Importance of test code quality in continuous testing of financial applications

The global pandemic (2020-2021) had led to unanticipated issues such as economic crisis and credit risk. The upcoming years looked uncertain while facing a critical time. To protect from the economic fallout, the leading business entrepreneurs focused on finding out possible solutions that they thought would help them in stabilizing business continuity and serving their customers better.

One of the Gartner’s Business Continuity Survey reveals that as less as 12 per cent of organizations were prepared to combat the effect of a deadly catastrophe like coronavirus. Amidst the threat of spreading COVID-19, the leading financial institutions considered evaluating their business continuity plans and pandemic planning initiatives to ensure they put safety and efficiency first.

Banking and financial institutions considered agile methodology to adapt to the changing global scenario. The unforeseen event urged the BFSI sectors to reflect on their fundamental practices and how prepared were they for the future. The impact of the pandemic was so widespread that banks faced a weak investment return leading to future credit risks and economic uncertainties. Reportedly, the European banks collectively have experienced an estimated credit loss of an average of €700m in Q1 2020. Meanwhile, in the US three popular banks informed that they noticed a significant credit loss of $25b in Q2 2020.

Current Trend and Opportunities

To prevent the pitfall and evolve from this economic crisis, banks seized available opportunities and prepared their next business module. This catastrophe has urged banks to re-evaluate and analyze their core and non-core assets. Under this scenario, 60% of the banks considered the divestment option, a plan to divest in the next 12 months.

The possibility is likely to play a massive role in understanding the type of organizations banks would like to connect with in the future and how conveniently they can transform their existing process. A growing interest in digitalization is driving banks to adopt digital banking products and solutions to cater to customer requirements. They are taking steps to boost their digital transformation plans.

With a growing threat during a pandemic and different phases of the lockdown being imposed everywhere, financial institutions had adopted remote working policies. It provided an opportunity for the business leaders to reconsider working remotely, operating in the long-term, and consider the monetary impact this approach could have.

This situation enabled many banks to understand their resilience and capabilities. They also reconsidered their cost transformation programs to move in tune with the new challenges of this crisis. The future from here on looks promising and inspiring.

From the online purchase of grocery items to electronic goods, banking and financial institutions, companies introduced promotions, special services, and reward points to re-establish their position in the market. The customers’ purchase behavior was requirement-based, as a product was bought and sold based on bare necessity.

Customers were driven more by emotion during the crisis. Hence, for organizations, brand messaging, tone and purpose became extremely important while connecting with their customers at an emotional level. It helped in establishing customer brand loyalty. Customer purchase behavior depends on four principles, as stated below:

  • As customers remain indecisive, empathy and commitment become two ways to win their trust. During the pandemic, consumers reacted positively to inspiring content that highlighted social, financial, and other real-life aspects.
  • Brands should keep informing their customers about the crisis, how to protect themselves and change in the situation. Customers are likely to trust brands that provide reliable and accurate information about the current situation.
  • Engaging and connecting your customers by facilitating and extending social support are assured ways of improving brand loyalty. Social engagement with customer support and responding instantly during this pandemic have helped build brand loyalty.
  • Offering new schemes, promotions, and offers helps your brands to evolve through endorsement. These efforts have an impact on your customers.

Digital Transformation

Digital banking solutions, which have been brewing for a long time, have accelerated during this unprecedented time. This pandemic situation profoundly changed the behavior of retail and corporate banking clients and facilitated the use of digital banking.

A recent survey done by Ernst and Young, reveals that 62% of consumers said they would use less cash in the future, while 59% will opt for contactless payments. The use of digital services and products propelled more expansion when some of the bank branches were closed, and in response, banks accelerated digital and technology transformation programs.

The small and mid-size companies started adopting digital solutions faster than anticipated. There was an increase of new digital accounts by 2.4 times in the first quarter of 2020 as compared to the first quarter of 2019, and a 49% rise in SME digital loan applications in 2020 as compared to 30% in 2019, in one of the Singapore-based banks.

The concurrent situation has led to massive economic uncertainty, and there is a requirement for the bank to endure this sudden disruption. With a low margin, banks opted for digital tools and focused on sustainable digital enablement that helped them save cost and time. Their motto was, “Grow your business with digital innovations to live up to your customer’s expectations”.

When assessing customers’ requirements, it was observed that a combination of UI and UX of a digital platform contributed to customer satisfaction and experience. Since banking and financial institutions were turning their services online, they needed a platform that could improve the appeal and undisrupted performance.

The following instance supports the claim of how banking is relying on digital and online platforms. In April 2020, Lloyds Banking Group decided to provide a tablet to their 2,000 customers over the age of 70. The objective was to provide training and support to help them access online banking. As banks are now adopting the best digital practices and customer-centric solutions, they form a well-connected digital ecosystem and unique value propositions for their clients. The whole objective shifts to serving their customers better through an outstanding and uninterrupted online banking experience.

Banking has been evolving even before the pandemic swept the entire world. Based on customer requirements and expectations, banks are compelled to leverage digital channels, accounts payments or transfers and online wallets. To avoid the risk of spreading the infection, consumers opted for cashless payments during this pandemic situation. Consumers who did not consider online payment and transactions as options were encouraged to migrate to a digital platform. Since many consumers were not fully familiar with the digital platform, banks have taken it upon them to educate their customers for an outstanding experience.

As the cashless transaction became the new reality of the ongoing situation, banking and financial sectors had to speed up their digital innovation process in response to customer needs by leveraging cross-channel, customer-centric metrics and tracking the success of digital banking. To re-align sales, reduce operational costs, and offer excellent customer experience, data and analytics, AI and automation played a significant role.

A Cost-effective Managed Services

A well-panned managed service can offer operational flexibility and ensure uninterrupted business-continuity plans against unanticipated challenges during the global crisis. With the pace at which the market situation changed, the banks and financial institutions could not afford to hold back the digital revolution for long. Organizations realized that if they suspend their online operational transformation, they will suffer business loss. They understood the competitive edge the change would bring and hence started managing the costs more carefully.

A well-managed service allowed the banks to reduce operating expenses for the long term, and the sudden outburst gave a reason to the bank to adopt managed services. Managed services helped banks to formulate a strong business continuity plan. It is during the time of crisis that managed services helped the banks to maintain the system stability.

The financial instability during this challenging time urged banks to develop strategies to encourage their customer to move online and prove their operational flexibility. With this rapid digital growth, banks were compelled to invest in security, virtual collaboration and cloud infrastructure, analytics, artificial intelligence, and automation. The banks and financial institutions were quick to adopt digital transformation. And the one who did could recover from the economic setback and establish a strong foothold.

Since banking operations largely depend on customer behavior and satisfaction, the banks must face and overcome the challenges of maintaining their standard of customer services, while mitigating operational hurdles.

Current Contact Centers

Digital and mobile banking witnessed a sharp rise during this critical situation, along with the voice channel to serve consumers well. Despite the fully functional digital operation, a few of the banks were operating from branches in different locations. It proved that even if we were relying on a digital platform, we still needed human interventions. We realized the importance of both during a crisis like the current one. AI-driven technology replaced this to achieve the objective. AI could smartly detect the call intention and provide real-time data to the users. This technology helped in reducing call time, and improved efficiency, and customer satisfaction.

Rise of Open Banking Solutions

The situation gave rise to open banking solutions as there has been an 832% increase in open banking during the global lockdown. Banks took more interest in the open banking payment initiative to gain more understanding of their financial situation. Consequently, more and more banks used the opportunity and invested in open banking solutions. The European financial institutions witnessed a steady increase, and globally the organizations were eager to have a different perspective. They did not mind sharing the information on an open platform. A recent report revealed that there was a rise of 20-29% of investments in open banking services for two-thirds of the respondents.

Partnering with FinTech

Banks were simultaneously looking to speed up the digital innovations during the prevailing global situation when the economies across the globe were slowing down. Also, during this pandemic situation, many venture capitalists were restricted from investing in FinTechs. Hence, partnering with FinTech in this situation proved to be economically and mutually beneficial.

Many governments slowly eased rules and regulations in FinTech companies to encourage the growth of innovations and balance out economic disruption. It came as a relief against the long-standing rules, which were once imposed on them.

The current situation provided opportunities for FinTechs to strike a balance between digital transformation while creating a secure financial backbone. As banks and FinTechs together collaborated, it helped them to bridge the funding gap.

As banks were in the earlier stages of digital transformation, partnering with FinTech companies proved to be helpful in terms of improving technological expertise. Banks in collaboration with FinTechs could develop platforms for financial inclusion, analyze transactions and other data for deep insights, capability development and deploy automation for compliance.

Mortgage Refinancing & Payment Deferral

The crisis raised lots of dependability on banks as to how they are addressing their customer’s issues. Due to low-interest rates, there was a steady rise in mortgage refinancing in April and May 2020, resulting in high loan volumes for lenders. As the whole world was suffering because of layoffs, and pay cuts, the homeowners found it to be challenging to pay their instalments on time. This catastrophe has left many customers asking for mortgage deferrals.

Many banks waived fees, increased credit card limits, and granted mortgage payment holidays in response to customers’ inability to keep up the monthly mortgage payments. They made a few adjustments with the short-term and long-term financial changes. Banks provided tailored solutions based on the customer’s requirements by leveraging machine learning, AI and analytics and driving improved engagement.

Managing System Performance and Unexpected Risks through QA

The customers looked for additional support during this crisis in terms of credit facilities from the banks globally. Banks had to be prepared for the upcoming risks and take measures to keep their business and customers protected from the financial debacle, as default and bad loan cases were expected to rise in numbers.

Banks had to build a powerful fraud and risk management and strengthen their portfolio using their analytical capabilities. It helped them to generate useful insights, improve the operational process, and decide quickly on process-related matters. The impact of the global setback urged the banks to focus, assess and review their stress testing models. Since banks actively took steps towards digital transformation, they had to ensure that their systems had seamless performance, system integration and customer acceptance of their digital platform.

Efficient software and algorithm were needed to detect fraud and reevaluate the risk modelling. It allowed banks to calculate pricing, and evaluate and measure the credit risk of borrowers. Banks needed real-time data and an advanced risk calculator, as the economic impact during this time turned a large amount of data unreliable. Banks had to develop advanced analytical capabilities to filter data accurately and spot anomalies quickly.

Since the outbreak of the global pandemic, there has been a significant rise in criminal activities, increasing the threat of money laundering. Banks will also have to strengthen their KYC and Anti-money Laundering (AML) programs. It helped the banks and financial sectors to manage risks and keep pace with changing regulatory scenarios.  

Journey Ahead from Here

The rising concern and uncertainty of this pandemic situation have made the global banks sort out multiple ways to address their customer requirements. The customers require extensive support and flexible services, and interaction. As the situation demanded high technical upliftment, banks were likely to adopt the followings that allowed and helped them to meet their customer expectations. 

  • Accelerated digitalization efforts
  • Cloud migration
  • Intelligent workflow management
  • Partnerships with the BFS sector and FinTechs
  • Embedding security and governance across operations
  • Advanced risk modelling

The current condition posed multiple challenges and compelled banks and financial institutions to invest more in the digital future. They are now improving their operations by leveraging innovative technologies and continuing to inspire other industries that have not reached digital excellence. The financial sector is on the right track to reap the benefits and enjoy the success of its cost transformation programs for the future.

Ensure Credit Quality in Digital Lending Applications

The digital lending market is exploding with growing apps and fintechs. As per a report IIFL FinTech, the digital lending market is expected to grow to a whopping USD 515 billion by 2030. Lending services are no longer about hard-copy documentation. The lending process has moved far beyond becoming completely digital. From recording queries and customer financial details to credit underwriting and loan disbursal, the process is increasingly becoming online.

The online lending process saves time and effort for customers from physically visiting the bank branches to either sign the documents or verify their identity. Digital lending platforms have reduced foot traffic in branch offices, increasing the dependencies on digital applications, which leads to frequent updates and changes in digital applications. These regular updates require continuous monitoring to create a secure, scalable, and efficient digital lending application.

Why gradually industry shifted towards digital lending from traditional processes?

The traditional lending process was inefficient, filled with errors, and time-consuming. It involved managing hard copies of required documentation, frequent bank visits, and prolonged verification of borrowers’ loan profile, credibility and repayment history. The issues were further amplified if the borrower did not meet the eligibility criteria and underwriting based on their past credit history. Securing loans from the banks remained a matter of speculation for the borrowers. This is where digital lending came into the picture and steadily captured the market.

The current scenario of digital lending

Factors like unlimited access to the internet at an affordable price, smartphones penetrating the market, and applications and software available for loan applications facilitate digital lending. Digital lending in India is expected to touch $350 billion by the end of 2023.  

A report states 36 RBI Approved Loan Apps. These names are independent of banks that already offer lending services at a reasonable interest rate. The lending app comes with instant approval and disbursal within 24 hours, which is extremely convenient for borrowers seeking small and medium-sized loan amounts in case of emergency.

But how the lengthy traditional lending processes become so convenient?

The bank lending apps can access the customer data stored in their in-house server and system. However, the fintech organizations procure this information from various sources like banks and third parties through the Application Programming Interface or APIs.

The fintech applications have to obtain the data from diverse sources. To maintain the turn-around-time and live up to their service reputation, they must send the request data access from multiple sources like credit bureaus for borrower past credit history, link to the bank server for bank account verification and auto debit facility, and more to access borrowers’ details.

The lending process through these applications can be extremely critical if the essential quality checks are not done. There can be rising security concerns, performance & functionality errors, delayed access to customer credit history and a cluttered user interface. Let’s look at the complications or bottlenecks in digital lending applications and what problem it may lead to if remains unresolved.

  1. Security and privacy – Customer data is the most sensitive. Digital lending applications procure customer data directly from the bank server and from a third-party vendor. These transactions can be highly sensitive, and if attacked by malicious malware, they can lead to terrible issues if unresolved. It is crucial to ensure robust security measures and compliance with data privacy regulations.

  2. Data protection from risk and fraud – Understanding the current trend of digital lending platforms protecting customer data from risk and fraud is essential but challenging too. Protecting the sensitive credit details of customers are a complex process if the fintechs do not have adequate mechanism to analyze user behaviour and identify the potential risk.

  3. Scalability – As the number of users and loan applications grows, the application needs to scale efficiently to handle increased traffic and processing demands. Inadequate scalability can lead to slow response times and system crashes during peak usage times.

  4. Migration from Legacy systems – As per a report, over two-thirds of organizations are still using and relying on legacy systems. Legacy systems are non-adaptable and inflexible. They are not compatible with digital lending platforms. Integrating the digital lending platform with the legacy platform can be challenging and may require extensive effort and expert resources. And yet enterprises cannot abandon the legacy platform as they have been running for more than 30 years with an estimated over £2 trillion transactions every day.

  5. Integration with the main banking server – This brings us to the next bottleneck. It is a significant effort to integrate the digital lending platform with banks’ legacy platform. Moreover, the legacy systems are not equipped to manage the integration with the digital platform. They also cannot offer innovative offerings like banking-as-a-service (BaaS) as it does not support application programming interfaces (API) integration with third-party services. However, since the upgradation of these legacy systems is time-consuming, banks resist the changes leading it as a bottleneck in the digital transformation process.

  6. Regulatory compliance – Digital lending applications must be compliant with financial regulations. Frequent regulatory changes also demand financial institutions keep up with the changes and update their applications. With frequent changes in features and functionalities, keeping up with regulatory compliance can be complex.

  7. Data transactions – The digital lending platform pulls large amounts of user data from the main banking systems. It requires robust infrastructure and seamless data integration & management systems to eliminate bottlenecks and ensure smooth operations.

  8. Customer satisfaction – Customers require a fast loan approval and disbursement cycle. Hence, to ensure optimum customer satisfaction, lending institutions validate application workflow that expedites the decision-making process, minimizes delay and conforms to user experience. Also, recurring functionality, performance, and security errors can cause potential application issues that damage the brand’s reputation.

  9. Verification of data quality – Digital lending does not pull irrelevant data. They pull only required customer information. Banking systems may store multiple data but not all data are accurate and useful for digital lending platforms. Choosing the relevant data helps fintechs arrive at an informed essential lending decision. However, verifying the data quality can be complex due to the unavailability of relevant and accurate data.  

  10. Mobile responsiveness – The current trend in digital applications demands high mobile responsiveness. The process can be extremely complex in the absence of a mobile responsiveness platform. Hence, the digital lending platform requires extensive validation to ensure that the platform continues to deliver high-quality services and offer optimized user experience.

Digital lending apps became prominent during the pandemic, and customers are embracing it, because of fast approval and disbursal. But the credit quality remains under the scanner.

How reliable is the credit quality in digital lending applications?

A long-standing business lending process is more effective with manual review, cross-verification, and years of root-cause analysis of defaults and assessments compared to digital platforms. The former could be time-consuming, but it helps to achieve the desired risk outcome. It also helps the banks achieve low default rates.

However, the industry cannot avoid the trend of digital adoption. To adapt to the model, financial institutions have found a middle ground to amalgamate the digital model with the accuracy of data-driven model-based decision-making. As digital lending continues to improve, risk managers can take a calculated approach towards automation.

How can we improve the credit quality of digital lending apps?

Banks are testing the automated digital engine based on data-driven assessments and a structured credit framework to assess credit quality based on predictive default risk. As a result, the decision will be more consistent, accurate, fast and cost-effective.

Is quality assurance and testing essential to ensure the credit quality of digital lending apps? Can quality assurance and testing ensure the credit quality of digital lending apps?

Digital lending apps or fintechs pull data from the banks’ main servers. They also coordinate with TSPs like credit bureaus, collections and more. They handle critical transactions 24/7*365 days and customer details, making QA strategy an essential step. QA and testing confirm that the application and platforms are free from defects and errors before production and market launch. It also must offer outstanding client experience with high-quality mobile apps. Quality assurance and testing helps lenders to improve the credit quality of digital lending application.

Some factors are important here to ensure the credit quality of digital lending applications. API functionality and performance, digital application features and timely response of digital apps.

Though digital lending applications require end-to-end test coverage, including functional testing, reliability testing, validation testing, load testing, UI Testing, Security Testing, Penetration Testing and more, there is one more crucial aspect when it comes to validating digital lending applications.

Our understanding from the projects we have handled is that these applications have a few restrictions and limitations. We have also observed a reliability on API functionality and performance if digital lending platforms have to function without any technical glitches.

As high as the dependency on API, the risk with digital lending keeps increasing. API testing is conducted on Encrypted and Unencrypted APIs, multiple encryption levels and data formats, API tunnelling, instability/availability, handling many security protocols, and more.

We offer manual and automated API testing, validating requests and responses at various API layers. We also validate the accessibility of the API level and check the functionality, reliability, performance, and security of the programming interfaces.

Our intuitive robotic test automation solution, Tenjin, is a functional test automation solution. It is a seamless & effective test automation tool for BA and functional testers. Tenjin Test Automation solution is REST and SOAP API ready. Its features like auto-learn, auto-discover and auto-execute help to learn application interface automatically

We support financial institutions with end-to-end testing of their digital lending platforms.

Both banks and fintechs have brought their lending processes to digital platforms for quick approval and disbursal. It allows the borrower to avail loans in case of an emergency. But like all other platforms, digital lending apps require thorough testing to ensure higher customer satisfaction with lower TAT and improved credit quality. This is where Yethi’s domain expertise and industry come into the picture. We have delivered over 500+ projects for over 130 clients across 30+ countries in various LOBs in banks and financial institutions.

10 Critical Steps in Testing the Business and System Upgrade Projects of Banks

Banking businesses thrive on market relevance and ever-evolving customer preferences. It matters a lot for banks to ensure the highest level of customer satisfaction. They can never compromise business quality as it may harm their reputation, incur a monetary loss, and take away their customer reliability. Compromising the quality of their services and systems may lead them to pay a significant penalty. Hence, testing is crucial in the event of new system installation or upgrades in banks.

Banks ensure to reform their services based on current trends and technologies as customer demands and preferences keep evolving. To stay relevant to their customers and stay ahead of their competitors, banks incorporate the latest technologies and improve their services, eventually improving the business metrics.  Hence, banks must validate every business and system upgrade to retain customers and offer them a seamless experience.

Testing is an integral part of the banking systems which demands a more strategic approach than a random one. It involves a great amount of strategy and planning to ensure that the projects go live successfully without any glitches. As so it may look simple on the surface, testing the business and system upgrades are usually a critical process. There are many steps that an enterprise must consider during the testing of the upgrade projects. Here we have discussed 10 critical steps in testing that the enterprise business must not overlook if their end goal is to serve their customers well and succeed.

Steps in testing the banking business and system upgrades:

Before we consider the step for the execution of successful testing of the business and system, it is important to define the goals and objectives of the testing projects. Here are key considerations to make while determining testing projects of banks once you have determined the objectives of your testing project. 

    1. Requirement gathering based on the project scope.

The testing projects of the business and system upgrade begin with an understanding of the project requirements. The scope of testing, the banking modules, menus, submenus and more are the essential components of any project.

Understanding the project requirements is a complex task as banking applications are quite diverse with multiple features and functionalities. The QA team must have a thorough understanding & awareness of banking modules, functionalities, various layers of application integration and more. The process can be complicated and the project scope may remain unidentified if the teams don’t gather adequate project requirements.

Is it an elaborate exercise to gather project requisites?

Requirement gathering is the entry phase of the software testing project. As a part of the project strategy, it is essential to gather the project requirements and understand the scope of the projects.

By gathering project requirements and understanding the project scope, it is easy to strategize, define, and measure the testing project outcome. It also helps in deploying manpower and determining the time and cost of the project. The team understands what is to be tested; they also understand if they are missing out on any important components, or any potential risk involved so that they can discuss with the stakeholders to have a detailed knowledge of requirements. The team also creates the requirement traceability matrix (RTM) to map the test cases.

    • Requirement validation based on available resources (Time, money, and manpower)

Validating requirements helps the team streamline the testing projects and segregate them into categories to individually address the issues in each category and allow to resolve them immediately. Based on the project categories the requirements can vary. After gathering the project requirements, the team takes an overview of the available resources and validates if the available resources match the project requirements and identify the test environment.

Banking applications are usually complicated with multiple requirements. Also, based on new trends and customer requirements, the application features may change frequently. This dynamic nature of the requirements can further add complexity to the validation process, as they are subject to frequent changes based on the changing application features. Additionally, resource availability in terms of time, funds, and manpower may experience small variations, influenced by the specific project requirements and scope.

Can project requirements change frequently? Does frequent changing project requirements affect the testing project outcome?

Frequent changes in project requirements may not affect the project if requirement gathering is done considering all aspects. The diversions are evaluated by the project team to ensure they can accommodate frequent changes without affecting the project or workflow. Changes in applications are part of the project plan, so a pre-defined strategy and a thorough requirement validation can help the team to prepare with the time, money, and manpower for a successful test execution of business and system upgrades. The frequent changes will significantly not impact the project outcome if the requirements are gathered, assessed, and validated adequately before initiating the project.

    • Planning tests under the scope of the AUT

Planning the test is a critical step for the effective execution of the software testing life cycle. Testers define the test plan, application under test, scope of testing and more to yield expected results. Based on requirement gathering and validation, the team also effectively calculates the effort, time and cost required for testing. The project team also develops the test strategies, methods, and techniques during this stage. They also identify the test cases, test deliverables and milestones. The planning stage will only be successful when a detailed plan is presented, reviewed, and approved.

The test planning stage can be complicated because this is the stage when all the essential components are defined. If one or more project components are not added, then there will be a lack of clear understanding of the project, testing objectives, and scopes, leading to issues in deliverables. Since the executable test cases are identified in this phase, if the roles and responsibilities are not assigned, and test plans are not reviewed and approved, it will be tough for the project team to move on to the next step.  

Can the project team accommodate application changes if the request is raised at the later testing phases? Will it harm the project plan?  

Application changes are normal and can be raised at any stage. The changes are purely based on regulatory and technology updates as well as customer demands. Hence, the updates may come frequently, which the team must accommodate accordingly. Since the application changes are flexible there are greater need to incorporate these changes. Feature and functionality changes are integral parts of project plans.

    • Selecting the test cases for the sanity check

This is an interesting phase in the testing project where you identify the new functionalities, feature changes, and any bug fixes. Since the objective is to perform a quick and fast sanity check, there is no requirement to write new tests. This step ensures that the newly implemented changes are working without any errors.

The process can be complicated as only a small portion of test cases are selected for sanity checks. The team will fail to determine the impact ratio if the right test cases are not selected. The project team must thoroughly understand the project requirements and select only those test cases that might have the highest impact on the application’s functionality and performance.  

What is essential to identify the test cases for sanity checks?

Based on the project, application under test, project scope and test environment, the project team can identify the test cases based on their test predictability. The project team usually handles multiple test scenarios to understand the test cases that can have the maximum impact on application features, functionality and performance and choose the most probable test cases. Usually, the requirement gathering and analysis, understanding of AUT, project scope and the test environment are the essential aspects to identify the test cases for sanity checks.

    • Designing and developing the actual test cases

This is the actual phase when the testing team starts designing and developing the test cases. The team prepares the required test data for testing, and the quality assurance team reviews it. The team identifies the test cases that must be designed and developed and writes them to ensure that the written test cases are easy to understand. They also create test data and scenarios for test cases, identify probable results, and review and validate test cases. They update the requirement traceability matrix (RTM) with new changes.

The main objective for the team in this phase is to have a set of accurate and relevant test cases to ensure that they provide complete test coverage of the software and application. It helps the team to have a 360-degree overview of software quality. A comprehensive testing process allows the team to detect potential errors in the software before it is released. The team prepares the test data and keeps it ready for test execution. In the test case development phase, the testing team creates, verifies, and reworks test cases and manual and automated test scripts.

Banks may face two types of complications at this stage. First, if the team lacks the skill and knowledge to identify accurate and relevant test cases, and second, if due to multiple changes, the number of rework test cases increases. It may consume an ample amount of time and money to find skilled people for the job and validate the increasing number of test cases due to frequent changes in applications.

Can there be a possible solution to reduce the effort and time of rework?

It is time-consuming to find skilled developers and testers when your projects are time-bound. Even if you manage to put the entire team together, you might have to meet with one more challenge of accommodating frequent reworks. The project team might have very less time to meet the project deadline and time-to-market. So, banks hire third-party vendors to handle the testing projects to ensure they go live confidently without worrying about software quality. Since the amount of rework increases with application changes, it occupies a significant segment of the software testing lifecycle compared to new changes. Hence, the team selects a robust test automation solution to reduce the rework or regression test time.

    • Understanding the available test environment

Some banks and financial institutions have a conducive test environment with the necessary hardware, software, and network configuration for test execution. While the team designs and develops test cases, they can simultaneously evaluate the existing test environment. If the test environment does not support the massive business and system transformation and upgrade projects. The team must consider setting up the test environment for an effortless test execution project.

The process is complicated if the bank runs long on its legacy system and has a massive amount of data to migrate. Banks find it tough and time-consuming for seamless execution of the testing process without a favourable test environment. Moreover, they must delegate skilled people for the projects or hire a new team.

What is the possible solution if you do not have the required team strength, bandwidth, and allocated budget to set up a test environment?

Banks can consider hiring a third-party vendor to take care of all their test requirements and deliver the project on time by meeting all the quality standards and regulatory compliance. The QA solution providers have the required test environment or can set up one to ensure timely project completion.

    • Setting up the right test environment for seamless test execution

The test environment defines the condition on which the software is validated. Setting up a test environment can be simultaneously conducted with designing and developing test cases. In this stage, the project team determines the software and hardware conditions for testing the product. As the activity is done by the development team, the testing team may or may not be involved in the process. However, they check the readiness of the available environment, and this is known as smoke testing.

The first step in setting up the right environment is to understand the required architecture. The team must be skilled and aware of the available architecture. The test environment needs to be adaptable for seamless test execution. The process can be complicated if the environment is not favourable for test execution and is not ready with the test data set up.

How can the team ensure that the environment is built-ready for seamless test execution?

The team must validate the readiness of the test environment to ensure seamless test execution through smoke testing. They must understand the hardware, software, and network configuration well to ensure that the environment supports the test execution without any disruption.

    • Executing the test cases

In this phase, the test cases and test scripts that were created in the design and development phase are executed to detect defects or issues or errors in banking software. The evaluated results are gathered and assessed by the team. Test execution combines the two phases, planning and developing that verify the software quality. The activity also helps report bugs or technical glitches in the software. If the testers report bugs, the errors are reported to the developers who fix the bugs, and the testers test the software again.

The process can be complicated if there is no adequate test, or if there were any issues in the planning and development of the test cases. Also, if the test environment is not favourable or the test execution did not happen as per the test plan. The team must also put the stages together to finally execute the test cases.

Can multiple test execution degrade the software quality?

The objective of software testing is to validate the accuracy, stability, reliability, usability, efficiency, flexibility, portability and more. Software is tested to ensure that it successfully passes all the criteria. Multiple test execution does not degrade the software quality, instead, it delays the product release. It may not be necessary to test the same feature again and again. Moreover, testing the same feature repeatedly can be time-consuming. It is a good practice to test only applicable changes, performance, and security instead of testing the complete software functionality and menus. It saves time and effort and does not disturb the existing feature of the software.

    • Tracking and reporting defects

Tracking and reporting defects is one of the objectives of testing the software and its quality. The defects or issues are logged in defect tracking systems that are raised during the test execution. The details of the defects include descriptions, defect severity, priority, and more. The test execution results are examined to verify the software functionality and performance and simultaneously detect defects if any.

If the team identifies defects, it is sent to the developers for resolving the errors and retested again to ensure that the defects are fixed. After the defects are fixed team documents and report the test results to the stakeholders. The end objective is to identify and resolve the defects to ensure that the software can be released without any errors. Hence the software must be tested multiple times to ensure all defects are resolved. The process can be complicated if the team does not have an adequate mechanism to identify defects. Finding defects manually is a complicated process.

What solutions can organizations opt for to reduce the rework and multiple retests?

Multiple defect-tracking tools in the market can reduce the manual effort of identifying defects in the software and reduce the rework. For its benefits, organizations use defect-tracking tools that can be easily integrated with testing or test automation solutions. This saves time and effort and reduces rework. The team can confidently fast-track product releases.

    • Planning exit test followed by test closure

This is the final stage of the test execution and a critical one. In this final stage, the quality evaluation of the software is completed and determined if the product is ready for release. In this phase, all testing-related activities and formalities are concluded and documented. The testing team by now must have a clear understanding of the software quality and reliability. Whatever issues have been detected this far must be resolved. The team must document the testing process and improve the testing processes based on their experiences. It helps in removing the bottleneck from future testing projects.

The stage comprises preparing test summary reports, defect tracking and reporting, cleaning up the test environment, preparing test closure reports, transferring knowledge, and providing feedback for process improvement. The main objective of test closure is to validate the software quality and ensure the product market launch. It also confirms that the test execution was organized and completed efficiently. The process will be complicated if there is a lack of relevant information, or the team fails to capture feedback and critical lesson learnt from the project.

How to ensure that the report is whole and comprehensive?

Recording the project reports manually will be liable to errors as there can be a chance of missing out on information. There are a few test automation solutions in the market that comes with easy reporting solution. As reporting is a tedious, elaborate, and time-consuming exercise, these solutions are convenient and useful for the project team.

Conclusion

The steps, scenarios, and situations mentioned above are our understanding of the business and system upgrade projects we delivered. Yethi has supported 125+ banks and financial institutions in 30+ countries in their transformation and upgrade projects. In the 700+ projects we have completed so far, we have achieved quality and punctuality by completing the projects within strict deadlines.

We manage end-to-end test lifecycles efficiently to ensure customers receive quality outcomes within the project deadline. We have conducted end-to-end functional testing and non-functional testing in upgrade testing projects. We have also validated the robustness and responsiveness of systems while ensuring stability and flexibility in data migration and systems performance testing.

We leverage the highest potential of our robotic codeless test automation solution Tenjin during repeated regression cycles in a project. Our intuitive and intelligent solution comes with banking and FI-specific plug-and-play adapters that reduce implementation hassles with banking applications. Tenjin offers data-driven test execution and covers pre- and post-regression cases and effortless system integration testing, user functionality testing, user acceptance, regression testing and more. It comes with easy report generation capabilities and integration with defect management tools to generate test summary reports.

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

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

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.