Are open-source test automation tools reliable for banking systems?

Banks are steadily adopting open-source test automation tools. Let us explore why banks rely on open-source test automation tools. Banks in less than half a decade have witnessed growth in technology and digital advancement. Open-source test automation tools offer banks a competitive advantage to remain updated with technological development.

It helps banks in cost reductions, stability, easy accessibility, training testers, testing in-house developed applications, and more. Because of its benefits and advantages, open-source test automation tools have evolved as an industry standard and became a necessity for banks and financial industry. It allows people working and evaluating the framework in large groups to identify errors, flaws, and technical glitches with ease.

The current age banking systems

Banking systems in the current times see a greater digital acceleration. The banks and financial institutions confronted the most fastidious situation and came out unharmed. The banking system is healthier and stronger in handling adverse scenarios after dealing with a global pandemic. Banks and financial industry have seen significant growth in technologies in recent times. Banks now follow the latest open banking trend, and there is unrestricted growth globally.

As per a recent report in Statista, the number of open banking users worldwide is expected to grow at an average annual rate of nearly 50% between 2020 and 2024, with the European market being the largest. As the graph shows, in 2020, Europe counted approximately 12.2 million open banking users. This figure is expected to reach 63.8 million by 2024. As of 2020, 24.7 million individuals worldwide used open banking services, a number that is forecast to reach 132.2 million by 2024. This growth in technology requires steadfast system validation to ensure that banks continue to perform and innovate.

The benefits of open-source test automation tools

To substantiate the question, “are open-source test automation tools reliable for banking systems” I will state a few benefits of open-source test automation tools in this article. Let us go through the reasons one by one to understand why open-source test automation is reliable for banking systems.

  • Better support and collaboration – There are vast fields of information available on the internet that testers can consult to overcome obstacles. Open-source framework enriches online communities, which allow the team from different locations to interact and collaborate with each other via a centralized server. There is a constant flow of information transfer within the community without any downloads and uploads.
  • Cost-efficient – The open-source test automation platform has low licensing costs and minimal hardware needs. The testing components are easily reused and have greater scalability, making the task of managing the performance and load testing easy. Testers can adjust total cloud storage based on the testing requirements making it flexible for organizations to opt for a pricing plan. All mentioned above help reduce the cost of using an open-source test automation framework.
  • Prompt testing – Open-source tools hasten the test cycles making it much shorter than the cycles run with traditional tools. Setup and tool deployment are prompt without the need of installing. The productivity remains unaffected as test updates are tracked in real-time. It reduces the overall time to market making the organization to focus on the quality and deliverables.
  • Overall quality – Several users and developers come together to ensure the quality and security of the open-source platform. The team comprises multiple developers across the globe who are among the best in innovating, improving, and enhancing the quality of the open-source test automation platform so that the users get a high-quality test automation package.
  • Easy to customize – The open-source test automation software comes with a customizable option to suit the specific requirements of the testing department. The codes are easily editable and offer smooth functionality.
  • Virtualization – Virtualization reduces the cost by easily sharing resources and making the best use of their respective skills. Virtualization ensures that testing is more efficient and user-friendly.
  • No restrictions – Open-source test automation platforms allow the organization to work with skilled teams and individuals. Users can fast track the decision-making process with complete control of the execution process. As the highly competent users and developers form a global community, there is uninterrupted support without restrictions.

Open-source test automation tools reform the banking systems

The banking and financial industry is undergoing a massive shift with the appearance of agile and DevOps practices. The importance of software Quality Assurance has increased to ensure the reliability and stability of banking software. Banking systems must be updated with regulatory and functionality changes frequently. Testing the applications from the start will only increase the time to market.

To eliminate the delays, banks and financial institutions are embracing DevOps practices. They are speeding up frequent iteration by establishing CI/CD pipelines and releasing small segments of applications in batches. QA teams are enabling early testing by taking the shift-left approach. Organizations are adopting the DevOps methodology that combines the development and testing teams to focus on a result-oriented QA process. The development team works in a cohesive manner where the development teams create and run unit tests while the test teams validate these at the API and UI layers.

As application development adapts the cloud native technologies, they are built with service packages and deployed as microservices. Open-source test automation tools speed up the testing process of financial and banking applications while reducing cost, enhancing stability, and offering easy accessibility. Banking applications are now managed on cloud infrastructure through DevOps processes and continuous delivery workflows making it accessible, flexible, and scalable.

The teams can ensure high software stability as test automation helps to achieve a larger test coverage and higher level of regression testing. Teams are also focusing on preventing and predicting application performance issues as a result organizations are replacing performance testing techniques with performance engineering.

Different types of open-source testing tools

To test the different types of banking applications and interfaces, the organizations must select the testing tools. The selection of testing tools must be based upon the two functional or non-functional testing aspects. The areas included in functional testing are Web UI, mobile app UI, and API validation, whereas the non-functional test areas include performance, reliability, scalability, and accessibility. The following are the types of open-source test automation tools that can help us to validate the banking software.

  • BDD based test automation tools

Testers or business analysts can create test cases in uncomplicated text language using BDD or Behaviour Driven Development framework. This software development approach allows even non-technical team members to understand the project details.

  • API automation testing tools

Teams are adopting agile and DevOps methodologies and shift-left testing approach that shortens the release cycles. It is imperative to execute API testing as it bridges the differences between unit and GUI layer testing.

  • Mobile test automation tools

The open-source test automation framework can help to automate workflows for native, hybrid and web apps. Many tools offer cross-platform support and JIRA integration.  Mobile test automation tools can automate workflows of iOS, Android, and Windows apps and offer support for multiple programming languages like Java, Ruby, Python, PHP, JavaScript, and C#.

  • Performance testing tools

Performance testing tools are intended for load testing of web applications. Many such tools are open-source test automation tools offering load and performance testing for cloud-native applications, APIs and microservices. A few performance testing tools allow writing test cases in ES6 JavaScript, while other tools offer built-in support for HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 and Web Socket protocols. Some open-source test automations tools can be introduced into automation pipelines in Jenkins, GitLab, Azure DevOps, CircleCI and other CI/CD tools for performance regression testing.

  • Reliability and stability testing tools

These open-source test automation tools offer services on the cloud for generating various kinds of failures, detecting abnormal conditions, and testing the ability to endure the adversities. The main goal of focus of reliability and stability testing tools are to keep the cloud applications safe, secure with high reliability and stability.

  • Accessibility testing tools

Open-source accessibility testing tools offer thorough application testing to ensure that even the people with disabilities or specially challenged, of all age groups and different races, can use the applications without any issues or disruption. However, application testing must remain compliant with accessibility standards like WCAG 2.1 level AA and AAA, Section 508, ADA and EN 301.

Conclusion

Banking in current times is evolving fast. If it must keep up with the pace of fast changing technology landscape, the banking QA software QA must be ready to adopt newer techniques and tool sets. Banking and financial applications are the most versatile. Each application has functionalities only specific to the requirements, hence, to maintain the quality of the applications it must follow the e2e testing process. This article highlights the different open-source test automation tools and how banks can rely on them for their software testing.

QA Transformation is key to Digital Readiness

The importance of QA is increasing steadily with the growth in digitalization, with 40% of the financial sectors have already adopted DevOps. As now more and more companies are embracing agile methodology and DevOps, they are meeting the growing demands for the fastest product delivery incorporated with continuous feedback. There is now a greater dependency on continuous testing with an increasing need for faster product delivery.

In agile methodology, the testing team is a part of a core development team, which nudges them to be ready for any subsequent changes in software and develop it accordingly. Software testing has been evolving, from manual testing to automation, open-source frameworks, agile, DevOps, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI / CD). With a continuously evolving approach to testing, the development team enables faster deployment of software reducing the time-to-market.

What is QA transformation?

QA transformation means focusing on user experience while ensuring the information security of the application. Meeting customers’ expectations, needs and focusing on customer satisfaction are the key parameters that drive QA transformation.

For example – In a pandemic situation, such as the current COVID-19, there has been a surge of new applications to address customer needs. Not restricting just to quantity of digital products, these applications focus on quality as well as variety, spanning across different sectors namely banking and financial sectors, GPS tracker and COVID19 cases tracker, video calling and teleconference platform, online delivery of grocery, food, and medicine delivery. With continuous feedback and integration, these apps were released faster in the market than we could anticipate.

Companies adapting to automation, open-source frameworks, agile, DevOps, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI / CD) helped them in reducing the time-to-market. As software testing is quickly emerging, it relies heavily on codeless test automation, AI/ ML, RPA, and more. Since QA practice evolved with these methodologies, it facilitated the growth, flexibility, scalability, and sustainability of the digital platform.  

How important is a good QA practice?

A well-structured QA program follows complete quality metrics to facilitate digital transformation, hence, ensuring the quality of the software becomes essential. Based on customer requirements companies determine their QA resources their respective roles to accomplish the digital transformation goals.

QA plays a crucial role in digital transformation. QA helps in,

  • Protecting brand image 

A good QA practice is to consider user experience across multiple digital platforms. This includes improving user access reducing response time and improving consistency in brand perception.

  • Enhancing product quality

The end-users need a high-quality product for glitch-free performance. The right QA practice eliminates performance bottlenecks and enhances the quality of products to ensure user satisfaction.

  • Ensuring User Satisfaction

Attaining complete coverage of user requirements and expectations by designing and automating test cases. Implementing solutions and accumulating test data for test automation and ensuring customer experience. 

Benefits of QA in Digital Transformation

As automation, open-source frameworks, agile, DevOps, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI / CD), methodologies are growing more than ever before, these are becoming an integral part of the Software Development Lifecycle. Following are some of the benefits that the development team would experience following the methodologies.

  • Ensure Application Security

Continuous system integration exposes an application to many bugs and defects. Hence, the developers and testers follow definite processes and methodologies to continuously improve the quality of the application throughout the QA transformation process.

Collecting customer-sensitive data ensures application security by reducing the chance of exposure to risks. A quality assurance plan allows companies to identify the risks and build software that continues to perform even during a crisis.

The customers’ sensitive information and data can be misused, due to improper QA plans and prevailing technical glitches in software, which leads to loss of market share and customer reputation.

To avoid these unforeseen scenarios, organizations are investing in digitalization and building QA strategies, which is expected to play a crucial role in ensuring business growth and sustenance.

  • QA Transformation improves user experience

Over the years, companies are striving to improve customer experience and gain a competitive edge in the market with the emergence of new trends and technologies like Big Data, Cloud services, and Mobility services. The technologies that are driving digital transformation are unlikely to provide results without appropriate digital assurance and quality metrics.

Following a proper quality transformation strategy and planning prepares organizations to adopt digitalization promptly, as with every innovation your platform, process and system remain ready to adapt to frequent changes saving you time, money, and effort.

A prior quality assurance planning and testing ensure that your applications are compatible across all devices and browsers and offer seamless customer experience in a real-time user environment.

Interesting here, as it may seem, the QA or testing teams are leveraging test automation tools for repeated tests across devices and operating systems to ensure flawless integration, performance, and user acceptance.

  • QA Transformation allows you to adopt new technologies

As enterprises adapt to new technologies, it brings along multiple challenges such as system integration with existing, being familiar with the new technology with work culture, training, development requirements, and more. The QA transformation allows you to measure, manage and integrate processes to deliver financial and timely benefits consistently.

Organizations build their own Testing Center of Excellence (TCoE) to adopt robust processes and get test results through the test transformation process. Various teams build quality metrics and assessment models to measure the impact of the newly adopted technology on the overall transformation process.

Quality Assurance impact on Digital Transformation Initiatives

The DevOps enables continuous delivery, continuous deployment, and continuous integration. Since testing is an integral and inseparable part of DevOps, some of the test engineers have coined it as, “DevTestOps”. The functional testers are now adapting to the more agile framework and intensively performing A/B testing, NFC testing, mobile testing (functional and automated), system integration, data testing and more.

Agile Awareness in QA Transformation

Companies’ leap in adapting to the agile methodology has made the QA teams in companies struggle with the implementation of the agile development model and the end-to-end transformation to the agile framework.

An agile QA should be open to change and adoption of glitch-free techniques. Following a few steps will allow a smooth transition from traditional to agile QA. QA is an integral part of the development process, and it needs to be considered as one. QA does not just only focus on improving the quality of the application, it reduces the risk factor redefines and transforms the process.

Steps for successful QA transformation

  • The QA team needs to be trained in agile methodology so that they can be more receptive to digital changes.
  • Before rolling out the transition to agile, a few pilot projects need to be introduced. This will allow you to build agile competency and lower the risk of transition.
  • Since traditional QA is very different from the agile methodology, which follows an iterative approach and an adaptive model, developers and testers should take up more ownership in terms of responsibilities.
  • The QA team are expected to be more competent to write any kind of code. Conventional methods and processes are no longer applicable if you are looking for a smooth transition to agile QA.
  • Test automation is a key feature of testing, developing, and deploying the software. The developers and testers should work in perfect coordination until the automation results are achieved.

Conclusion –

At Yethi, our team is driven by in-depth knowledge of the domain and technology systems support, coupled with the requisite skill set. We are a team of quality assurance professionals focused on the BFSI industry. We have helped many organizations globally in ensuring the quality of their applications while reducing their turnaround time, time-to-market.

Yethi’s flagship 6th generation codeless test automation tool – Tenjin is an intuitive automated test suite, which is built with features for seamless system integration and flawless performance. With agile, granular, and multi-system test capabilities, Tenjin can interact with multiple applications through APIs.

CI For Automation Testing Framework

Let us consider that you have a critical project idea, and you want to set up an automation testing framework. A complex mobile application will need a lot of iteration right from the beginning. The complexities of the application may arise due to frequent changes in functionalities, adding new features, and running regression frequently to validate the changes. This will sway your project back and forth, consuming time, money, and effort, and the result will not equal up the effort made.

To end all the confusion, CI (continuous integration)/ CD (continuous deployment or delivery) is introduced at the very beginning of the software development lifecycle. The process offers a stable development environment and facilitates the automation testing framework with speed, safety, and reliability. It eliminates the challenges like lack of consistency and the numerous errors that arise due to human intervention of an application development process, ensuring that the users receive an error-free, end-product with a seamless user experience.  

What is CI/CD?

Technically speaking, CI/CD is a method that is frequently used to deliver apps to customers by using automation early in the app development stage. The main concepts associated with CI/CD include continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment.

We can think of it as a solution to various problems for the development and operations team while integrating new code.

With the introduction of CI/CD, developers have ongoing automation and continuous monitoring during the lifecycle of an application – be it the integration phase, testing phase, or delivery and deployment phase.

When we combine all these practices, it can be called the ‘CI/CD pipeline.’ Both development and operation teams work together in an agile way, either through a DevOps approach or site reliability engineering (SRE) approach.

Automation testing in CI/CD

Automation testing in CI/CD helps the QA engineers define, execute, and automate various tests. These tests allow the developers to access the performance of their applications in an innovative manner.

It can tell them whether their app build has passed or failed. Moreover, it can help in functionality testing after every sprint and regression for complete software.

Regression tests can run on their local environments before sending the code to the version control repository to save the team’s time.

However, automation testing isn’t confined to regression tests. Various other tests, such as static code analysis, security testing, API testing, etc., can be automated.

The central concept is to trigger these tests through web service or other tools that can result in success or failure.

Test automation framework runs on a set of guidelines, rules, and regulations. DevOps team needs to implement a proper test strategy following these guidelines, rules, and regulations before they start the testing process. They have to set the process right and decide when to introduce CI during the entire software testing lifecycle, when to start the execution, and the deployment process. Some of the key points to consider:

  • Evaluating test automation frameworks: Ensuring codeless representation of automated tests, that support data-driven tests, and concise reporting.
  • Choose the test automation framework based on the requirement: The different types of test automation framework include modular testing framework, data-driven framework, keyword-driven framework, and hybrid framework.
  • Defining the objective for automation: This is an important step where the objective of the test automation must be set clear. It includes choosing the right tools, skillsets, framework, current requirements, and considering the future trends.
  • Defining the benefits of the automation framework: Considering the benefits of the automation framework for faster test script creation, longer automation span, easy maintenance, reusability probability, and good data migration support.
  • Automation compliance: Testing the software for the latest regulatory compliance.

Benefits of deploying a CI/CD pipeline in automation testing framework

Wondering why a team should work on CI/CD pipeline? Here are some of the benefits associated with it:

  • Boosts DevOps efficiency

In the absence of CI/CD, developers and engineering teams are under immense pressure while carrying out their daily tasks. It could be due to service interruptions, outages, and bad deployments.

With the help of CI/CD, teams can eliminate manual tasks and thereby prevent coding errors. In addition, it will help them detect problems before deployment. This way, teams can work faster without having to compromise on the quality. Furthermore, since the manual tasks are automated, the release rates also decrease.

  • Smaller code changes

A significant technical benefit of CI/CD is that it helps integrate small pieces of code at one time. Therefore, it gets much easier and simpler to handle as compared to huge chunks of code. Also, there will be fewer issues to be fixed at a later stage.

With the help of continuous testing, these small codes can be tested as soon as they are implemented. It is a fantastic approach for large development teams working remotely or in-office.

  • Freedom to experiment

The CI/CD approach helps developers experiment with various coding styles and algorithms with much lesser risk than traditional software development paradigms.

If the experiment does not work as expected, it won’t ever appear in the production and can be undone in the next iteration set. This feature of competitive innovation is a decisive factor behind the fame of the CI/CD approach.

  • It improves reliability

With the help of CI/CD, you can improve test reliability to a great extent. It is because specific and atomic changes are added to the system. Therefore, the developers or QAs can post more relevant positive and negative tests for the changes. This testing process is also known as ‘Continuous Reliability’ within a CI/CD pipeline. This approach helps in making the process more reliable.

  • Customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is an essential aspect of the success of any product or application. It is a crucial factor that should be considered while releasing a new app or updating an existing one.

With the help of CI/CD, bugs are fixed while it is still in the development phase. Through automated Software Testing for Continuous Delivery, the feedback from the users is easier to integrate into the system. When you offer bug-free and quick updates on your app, it will help boost customer satisfaction.

  • Reduces the time to market

Another essential feature that makes CI/CD popular is the deployment time. The time to market plays a crucial role in the success of your product release. It helps increase engagement with your existing customers, gain more profit, support pricing, and get more eyeballs.

When you launch the product at the right time in the market, the product’s ROI will surely increase.

These are just a few benefits of CI/CD. It isn’t just a tool for software development but also an approach to set your business as a leader in the market.

Conclusion

CI/CD is an essential aspect of software building and deployment. It facilitates building and enhancing great apps with faster delivery time. Furthermore, continuous testing automation enables the app to go through the feedback cycle quicker and build better and more compatible apps.

Why Yethi for your projects?

Organizations need strategies and a customized testing environment to offer continuous testing with every integration and deployment. You cannot go wrong with the implementations. Our approach towards building an automation testing framework is agile. We offer continuous testing for all your integration and deployment ensuring that you get a stable, safe, and scalable product. The robotic capabilities of Tenjin – our codeless test automation platform, which enable to learn and adapt to the application and its updates. Tenjin, is a plug-and-play banking aware solution, continuous testing, minimizing the manual effort and speed up the test execution regardless of the complexity and number of updates.

Testing & Quality in Continuous Delivery, DevOps, and Observability

In today’s fast-paced world, development and deployment must go hand in hand to ensure timely delivery without compromising on quality. To support this modern application development approach, continuous delivery is implemented, where the code changes are automatically prepared and deployed for production. But often, when the development and operations are not managed well can lead to failure in the production of the application. To resolve this issue, DevOps comes to the rescue, it eliminates the conflicts and creates the perfect environment for building sustainable applications.

Deploying DevOps models is an integral part of the process that accelerates software deliveries while assuring a high-quality deliverable. To streamline the entire process and understand the success or failure of the process, it is important to establish continuous monitoring and observability. The observability process allows to collect the metric and decide on the next actional steps to be taken. Hence, DevOps and observability are essential criteria when it comes to testing and maintaining quality in the continuous delivery pipeline.

DevOps test strategy: The need for continuous testing in continuous development

Organizations are adopting the DevOps approach to develop software that streamlines the entire software development and delivery lifecycle. DevOps strategy involves implementing agile practices of continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) to ensure an easy and efficient result. The introduction of continuous testing verifies the operational structure, detects errors early, and resolves conflicts as soon as it is identified.

The goal of CI/CD and the associated continuous testing process in the DevOps methodology is to evaluate and eventually improve the quality of the process. Here, the testing, operations, infrastructure, QA, DevOps, development, and testing are interconnected. The effectiveness of the final result depends on these parameters.

How implementing continuous testing helps in the continuous delivery pipeline

  • It helps detect defects earlier, which eventually allows the company in reduced cost and improve quality
  • Continuous testing in quicker deployment
  • The automated testing system helps reduce the manual effort and improves the consistency and accuracy of the end results considerably
  • Since the testing starts at the early stage, it ensures a better test coverage
  • With better coverage and accuracy, application-related risks can be mitigated quickly
  • The transparency of the test results helps the developers to improve the software by implementing different techniques

As a part of the testing strategy, organizations are also investing in good DevOps tools. Some famous DevOps tools can be version-controlled source code managers like GitHub, GitLab etc. Organizations can also consider CI/CD pipeline engines to validate and deploy the application to the end-user during the development lifecycle. Using integration and delivery tools are a great help to solve problems.

For example, Cloud environments allow using Cloud resources to automate the deployment. As-a-Service models like SaaS, PaaS, IaaS allow the set of required resources to flawlessly generate code, test the code, and maintain the code.

Monitoring the progress is also a significant part of the development cycle. The code creation and security checks are significant parts of monitoring.

The need for observability in the CI/CD pipelines

The evolution of workflows to CI/CD approach is carried out in the advanced DevOps environment has proven to improve the quality by multiple folds. However, as the advancement progresses, they get associated with a new set of challenges. In order to mitigate any known or unknown risks, it is important to carefully analyze and control the process. The analysis metrics will help the teams to measure the success rate; this is done by implementing Continuous Monitoring and Observability process.

Advantages of continuous monitoring and observability

Vulnerability checks: When a new code is introduced in the system, it is essential to check what security vulnerabilities it can cause. It is important to implement constant observability to check the way the code is performing, any data leaks, or unauthorized activities. Continuous monitoring and observability will have a check on all possible threats and keep the team prepared to mitigate any kind of risk.

Understanding future trends: By implementing constant monitoring and observability, the organization can analyze the infrastructural and operational gaps. The metrics will help the organization to understand the future scope and build a solution to resolve the issue.

Reviewing the analysis: Continuous monitoring and observability allows the developers to have an elaborate result of the working of the system. Any discrepancy can be easily identified during the general observability process and given an opportunity to fix them before deployment.

Long-term analysis process: A similar QA process may not be feasible for testing different workflow systems. Hence, we cannot conclude the working of a certain process as a success or failure. On implementing a continuous monitoring process over a longer period of time, the process can be reviewed based on the data.

Ways to implement monitoring and observability

By implementing Monitoring and Observability in the production environment, the following can be achieved.

  • Help in getting prior indications regarding service degradation or outage
  • Easily detect unauthorized activities and bugs to resolve at the earliest
  • Identification of long-term trends is crucial for an organization. Monitoring and observability help organizations to find trends for business purposes and planning
  • It will help the organization to know the unexpected side effects of new functionality or changes.

Why is Yethi your perfect QA partner?

To achieve long-term success, installing tools is not sufficient, you need new ideologies and continuous support to succeed. Yethi is your perfect QA partner for helping you achieve your business goals. Having helped more than 90 customers across 18+ countries, we have emerged as one of the leading QA service providers in the BFSI industry.

Our test automation platform, Tenjin, is a 5th generation robotic platform that has a simplistic plug and play design. It can offer high test coverage with an end-to-end testing approach, and is capable of testing even the complex software system with utmost ease. Tenjin supports end-to-end testing and offers detailed metrics with its TTM (Tenjin Testing Management) solution.

Continuous Testing: What Every DevOps Team Needs to Know

Organizations are constantly investing in their digital transformation journey to enhance their business operations in today’s fast-paced competitive market. But, if done incorrectly, the advanced digital initiatives can hamper their projected growth, leading to a considerable waste of resources and leaving them in worse condition than before. Hence, organizations have come to terms that they should test their technology platforms. Additionally, they have learned to improve the management of their connections with their employees, customers, systems, and the data for the success of the digital transformation initiatives. Continuous testing can help organizations through the transition phase and minimize the risks associated with the software assets.

First introduced to decrease the time to receive developers’ feedback, continuous testing aims to test more often, especially at the early stage of development, and then test the entire unified codebase.

Continuous testing allows organizations to seamlessly integrate their software with legacy systems and boost their business efficiencies. For the DevOps team, continuous testing plays a massive role in skyrocketing their growth.

What is Continuous Testing?

Continuous testing involves testing early in the development lifecycle. It carefully evaluates software quality as part of the ongoing delivery process due to testing regularly.

In a traditional framework of testing, software is transferred by one team to another with a project that has clearly defined development and quality assurance (Q&A) phases. This process would demand a significant amount of time from the QA team to ensure quality, since it was prioritized over the project schedule. However, as today’s organizations have no choice but to deliver software to their customers rapidly, the traditional framework isn’t a feasible option.

With a continuous DevOps process, organizations can release software changes faster while moving from development to testing to deployment. Moreover, continuous testing helps DevOps teams to explore critical issues in the initial stages of development itself. As a result, it helps mitigate the risk of bugs beforehand and saves companies the cost of fixing errors further down the line. Continuous testing in DevOps also involves various stakeholders such as the development team, DevOps team, Quality assurance (QA) team, and operational staff.

Continuous Testing in DevOps

DevOps has its architecture, system, resource, and the process that operate. On its process side, there’s a strong culture of cross-discipline collaboration. Most of the time, developers collaborate when they produce code and pair-programming. Their work is frequently measured in days or hours of work. After the development is done, the code is ready for production, not for intervention.

On its technology part, DevOps understands and automates handover code between previously siloed departments. Continuous testing in DevOps concentrates on breaking down the silos of testing and QA to spread out to participate in the entire software development lifecycle.

In the DevOps environment, continuous testing can thrive if the organization is committed to transforming itself positively. But, for its successful execution, organizations shouldn’t be hung up on the most popular tools for the continuous delivery environment but instead spend their time deciding how these tools are tied together. Their ability to ensure seamless information exchange between tools can achieve the continuous aspect of their automation process. And in the process, it can remove the need for manual intervention. 

Steps for Continuous Testing in DevOps

Establishing stable automation

Stable automation is the first step in DevOps Continuous Testing. Developers can have stable automation once the testing issues across the DevOps are remediated and smart reporting for clearly discerning between real problems and false negatives.

Running a daily cycle

In the next phase, the DevOps team should add a limited number of scripts into a repetitive pattern that runs at least once a day, automatically, successfully, and unattended on different platforms.

Increasing Coverage

After the stable connection runs at a reliable pace, the next phase is to increase the test coverage. Since the numbers can vary, the DevOps team should reach valuable and meaningful functional and non-functional test automation coverage. The original range may be from 90 – 95%  The parts that are not automated will only occur at the end of the cycle.

Doing Continuous testing throughout the day

The final stage is continuous testing. In this stage, the process moves from automated testing every night to multiple times a day. The benefits of it are faster feedback, better accuracy as well as minimized risk. It also provides developers with better flexibility during the entire development cycle and usually reduces their defects by 50%.

Best practices for DevOps continuous testing

Successful integration of continuous testing in DevOps needs a high level of collaboration, where everyone maintains quality and cooperation. The team should decide on test cases before commencing coding. A few practices of continuous testing for DevOps include:

  • Decreasing test waiting times with testing carried across all the stages of the delivery pipeline by reducing complexity.

  • The testing should cover all aspects of a DevOps lifecycle. It will provide developers the feedback they need across all stages to ensure the quality of the software is under control.

  • Organizations should access the requisite DevOps tools, dependencies, and resources to be successful with continuous testing.

Continuous testing is integral to DevOps’ continuous integration and deployment process pipeline. With continuous testing, the continuous integration/ continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline continually moves from the development to testing to deployment process.

Benefits of Continuous Testing DevOps

Continuous testing comes with many benefits for DevOps. Here is an overview of a few of them:

  • Discovers critical bugs early
  • Provides a smooth collaboration among developers, QA, and Operations team
  • Enable developers to assess the quality of software at an early stage
  • Removes the testing bottleneck from the DevOps procedure
  • Delivers a stable user experience
  • Assist in providing test results at a faster pace that results in improving the overall code quality
  • Allows for a quicker time to market with a viable product as well as a continuous feedback mechanism

Conclusion

By understanding DevOps Continuous Testing’s architecture, steps and incorporating best practices, organizations can hope to deliver high-quality software while engaging in a continuous testing mindset to differentiate themselves from their competitors.

Why choose Yethi?

Yethi is a leading QA service provider to global banks and financial institutions, which is committed to address and resolve the quality challenges faced by organizations. Its test automation platform, Tenjin, is a 6th generation robotic platform that has a simplistic plug and play design. With its high-test coverage, it can effortlessly remove any redundancies and makes sure the system performs at its best. It offers great performance, flexibility, precision, and consistency for a seamless user experience.

Elastic QA; what is it, and why do you need it?

In this digital era, software solutions and applications are becoming an essential part of everyday products and services. Due to the high level of competitiveness in the market, customer experience has become the prime importance for businesses. To improve the effectiveness of this process, quality assurance (QA) of the product is incorporated to the Continuous Integration/ Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, known as QAOps. It demands the QA team to work closely with the software operations team and the development team.

Currently, 1.96 million applications are available on the Apple store, whereas 2.87 million applications are available on the Google Play store worldwide. The key to delivering an exceptional customer experience is quality. A rapidly evolving technology makes existing technologies outdated in a short time. To match the speed of technology and faster delivery of software, quality is often degraded. The poor quality leads to poor customer experience and losing one-third of software application users and reduces revenue. To maintain software release velocity while sustaining the quality, there is a need to upgrade the QA resources.

A contract-based QA testing resource hiring takes time as well as money, which are crucial in the software release cycle. Instead, this time can be reinvested into the business by introducing software test automation in QA testing resources. A partial or complete automated approach to QA testing resources still needs the human touch to ensure it resonates with people. Ultimately, people are going to use it and it should be optimized to enhance their user experience.

The quality and speed are critical components of the software release cycle and delivering a delightful experience to customers. A trending solution to achieve this is the Elastic QA that offers flexibility to QA testing.

What is Elastic QA?

An innovative approach to software QA testing is software testing automation. It is a volume-based model that provides elasticity (flexibility) to QA.

The world of QA is dynamic and is not one size fits all business areas. Some companies may have a huge in-house QA resource team, whereas others may have only a handful or no team to lean on for the software testing cycle. Additionally, the software release cycle may vary with the demand and requirements. Moreover, some companies keep releasing new updates or versions of their application weekly or monthly, while others may release new updates once in two-three months. Accordingly, the QA testing resource requirements vary while battling with the speed and quality of software release. The value in prioritizing quality is another vital component that should be on the priority list while carrying out QA tests.

Elastic QA is the solution to sort out the battle between speed, quality and value. It gives the blended approach to software testing by combining humans with technology. Elastic QA helps in delivering quality at speed and sees the real value! Elastic QA helps in flexing up and down the testing requirements and aligning with the QA team demands by leveraging third-party QA resources. Additionally, it helps in cycling the software releases. Thus, Elastic QA helps in alleviating the QA resource pressures and modern-day engineering unpredictability.

Need for Elastic QA

With many innovative and novel ideas and approaches in the software release cycle and QA testing, the question remains constant: Why should one adopt Elastic QA in the software QA testing and release cycle? Let’s see the primary reasons supporting the adoption of Elastic QA in QA testing resources.

Elastic QA ensures the cohesive software release cycle across various versions and updates, whether the Apple Store or Google Play Store and different versions of gadgets like smartphones, personal computers, tablets, or laptops. Complete coverage of different devices and an extensive network of QA testers help in faster software testing. Multiple testers work to identify the bugs and troubleshoot them, increasing the speed of testing and software through the eyes of several testers, ensuring quality.

The internal QA resource goes through a proper documentation channel that takes time to prepare the testing report. A faster response through the Elastic QA approach reduces the hiring needs of in-house QA resources saving time as well as money.

Elastic QA delivers real value to the business by allowing testers to focus on other business areas by automating the software QA testing. It ultimately secures the budget and allows other QA resources to meet their critical deadlines. 

Conclusively, Elastic QA does crowd-testing, saving time and money, while ensuring performance and security. It stretches internal resources and communicates workload balance to prevent bugs from falling through the cracks. A global network of QA testers ensures the software works absolutely fine in the local environment, allowing the release of the perfect version of the software working worldwide.

Why Yethi is your perfect QA partner?

As the software development trend is continuously growing, the testing trends are also evolving to address the new quality challenges. Yethi is here to help. We are a niche QA service provider for global banks and financial institutions, having helped more than 80 clients in 18+ countries. We are market leaders in offering QA services to banking/financial software working across multiple devices and networks. Our test automation platform, Tenjin, is a 6th generation robotic platform that has a simplistic plug and play design. It can offer high test coverage with end-to-end testing approach, and capable of testing even the complex software system with utmost ease. It removes delays and redundancies to ensure the system works at its best and offers a seamless experience to end-users. It offers greater flexibility for quicker deployment and can easily adapts to the changes in the underlying application without the need for scripting or recording.

Financial Payment Systems: Quality assurance and testing

Payments is considered the heartbeat of banking and is an area that is witnessing significant disruption. Transactions today occur not just through debit/credit cards but also wallets and other micropayment systems – not to mention the surge of cryptocurrency. In addition, regulators globally are encouraging competition and innovation by granting licenses to pure-play payment providers. Payment platforms handle a large volume of transactions and the need for better/faster/ more accurate reconciliation is also therefore growing. Ensuring faultless systems with fast processing times and robust security are the need of the hour. 

Increasing the diversity and speed of testing how payment messages are generated, processed and reconciled would help reduce mis-steps and need for manual reconciliation. While there have been significant attempts to automate testing of Transaction Entry, testing of the entire payment lifecycle remains largely manual. 

Till recently, financial institutions have generally relied on manual testing methods for quality assurance of payment systems, compliance, and security. However, digital transactions have grown a whopping 338% in just one year. This has been brought about by innovation and advent of new players. Banks, who provide the backbone for all payment transactions are finding that the rate-of-change is extremely high requiring significant improvement in exception handling. Testing / QA of these platforms is gaining a higher focus due to the volumes and values involved. 

In this article, we take a closer understanding of the landscape of automation testing and quality assurance for financial payment systems and discuss the path forward to iron the kinks.

Manual vs. automated testing for electronic financial payment systems

1. Capital and resources

Manual testing heavily relies on human experience and expertise for execution. In this case, building a reliable hub of QA engineers and state-of-the-art testing tools is of paramount importance. This is not as capital intensive when instances are low. However, as real-time payments become more popular, it becomes imperative for engineers to adapt, or you may face a higher risk of manual errors and leave significant loopholes in security.

On the other hand, automation testing is quite capital intensive, but the ROI becomes significant when much of the recurring tasks are completed at record speeds without human intervention. Note that the upcoming generations prefer the convenience of digital services over the user experience of traditional brick & mortar branches.

2. Flexibility vs. replicability

Manual testing systems are inherently advantageous for catching one-off ambiguous errors. A manual testing system that is equipped with the latest tools and techniques can accommodate for versatility and be highly responsive.

On the other hand, where the manual system may fail, the automated testing system shines – replicability. Recurring errors for which there is a temporary solution at hand can be automated, while the resources to dig deeper can be handed over to the top QEs. If not, resource management becomes an intensive process where specialists are forced to work on repetitive tasks instead of actually fixing the problem from the root. This may be the very reason for frequent headlines that begin with “IT meltdowns.”

3. Time to deploy

Bringing in new technology to the QA system used to be a cumbersome task. Agile methodologies and the Continuous Delivery framework have vastly helped improve the time to deploy QA systems.

As market forces are dictating the deployment of creative apps, faster product development cycles have become imperative. If containerization and microservices are leveraged well, automated systems can be a crucial asset in deploying new apps as well as new versions at a faster pace to keep abreast with the competition. It’s also much easier to recall the apps to older versions in case of technical glitches if the code is automated.

With automation, coders can focus on validating scripts rather than writing scripts which is much more time-consuming.

4. Scalability

In a world where change is constant, and new regulations are brought in with little time to restructure existing infrastructure, the question of scalability remains a looming point. Quality Assurance Payment Systems should not only be able to scale for volume but also accommodate for framework changes on the fly. In this case, generic software solutions are currently struggling to cater to the ever-increasing demand. However, smarter solutions such as no-code testing can be the key to adapting to the market’s ever-changing demands.

5. Data creation and virtualization

The most important factor in testing the robustness of generic tools is how well they are able to simulate real-time transactions. While older systems are able to accommodate for task-based testing, there is little evidence that they work well for behavioral testing. This kind of deeper analysis is what should drive the continuous improvement cycles on agile systems. No doubt, some of it can be analyzed manually but is that enough? Data-backed decisions provide the best analysis of the impact of concurrent external events.

Making the best of both worlds

As we’ve seen above, there is a necessity for both manual testing and automation testing to coexist.

Most software suites today are driven towards making the life of coders easier. However, it’s not the coder who forms the bridge between the bank and consumer, but the business analyst. Codeless Payment System Automation Testing is a pragmatic solution that is geared towards enhancing the product life cycle.

With codeless automation, you have little to worry about hiring or outsourcing a large team for android, iOS, website, and desktop application testing – all recurring tasks are taken care of in-house. All you need is a well-qualified and experienced team of analysts who have the know-how of coding and a team of specialists who can tweak the code on the fly.

To take care of recurring tasks, robotic automation testing software that “learn” on the job are the key. An RTA tool must be able to integrate easily with a device farm and quickly carry out tests across form factors. RTA tools also pose an advantage in that they are DevOps ready – meaning they can easily mesh with existing DevOps tools. This further improves the efficiency of the CI/CD pipeline.

Yethi’s QA services for financial applications

As the weaknesses of manual testing become more palpable, investing in a trusted automation testing and quality assurance partner is an inevitable reality. In this phase, banks and other financial companies are creating and updating their payment software to online, mobile, and other digital platforms. This increasing number of online users has created a need for an immensely effective software testing solution that will leave no scope for compromise in any aspects of functional usage, performance, or security.

At Yethi, we have introduced an efficient software platform for payment software to work at their best while offering complete peace of mind to the entire client base. Tenjin, Yethi’s codeless automation tool, has revolutionized test automation in the banking and financial sectors, offering an impeccable system that offers no scope for errors. Yethi has established itself as a market leader in QA services to the BFSI industry by offering testing solution to popular banking software including Oracle Flexcube, Infosys Finacle, and TCS BaNCS. Tenjin has created a deep impression in the market for its quick deployment test automation solution that conducts the testing without the need for scripts or codes while offering nearly 100% accuracy.

Digitalization: Learning from Workflow Testing

Digital technologies have gained momentum in the last few years reshaping the business models and helping companies to explore new opportunities to scale up efficiencies and improve customer satisfaction. This trend of evolving technologies has led to the progress of digital workflow systems, to provide greater insight and efficiencies. To keep the digital workflow system up and running, organizations are innovating and streamlining the existing processes. Having business operations and software development closely interact and adopting practices such as DevOps, businesses have accelerated digital adoption cycles.

Every organization is creating a new digital transformation strategy to efficiently incorporate digital workflow and remove any hurdles associated with integration, processing, and maintenance. This process of building and implementing the digital workflow strategy should be backed by strong quality assurance teams and powerful test automation practices. Strong QA process will help bring faster stability to the systems, detect even the slightest of errors, and provide faster updates to the developer to fix any issues. Hence, the test automation forms an inevitable part of the modern, digital workflows.

Redefining the role of test automation in digital workflows

With the increasing emphasize on technology, organizations are moving towards digital, omnichannel workflow systems to offer seamless customer experience. Furthermore, organizations are adapting to the modern software development process like DevOps to improve the digital workflow system. This kind of development process works on highly complex and unified systems that are driven by specified APIs, GUIs, AI, ML, and other Cloud-driven applications. To ensure the speed, quality, accuracy, and consistency of these systems, test automation plays an essential role.

To sustain and succeed in today’s highly competitive world, organizations are optimizing their workflow testing strategy to suit the modern application development practices and DevOps implementations. Such test executions are an important part for successful digital transformation.

Changes required for test automation in digital transformation scenario:

  • Focus on business tests
  • Emphasize on continuous testing
  • Improving processes with test automation
  • AI integration

Focus on business tests

Workflow operations are directly linked to business outcomes. Incorporation of digitization in the workflow systems are important for greater execution and enhanced customer experience; thus, allowing companies to build new workflow testing strategy to improve the performance of the entire process.

With digitization, the role of test teams has undergone a major transformation. Testers are not required to manually write the codes for all the process that is being developed. The QA process has been automated to handle complex business operations like real-time performance, interacting with other applications, flexible to the user preference, and a lot more. Businesses understand and develop test execution based on their requirements.

Emphasize on continuous testing

Digital workflows demand tools and concepts that deliver faster, accurate, and consistent results. CI/CD (continuous Integration/continuous delivery) practice is the most preferred among the developers for the speed, quality, and ease it offers. The success of the CI/CD process also lies in expanding the scope/coverage of the software testing efforts and the proverbial -shift-left testing. Continuous testing is bringing a testers mindset of questioning/ enquiry in early/all parts of the product development cycle. This enables the testers to identify any issues at an early stage in the development process and allows developers to fix the issues early which will further enable an easy and smooth development process with accurate end results.  This is achieved by questioning and revalidating assumptions (documented or undocumented) and establishing cause-effect relationships between varied parts of your development efforts. 

Improving processes with test automation

Digital workflows and test automation work hand-in-hand. The success of a digital workflow system lies in automating the testing process. Manual testing, while being highly effective, is tedious, time-consuming, and often prone to a number of errors.  A judicious mix of manual and automated testing should be applied to achieve maximum coverage and error-discovery.

As discussed earlier, digital workflows need continuous testing process to ensure the quality of the system. Continuous testing can be achieved only by test automation solutions. Test automation are implemented to conduct end-to-end workflow testing that includes test creation, processing, execution, test data generation, test data and environment management, running test suites, security testing, and generating reports.

Though test automation can provide reliability, accuracy, and consistency, it is essential to identify the right test tool. In the event of failing to do so, the anticipated time and effort savings can be lost in building and maintaining automation scripts. In critical digital workflows, testers create smaller regression suites and run the test; the results are analyzed, and problems are reported to the developer.

AI integration

AI and ML integration are offering new possibilities for test automations. AI has increased the speed of test automation by multiple folds, this is achieved by applying complex algorithms running in the backend of the AI-integrated system. AI-integration is still at a nascent stage, organizations are exploring different possibilities to use them for automation of different digital processes. AI testing are used to test application usability, features, integrations, and test data analysis. Furthermore, AI-driven test automation allows the machine tor self-learning and taking proactive actions with minimal or no human intervention.

Digital workflow testing for early issue identification in DevOps

DevOps practices are popularly used for application development in the modern world. Test automation helps them to identify and resolve issues at an early stage of software development lifecycle. Without a digital QA strategy, test automation can help to remove the barriers of the digital processes.

Digital-driven software development are the modern processes that are backed by powerful QA system. Implementing test automation practices right from the beginning of the DevOps cycle will adapt a true shift left attitude and perform the test activity with utmost precision. While test automation has distinct benefits, it requires careful planning supported by the right skillset to achieve the desired ROI.  Hence, it requires testers to reskill to fit in the modern digital scenario.

Yethi’s QA solutions to modern workflow systems

Yethi is a QA service provider for banks and financial institutions across the world. Yethi test automation tool, Tenjin, is a 6th generation, robotic test automation platform that is capable of handling diverse workflow applications. With successful testing of inexhaustible workflow systems in the past for our esteemed clients, having us placed as one of the top QA testing solutions for financial software systems.

Tenjin is capable of providing effortless test automation with reduced time. It specializes in handling automation of continuous integration/ continuous development processes to keep in sync with the development process, thereby, ensuring to fix the issues as they are detected. It further helps in end-to-end testing of all workflow stages, strategizing, analyzing and designing test cases, executing and monitoring entire workflow stages and process. Tenjin’s multiple rounds of test execution to offer accurate test results even under high-risk scenarios make us the perfect QA partner. We carry out thorough analysis and testing to achieve specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely results/