Importance of Continuous Testing in Continuous Delivery and Integration

The quality of software can be determined when it adapts to changes and promptly responds without any delays. However, overtimes with extensive use the code may change, and manual testing needs to be conducted again to identify the impact of these changes on the functionalities of the system.

A software is manually tested at the software development stage but comes with several drawbacks as follows:

  1. Manual testing of regression packs delays the release of the software. It takes weeks and months to get feedback from the developers as the written code is tested. The entire process is relatively time-consuming and expensive.
  2. Even the most advanced and expert testers may not perform regression testing with accuracy. It might be hard to detect the impact of the set of changes in a complex software system through inspection.

All about Continuous Delivery

Alongside code writing, it is equally important to focus on quality during continuous delivery. Testers work closely with developers to help them create unit tests. They start by writing code to automate the small number of tests that cannot be covered by unit tests. Continuous delivery allows us to rapidly test product with our users and collect data on the possible outcome. Continuous delivery enables you to carry out experiments quickly in the on-going production stage.

With continuous delivery, there is no need to ensure quality of software at the end of the development cycle before its launch. The code goes straight to production allowing for quality check at the same time it is created. The testers closely work with the developers to ensure that the quality is maintained.

Automation propels testing and focuses on the quality of the applications, and so most of these applications are tested in the unit testing phase itself. The tested code is deployed at the production stage for continuous delivery as soon as it is checked into source code management and passes a deployment pipeline.

Why Continuous Testing is important?

Developing software and testing them are not two separate activities, but a part of the same equation. Hence, testing should be performed simultaneously along with developing the application. Automation like test automation, deployment automation, and environment automation allows you to execute these changes faster with minimum effort.

Application and systems need consistent updating of test documentation to keep it ready with the changes in the applications. Many different types of tests, both manual and automated, need to run continuously throughout the delivery process. Followed by continuous delivery and integration, continuous testing automation is included in the deployment pipeline. The deployment pipeline allows creating packages that can be implemented in any environment and runs unit tests, providing feedback to developers.

These test packages need to pass comprehensive automated tests that run against them. These packages are available for self-service other environments for activities such as exploratory testing, usability testing, and ultimately release after they pass all these automated tests. Automation testing is important for continuous delivery, which is followed by continuous deployment. Hence, it gives rise to the need for continuous testing to keep a track on changes.

In the deployment pipeline, the changes are implemented simultaneously with continuous integration during product release. If the common defects are not highlighted in the deployment pipeline, it could delay product release. However, some tests are improved and updated in the pipeline if defects are detected later. The focus here is to find the issues as early as possible to reduce the release time of the product.

How Continuous Testing can improve Continuous Delivery?

Implementation of continuous testing in continuous delivery can benefit your delivery pipeline. The following are the points that would explain how continuous testing can improve continuous delivery: –

  1. Executing API, UI, and Performance testing along with Regression testing will ensure the quality of the app in various customized cases. Continuous testing will allow the developers to perform a live test of the implementation, functionality, and behaviour of their code with testing tools.
  2. The DevOps team can implement parallel tests with automatic notifications after making the necessary configurations to the CI environment. Testers can notify developers whenever there is a failure in any build component. Testing of all changes can be done automatically using continuous integration.
  3. The QA team can verify and validate the product quality by running regression, load, and functional tests deployment. The automation testing will be continuously carried out if the test module configuration is correct. In case if there is a build failure in the system, it can be fixed by manual testing.  

There are some best practices for continuous testing in continuous delivery:

  1. Continuous testing enables you to test operating systems and devices before production. It saves money in the long run as instead of running a large volume of test cases, load tests implemented every day at specific target areas reveal smaller bugs and fix them immediately.
  2. Accurate results can be obtained conducting test simultaneously during the development phase as compared to running tests in a controlled lab environment.
  3. Detecting defects and fixing them will be much easier and can run at the same time if the entire test suite is divided into several smaller tasks.
  4. To have adequate knowledge and detect the issues or discrepancies in app architecture and test automation, the metrics must be properly used. Proper use of metrics can also help up to prevent the risk of failures and its impact.

Conclusion

Continuous deployment and continuous delivery require a well-structured and planned environment for continuous testing. In absence of which CI and CD effort would not be successful. At Yethi Consulting, we follow an agile test automation framework. Our scriptless test automation platform, Tenjin, is a plug-and-play banking aware solution. Its robotic capabilities enable them 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 speed up the test execution.

Mitigating Challenges in Banking Application Testing with Right Automated Testing Suite

Leveraging digital technologies help to provide superior customer experience and bring greater measurability to internal processes. However, digital transformations are marathons and not sprints. With constant innovation in technology and changes in device platforms, there has been a growing magnetic pull towards “self-service” banking.

The growth of OpenBanking (PSD2, UPI etc.) is increasing competition for user data, and the one that has the better UI, features and more will acquire more customers with their faithful data.

With rapid changes, the diversity of digital platforms and the growth of third-party service providers, banks cannot help but invest in ensuring that their applications are of high-quality and feature enriched. This would require investing early in process and infrastructure to allow frequent and fast validation of the digital platforms.

Gone are the days when manual testing was conducted to check if applications worked well. It is no longer feasible to depend entirely on manual testing to meet the demands of 24/7 uninterrupted banking services. With constant and unprecedented changes in the overall banking technology framework and architecture, banks must quickly build, deploy, and operate applications to stay ahead of their game.

According to BBVA by adopting automation for their API products and services, “banks can reduce costs between 20% and 50%, workflows are facilitated in IT departments, better risk control with reduced human error in operations and a more efficient collection and data analysis for decision making”.

Why do you need automation testing?

  1. Automation is an investment to yield results in the near term by reducing future workloads, ensuring faster turnarounds of your application builds, validating basic functionality and possibly complex features as well.
  2. Automation Tools are complex to use and tough to maintain. Your ROI can be determined not by the initial cost and effort, but the cost of maintenance of fast-changing and modification of application features.
  3. Teams need diverse skill sets – Programmers must be paired with functional experts to achieve automation. Programmers must be familiar with automation tools, which otherwise could make your available resource pools shallow.
  4. Platforms – Self-service customer facing digital applications need to work on multiple platforms. Therefore, they need to be tested on multiple platforms. Automation will help reduce repetitive work or regression test burden.

Furthermore, with digital transformation, there has been a considerable increase in application workloads. The integration between legacy back-end systems and new applications involves complex processes and middleware platforms.

Testing such complex architecture involving multiple systems, channels, and processes comes with its own set of challenges. While the move towards automated testing is a step in the right direction, banks will need a definitive strategy to successfully adopt automated testing.

The challenges that the banks face during automated testing, include:

  • Following customer journeys

Technology landscapes in banks are complex. Digital platforms hide the complexity for end-users. However, ensuring these platforms remain accurate requires traversing the complex landscape of diverse applications. Automation platforms chosen should be able to address these complexities and resolve them.

  • Deciding the approach to automation

At the core of any banking technology framework there are very few applications that handle 80% of transactional loads. At first banks will need to automate these core applications to achieve greater efficiency and eliminate redundant processes. The changes/upgrades to these applications happen on a constant basis, requiring extensive regression testing.

Additionally, banking processes require testing of numerous data scenarios. Banking applications have multiple touch points interfacing with various channels and systems that makes testing a challenge.

  • Managing test data

Testing is ‘Business as Usual’ to ensure mission-critical applications are up and running always. Data management is another big aspect of testing. Banks must perform different kinds of testing on huge volumes of data across multiple environments. Performance, load, and stress testing require humongous amounts of data, sometimes going past the production data volumes. With automation, test data management needs to be highly organised and well planned.

Test automation solutions come with built-in simulators and test data repositories. Such features help to generate, structure, and store test data and use them as and when required. Banks need a test data management solution that performs the following:

  1. Generates synthetic test data that meets the compliance and regulatory requirements
  2. Data masking feature to mask sensitive information of production data
  3. Data transformation & ETL features to test complex scenarios, interface between legacy back-ends and other systems

  • Planning regression testing

Regression testing must be highly consistent. Whether introduced changes are minor or major in nature, the applications need to be tested extensively. To ensure no existing feature is broken or to avoid any eventful news headlines, regression testing needs to be automated.

As complexities in banking technology framework increases and with agile in software development lifecycle (SDLC), regression testing becomes a must to adopt.

A report by PWC highlights that 21% of defects are not identified until after the software goes live putting more light on the need of regression testing. With automated testing, regression tests can be scheduled and initiated with very fewer manual interventions. This allows the QA team to focus on other complex testing scenarios.

  • Launching application/products in time

Being a first mover in highly competitive markets has its own advantages. Similarly, many financial institutions offer on-demand and real-time services. These applications will also need to be developed and tested in rapidly evolving environments. In such scenarios, the right testing solution can save time and speed up the process of deploying applications in the production environment.

  • Need for reporting for greater visibility & transparency

With automation, proactive and preventive actions become seamlessly possible. With outcomes of test results in real time, development teams can plan for fixes and functionality changes. Additionally, update of test results provides an opportunity for product enhancements. With activity tracker, the complete process workflows of testing can be analysed, and bottlenecks can be identified with ease. For instance, if there is an issue in network connectivity or high latency or unsuccessful data transformation, such issues can be determined with precision. Real-time reports also make it possible to meet regulatory and compliance requirements in time.

In light of the PwC Report ‘An Ounce of Prevention, Why Financial Institutions Need Automated Testing’, it is established that 21% of defects in the software remains unidentified until after the software goes live.

Thus, organizations have an obligation to insist on unassailable software testing. Test automation is the way forward for financial institutions to remain competitive and agile. Tenjin has been specifically designed keeping in mind heterogeneous banking environments and ever-changing requirements.

To know how Tenjin can help your bank, request a demo today.

Challenges to address

1. Follow customer journeys across all technology platforms.

2. Reduce or eliminate programming in Automation by reducing errors and maintaining efforts.

3. Plan for data controls and pre-determined data strategy can significantly reduce the rework.

4. Adequate planning of skillsets for programmers, BA, and testers is mandatory.

5. Integrated Infrastructure like automation, platform, reporting, etc can help reduce overall workload during a critical run test phase. Planning and investing in this upfront reduces time and effort as you move forward.