testing projects. And often, the management team do not feel the need to delegate the most competent team. Banks also do not deploy a specialized team for testing the ERP platform. Banks cannot guarantee the success of ERP implementation testing due to a lack of technical knowledge and a specialized testing team.

Ways to overcome the challenges of testing ERP systems

All the components and modules of the ERP platform must pass through system integration testing. ERP being a central data system is a data source for multiple verticals. If the source data is not integrated efficiently, the processes within the organizations will not receive adequate and accurate data creating an immense discrepancy in the organizations. Banks’ data and information require utmost security and safety against data theft and manipulation. Hence, security testing is critical to ensure the safety of sensitive data.

Due to multiple changes incorporated in the Bank ERP systems, there can be a few alterations in the user interface design. It can also lead to confusion among the users. Hence with each implementation, it is necessary to ensure that the changes meet user requirements. System efficiency is crucial even with effective changes. An adequate module validation can ensure that even with several changes, implementations, and interpretations, the design flow of the interface remains intact. System integration and usability testing ensure that users can use the systems without disruptions.

It is necessary to validate the performance of the ERP system. The ERP system’s accuracy and speed determine its performance. It is crucial to validate the systems of their load, stress, capacity, volume, and scalability to ensure the reliability and stability of the system even with its extreme load. The performance of banking systems comes under heavy scrutiny from users or customers. Hence, testing the software before installation is essential to always ensure seamless performance.

Even a slight change can impact on the system’s performance, and as far as banking systems are concerned, the changes are extremely frequent. Regression testing ensures that the minor changes do not affect another subsequent module. As modules are interdependent, the poor performance of one module can heavily impact another. Through testing, the team ensures that all the modules and features run smoothly without any errors.

Conclusion

Testing ERP systems has drawbacks, but since ERP systems are not among the most critical functioning systems, banks and financial institutions tend to delay the testing of ERP systems or keep it long on their bucket list. It does not reduce the complexities of ERP system testing but aggravates it. The most pertinent approach is to address the issue by testing simultaneously with the implementation process. The most accurate approach is to build an appropriate implementation strategy and plan to avoid resolving the issues at a later stage. It is always a good idea to prevent rather than fix the occurrence.

All about shift-left testing. Is shift left testing supplementary or complementary to acceptance testing?

Acceptance Testing

A need to release your applications frequently and fast is essential to drive your business in today’s technologically advanced world. However, in an effort to slash down the time-to-market, many organizations are looking at innovating their Quality Assurance services significantly. Testing is a continuous process with a constant feedback loop of communication between the client, developers, and testers.

With the adoption of agile practices, testing begins much earlier in the software development lifecycle. Static testing is a great opportunity to reduce errors during the design phase. By also investing in test design simultaneously with the development and production process we avoid errors, save costs, and could potentially speed up the product launch.

What is Shift Left Testing?

Shift-left testing is also defined as “Early and Often” because it focuses on the functional aspects of the software at the early stage of the Software Development Lifecycle. With shift-left testing risks arising through defects in the software development lifecycle, can be projected and mitigated in advance. Shift-left testing is an inclusive part of the software development process, and comprehensive end-to-end automation enhances its accuracy and efficiency. It helps in reducing operational expenses and maintaining high-quality standards with greater ease. 

The testing team determines and defines the test designs based on the client’s objective. In shift-left testing following are the tasks a team focuses on during the test design phase.

  • Understanding client’s requirements, application behaviour and end-user expectation
  • Creating unit tests parallel to the development process
  • Creating functional and integration tests
  • Executing tests through end-to-end test automation
  • Creating reusable, maintainable code with regular quality checks

Developers and testers together adapt a Test-Driven-Development (TDD) approach and work through each detail and defect along the way. Both teams coordinate with each other to solve defects during the production phase within a DevOps environment. Testers and developers together communicate with clients, which allows them to deliver superior quality products smoothly and efficiently.

Why shift-left testing is important? How important it is to acceptance testing?

It takes time for the development team to gather requirements and pass them on to the testing team. The testing team may be less involved in the initial planning stage, often resulting in insufficient resources being allocated to testing. Hence, including testing early in the development stage helps in preventing the delays and unanticipated costs required for testing. Shift-left testing can avert the following types of errors arising due to late testing.

  1. The effort could be futile if defects remain undiscovered during the significant implementation of requirements, architecture, and design
  2. When the software is produced and features are integrated later in the development stage debugging such as identifying, localizing, fixing, and regression testing of defects become difficult
  3. The code coverage reduces to minimal during testing when encapsulation obstruct white box testing
  4. Fixing bugs can be postponed until the new versions of the system are launched and leave less time to fix defects detected through testing. This piles up a “bow wave” of technical debt leading to the decline of your project
  5. Helps you to develop a robust product with better team collaboration & efficiency

Shift-left testing focuses more on unit testing and integration testing rather than emphasizing acceptance testing. It enhances product quality by bug detection at the early stage of product development and helps reduce time-to-market. The CD/CI level in shift-left testing allows faster test runs and improve user acceptance. The continuous integration approach of shift-left testing complements user acceptance testing.  

It is frequently conducted in the open-source, in which license compliance and security vulnerability must be included, where the former ensures that all the components used in an open-source are licensed properly, while the latter helps to discover the problematic components in the open-source.

Benefits of Shift-left Testing:

  1. Shift-left testing helps in designing and thinking for development and testing
  2. It helps in developing a high-quality product
  3. Shift-left testing allows early bug detection to ensure better ‘Code’ & ‘Product’ quality
  4. It helps in reducing time-to-market and improving high ROI
  5. Shift-left allows continuous integration and continuous delivery for faster test runs

Types of Shift-left Testing

The four types of shift-left testing are:

  • Traditional shift-left testing

Traditional shift-left testing concentrates on unit testing and integration testing, using API testing and modern test tools instead of emphasizing acceptance and system-level testing, which is executed using GUI testing with record and playback tools.

  • Incremental shift-left testing

Incremental shift-left testing is useful when developing large, complex systems, especially those incorporating significant amounts of hardware. Based on the requirement to deliver it to the customer and operation, the shift-left testing shifts both development and operational testing.

  • Agile/DevOps shift-left testing

Agile testing excludes operational testing and is restricted to development testing only. The testing occurs once the system is integrated into the operation. The transition to Agile/DevOps shift-left testing is contemporary and is an ongoing practice.

  • Model-based shift-left testing

The model-based shift-left testing begins instantly at the integration stage rather than waiting for the software to appear on the right side of the test lineage. The previous types of shift-left testing concentrate more on implementation defects in the development stage, whereas Model-based shift-left tests focus more on uncovering the testing requirements, architecture, and design models.

Yethi, your partner for software QA

Shift-left testing allows integration testing during software engineering to be able to detect defects at the early stage when it is easier and is less expensive to find bugs in software and fix them. Shift-left testing is becoming powerful and popular as it improves efficiency, effectiveness, and even the scope of testing.

With the agile methodology of testing being adopted worldwide, it is essential to test an application faster and earlier, alongside developing software in SDLC. Bringing development and testing parallelly together early in the development stage is what we call ‘shifting-left’ testing.

At Yethi, we follow an agile methodology and framework. We have a well-structured and planned environment for continuous testing. Easy to integrate and easy to learn, our codeless test automation platform, Tenjin, is a plug-and-play banking aware solution. Its robotic capabilities enable it to learn and adapt to the application and its updates. Regardless of the complexity and number of updates, Tenjin facilitates continuous testing, minimizing the manual effort and speeding up the test execution, helping you launch your product early in the market.

Our testing solution allows you to test your software at the beginning of the development stage. Testing is executed simultaneously with the development process so that you can test as you build. Tenjin covers comprehensive end-to-end testing ensuring that you have the quality codes and the product.  

Data Migration Testing: Strategy & Best Practices

Data Migration testing strategy & best practices

As the world is witnessing a huge transformation at the technological front, organizations are constantly upgrading their legacy systems to keep up with the trend. Though updating to new systems is the need of time, a major challenge lies in migrating data without losing it. Hence, it becomes important to plan out an efficient data migration strategy to ensure that migration happens without any data loss.

Testing of migration is as important as migrating data; failing to do so, organizations may face issues of discrepancies causing expected results, which can affect the organization adversely. Furthermore, to carry out efficient migration testing a well-defined strategy is required, without which the organization can be left financially drained of resources after setting up more processes than they need. They may even find that their commercial success is negatively influenced by not exploiting their data to the fullest.

What is Data Migration? Why Do Organizations Undertake Data Migration?

The process of moving data from one system to another, preferably from a legacy system to a new one, is known as data migration. However, the process is not as straightforward as it may seem because it involves a change in storage and database or application. The data migration process involves three defined steps extracting data, transforming data, and loading data. When the data is extracted from the sources, it must go through a series of cleansing to eliminate errors and inaccuracies to qualify the data for efficient analysis and load them to the targeted destinations.

Organizations perform data migration for varied reasons; first, as a part of their system revamping plan, the other possible reason could be during the upgrade in databases, while another possibility could be when creating a new data warehouse or merging data from acquisitions. But it’s most common when teams are deploying other systems alongside their existing applications for integration purposes.

Why is Data Migration Strategy Important?

A comprehensive data migration strategy comes in handy when performing large-scale operations that need to preserve business continuity simultaneously. Organizations perform data migration to improve performance and competitiveness. When organizations carefully control the data migration process, they can prevent delays caused by missing deadlines or exceeding budgets, while improperly managing the process can leave a lot of migration projects dead in their tracks. In planning and strategizing the work, teams must ensure that they put their best foot forward with undivided focus on one project.

Data Migration Strategies

There are several approaches to developing a data migration plan, however, the two major data migration strategies include “big bang” or “trickle.”

  • ·         ‘Big Bang’ Data Migration

Organizations follow big bang data migration to ensure that the data is moved from the legacy systems to the target destination and the full transfer is done in a limited time. As the data migration process goes through the three inevitable steps of extraction, transformation and loading, the active system may experience a little downtime towards transitioning to the new database. The data migration process has some challenges like validation implementation failure, lack of data analysis scope, and inability to validate specification to name a few. But companies implement this strategy as the entire process of data migration takes less time to complete even with many challenges

  • ·         ‘Tickle’ Migration

Tickle migration is conducted in phases to avoid downtime or operational interruptions. In addition, migration staging is conducted continuously to support migration, even during peak operations.

Key Components in Data Migration Strategies

Moving sensitive or important data isn’t a simple task as it involves a lot of aspects that would need consideration. Hence, it is not a good idea to begin the process without having a plan on how this should be done. One must consider the key components of data migration strategies based on the critical factors mentioned below.

  • Knowledge of data — It is critical to have adequate knowledge of the source data to find the solution to issues that may arise unexpectedly. Hence, consider doing a thorough audit of the source data before migration.
  • Data cleansing — Between source data extraction to data transformation, there is a critical step of data cleaning, which focuses on identifying the issues of source data and resolving them.  The data cleaning can be done using software tools and third-party resources. 
  • Data quality maintenance and protection — The quality of data may subside over a period. It is critical to maintain and protect the data quality to ensure the reliability of the data migration process.   
  • Data tracking and reporting — It is critical to ensure data integrity by data tracking and reporting. Use the right tool and automate the function wherever needed.  

Although we can follow many ways to move data, it is important to have adequate knowledge about the best practices to ensure that the process of data transfer is done systematically and seamlessly.

  • ·         Solid Planning

Good planning is half work done. Decide the systems that will need to be migrated and plan how they will affect the business. When migrating data from one system to another, always ask yourself if your changes can be made without affecting or hindering other systems already being used by the business. Solid planning will help in carrying out the entire process with utmost ease.

  • ·         Action Steps

It’s time to give your migration process a ticking clock and a detailed, step-by-step plan– including the plan of execution – what, who, why, and deadlines – to ensure your migration is successful and time-bound.

  • ·         Crosscheck

Decide what technology to use for the migration and how it will fit into the larger IT ecosystem. Make sure you have a plan in place for decommissioning old systems.

  • ·         High-Quality Conversion Process

Ensure you map out the technical details related to how you plan to move data. Then, put processes in place to ensure that your data stays organized and of high quality.

  • ·         Build & Test

Here, you will implement the software logic that performs the conversion of data. Test the script in a mirror sandbox environment instead of running it against your production database.

  • ·         Execute

You’ll need to verify that data migration processes are safe, reliable, and fit for use in your business before implementing them.

How to Make Your Data Migration Go Smoothly?

Transferring sensitive data is a complex yet delicate process. However, here are some best practices to follow to ensure a successful migration.

  • ·         A Thorough Migration Plan

It would help if you had a good idea about how much data to move, from where it will come, and an idea of how you’re going to implement its move into your target server or location. Your plan should outline each necessary step and who will be responsible for them, physical aspects such as technical or compatibility issues, downtime expected for your system, and the source data and migration tools if they are going to be used. Last but not least is protecting your data’s integrity. Backups may prove exceptionally helpful in preserving your original data.

  • ·         Examine your Data

Before you proceed, take a close look at the data that you’re going to be migrating. In particular, identify and weed out data that is outdated and no longer important. Separating it from your migration will help streamline your process and set a clean slate for your team after the migration is complete. If there are pieces of information that require security controls due to the nature of its regulatory information, make sure you take these details into account.

  • ·         Put Migration Policies in Place

A data migration policy ensures that your data is on the right path after it’s been migrated. It also organizes and gives control over who will handle it and how they will do it, along with adequately protecting your company’s sensitive data.

  • ·         Automatic Retention Policy

Once you’ve successfully migrated, you must take the time to ensure that everything is placed where it belongs and remains safe and secured. It’s essential to keep all your systems in working order by setting up automatic retention policies to prevent data leakage. Also, make sure that outdated data has been validated and permissions are granted accordingly. Finally, just ensure that old legacy systems will back up automatically in the event of any technical difficulties – but make sure to double-check them before they’re put on standby!

Conclusion

As technology continues to change, businesses must continue to evolve as well. As a result, companies must create a plan for their data and understand data migration in today’s business world. Data migration can be challenging, but a company can migrate its data with minimal downtime and stress with a proper strategy and a few best practices.

At Yethi, we have the expertise of handling complex financial data migration, with pre and post-migration testing along with regular audits. We offer the most efficient end-to-end testing service. Our test automation platform, Tenjin, can test large data migration easily and efficiently while reducing time and cost significantly.

Risk-based Testing: Uncovering Risks

Risk based testing Uncovering risks

Risk-based testing starts early in the project by identifying the risks to the quality of the system.  This knowledge is used to guide the planning, preparation, and execution of testing.  The testing begins early in the project by identifying the risks to ensure the quality of the system.  Risk-based testing included mitigation testing which would offer opportunities to reduce the possibility of defects.

In risk-based testing, the quality risks are identified and assessed with stakeholders through a product quality risk analysis. The testing team designs, implements, and tests to reduce the quality risks.

Each product could convey a different grade of risk after identifying the parameters impacting the same and grading them.  Depending on the grades worked out, the classification as high, medium, and low risk is done. The intensity of the approach depends on the level of risk.

Need for risk-based testing:

Risk-based testing helps in reducing the remaining level of product risk during system implementation. The testing is done in the beginning stages of the project and helps all the persons involved to control the SDLC/STLC.

Risk for each product is investigated from processes and procedures, which are then graded. This method of quantifying risk allows testers to determine each risk’s overall impact and predict the damage caused by failure to test specific functionality. The strategy includes risk severity-based classification tests to identify the worst or most risky areas affecting the business.  It uses risk analysis to predict the likelihood of avoiding or eliminating defects using non-testing procedures and to help the organization select the necessary testing actions to perform.

The benefit of risk-based testing is to cut short timelines with optimal coverage.  It helps banks or financial institutions to lay their focus on high-risk areas in terms of q/a.

The above will help in reducing the efforts and costs without compromising on quality.

Yethi has out of its own experience, developed strategies and scoring patterns to help identify the risk level and the consequent impact on the project execution.

Action plan

Identify the risk

Risks are found through different testing methods and categorized accordingly. A chart is prepared based on the risk weightage and impact on the product.  The process involves organizing different risk workshops, checklists, root cause analysis, and interactions.

Risk analysis

Based on the risk parameters, ranks are allotted based on the probability and consequences that may follow.

A register or a table is used as a spreadsheet with a list of identified risks, potential responses, and root causes. Different risk analysis strategies can be used to manage positive and negative risks.

Response strategy

Based on the risk, the team chooses the right test to create a plan of action. Document the dependencies and assign responsibilities across the teams. In some cases, the risk strategy is conditional on the project.

Test Scoping

A review activity that ensures that all stakeholders have hearsay along with the tech staff.  Risk scoping helps create backup plans based on the worst-case scenarios, just to be prepared for a cascade of failures.

Identify the probability and high exposure areas and analyze the requirements.

Testing

After all parameters and scope of testing are listed out, testing needs to be carried out in stages. Prepare a risk register to record all developments from the initial risk analysis, existing checklist, and brainstorming sessions.

Perform dry test runs to ensure quality is maintained at each stage.

Maintain traceability between risk items and at every level of testing, e.g., component, system, integration, and acceptance.

Conclusion

Risk-based testing systems are sophisticated, efficient, and entirely project-oriented that resulting in minimizing risks. The testing efforts are quite organized, where each test has a protocol based on risk probability.