We cannot overlook the massive digital transformation occurring around us. The growing technology has already set the pace, and the pandemic situation has triggered digital advancement. The impact of this transformation is felt more strongly in a few of the sectors compared to others. Banking and the financial sectors are one of them.
Banking and financial operations are complicated, with multiple users and touchpoints. It adds to the complication more when you have complex software with heavily loaded features. Organizations cannot afford to lose their businesses and loyal customers due to technical glitches arising from the lack of quality check-ups of critical software. Hence, quality assurance (QA) of all financial applications becomes necessary. To determine the overall quality of the software, the software developers must ensure that they maintain the high quality of the test codes.
The current trend of financial applications
We have come a long way from traditional banking, where people had to form a queue for each transaction. The current age of banking follows a digital trend, which means that from money transfers to loan disbursement and transactions at the merchant outlet, pretty much everything is done using software and applications. It creates an immense load on application functionality and performance due to high user dependability and usage. It adds more to the burden when testers and developers have to ensure the application’s security. We cannot put aside user demand for innovative apps. It drives many developers to constantly design, create, incorporate, and test the changes in functional elements.
App developers and testers adopt new trends to understand the user demands and scenarios. One of these trends is adapting the agile framework in Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). To follow the agile methodologies, the DevOps team incorporate and deploy the changes continuously, followed by continuous testing, which is a vital step to ensure that your financial applications are performing as per the industry standard even with the launch of frequent changes. It is impossible to gain the level of accuracy if the developers are making an error and failing to keep up the quality of the test codes. This article will highlight the importance of test code quality in the continuous testing of financial applications. Let us walk you through,
Benefits of maintaining code quality
- Test code quality impacts software quality
The codes frequently change in the CI / CD pipeline, which may disrupt application performance. Financial applications are usually feature-packed, and it is challenging to introduce new code without testing and validation. Checking the code qualities are essential in financial applications. It avoids technical glitches and unstable performance, ensuring the overall quality of the software. Good quality codebase impacts software quality ensuring safety, security, and reliability of the codebase. It is critical to maintain high-quality codes and develop safe and secure systems. It brings me to talk about another benefit of maintaining code quality.
- Test code quality impacts software security
Financial applications are built with high-sensitive codes, which helps in protecting critical information. Writing codes for financial apps, which usually store, and process customer and financial data could be challenging. If developers have to write the codes frequently with each build, it would be necessary to test them continuously. If the quality of the code is not maintained, there would be errors popping up whenever the software would be tested. It would lead to compromising software security. The developers write the codes based on their knowledge and skill, but in the CI / CD pipeline, this may alter the functional elements of the software. Continuous testing supports these high-quality codes to ensure the security of financial applications.
- Test code quality impacts software performance
Due to the high volume of usage, financial applications have undergone sudden performance disruption and bottlenecks. There have been incidents in the past where the financial platforms suddenly stopped responding due to heavy traffic, hurling immense damage to brand reputation and customer disruption. Writing codes for volatile financial applications need domain knowledge and skills. The developers should be flexible to make frequent changes based on user requirements. We are already aware of how frequently users demand change. Based on this, the enterprises must adopt continuous testing. Through it, the financial sector would be able to maintain the test code quality and improve the performance of their software.
- Test code quality impacts software functionality
A recent survey reveals that 97.8% of users demand applications that have functionalities with user-friendly navigations. Developers do not almost immediately start writing codes with project discussion. Instead, they lay a foundational design and plan how they would like to execute it. Based on the requirements, a design could ideally be Architectural Design, High-level Design or Detailed Design. At each design level, maintaining the quality of the codes becomes vital. The importance of code quality increases in the CI / CD pipeline as there is a need for continuous testing to ensure the quality of the codes. Financial applications to be feature and functionality enriched, it is critical maintaining the code quality with robust testing.
Matrix to measure the quality of codes
Defect Matrix
There are two critical aspects in the defect matrix, the number of defects observed and the severity of the defects. To measure the code quality, it is essential to identify the errors at the stage when they originate, the number of defects reported, the time it takes to identify them, and how frequently they occur.
Complexity Matrix
Measuring the quality of test codes can be done through a complexity matrix. The cyclomatic complexity matrix measures the number of linearly independent paths through a program’s source code.
How to Improve Code Quality?
- Coding standards in a uniform protocol ensure that all users use a uniform and accurate style. It improves the quality, consistency and readability of the codebase while reducing the codebase complexities. It would be the best way to use coding standards to ensure the high quality of the code,
- Ensuring the quality of the codes at the very beginning of the development stage can save a considerable amount of time, money, and effort in fixing the errors. In the agile framework or DevOps, the codes are analyzed at the code creation phase, which allows the developer to improve the code quality at the earlier phase.
- The code review improves the overall software quality. Hence, a code review is an important step to verify the intent of the code.
- Refactoring the existing legacy code is necessary when there is a need for cleaning the codebase. It improves the quality of the existing codebase by reducing the complexities.
Why Yethi for Continuous Testing of Financial Apps?
Financial apps are feature-packed and need frequent feature updates based on user requirements. In the CI / CD pipeline, organizations must adopt strategies and a well-structured and planned environment for continuous testing for their CI and CD efforts to be successful.
At Yethi Consulting, we follow an agile test automation framework. Our codeless test automation platform, Tenjin, is a plug-and-play solution built for the banking and financial sector. Its robotic capabilities enable it to learn and adapt to the application and its updates. Regardless of the complexity and number of updates, Tenjin facilitates continuous testing, minimizing the manual effort and speeding up the test execution.
We have a test repository of more than 850K test cases created with high code quality, which can be reused for test execution to help you save time, money and effort and ensure high business ROI.