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.

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.

Commercial Bank of Africa (CBA) chooses Tenjin, Yethi’s Testing Automation platform to test its T24 banking solution

Commercial bank of africa

27th May, 2019: Commercial Bank of Africa (CBA) has selected Tenjin—Yethi’s Robotic Test Automation platform to test its core banking solution by Temenos (T24 – Version R18). CBA was in pursuit of a low-maintenance, seamless, effective, and easy-to-use Test Automation Solution. Yethi’s Tenjin met their requirements after a detailed evaluation among the leading players in the market. This is Yethi’s first T24 project in the African Continent, which will demonstrate the versatility and robustness of Tenjin given the complex nature of the ongoing T24 upgrade.

Commercial Bank of Africa, headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya, has been rated by Global Credit Ratings (GCR) with a national scale long-term rating of A+ and short-term rating of A1. CBA is a pioneer in leveraging technology innovations and aims to transform the African banking sector with a unique range of banking products and solutions. M-Shwari, a mobile banking application launched in partnership between Safaricom and CBA, reached 10 million customers within 18 months of its launch.

Moses Abwoga – Head of Enterprise Projects Management said, “We have always been associated with using innovative technology to augment the manner of interaction that our customers have with our bank. Effectively testing our banking solution to prevent any future errors is a major step towards fulfilling our motive of creating engaging customer experience journeys. We are extremely happy to select TENJIN to assist us in our testing activities during T24 upgrade. We look forward to reap the benefits associated with Tenjin and reduce our overall testing efforts.”

Speaking on the engagement, Srirang Srikantha, COO, Yethi added, “We are extremely happy to be working with the Commercial Bank of Africa. Tenjin’s core features such as naviflow learner, result validator, test management, and task scheduler will help in developing a robust solution enabling CBA to elevate its customer experience.”

About Tenjin

Tenjin is an advanced test automation tool which meets the changing needs of testing in banking enterprises. Its core features such as naviflow learner and robotic units that spontaneously determine and learn the application interface are the reason why some of the most complicated systems in the world use it to improve the efficiency of operations. As a plug-and-play and banking aware solution, Tenjin works within the bounds of regulatory requirements and is instinctively conscious of different transactions, making it a blueprint for successful testing of banking applications. The high-speed solution includes changes automatically without additional programming, relying on robotic learning for quick integration with high levels of consistency. Tenjin Test Automation works with major core banking and digital platforms and is adopted by banks across 15 countries.

To know more please visit https://yethi.in/tenjin-test-automation-suite/

About Commercial Bank of Africa

Commercial Bank of Africa, headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya, is one of the largest privately owned banks in Kenya. A member of the Commercial Bank of Africa Group, CBA is licensed by the Central Bank of Kenya. Apart from providing a wide range of financial services, CBA’s core mission is to enhance the wealth and financial goals of their customers.

To know more please visit https://cbagroup.com/mission-and-vision/.

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Improving API accessibility with no-code automation testing in the BFS sector

Automation testing in the BFS sector

The scope of APIs in the banking and finance industry is ever-increasing. But the rising vulnerabilities pose a threat to their growth. That could also severely affect cloud service dependencies and internal APIs. As APIs evolve with their newer versions, there is a possibility that the functionality and uptime might greatly suffer. Hence, it is critical to test APIs and improve their accessibility for a reliable backend. Financial institutions must establish a strong API testing backbone to improve API accessibility and enhance business values.

Every time we add new functionality, testers must write a new set of codes, install and test them in the frontend, and finally integrate them with the application in the backend. If the code fails to perform at the initial stage, it might affect the feature after integration without fixing the errors.

Software development and testing have changed over the years, and many technologies like DevOps, CI/CD, the API, and Agile methodologies collectively have contributed to this change. As software and applications become more dynamic, the teams have incorporated new techniques to conduct end-to-end quality testing to evaluate the software. 

Why no-code automation testing for API?

API proves to be a source of outstanding end-user experiences as they gradually become the puzzle pieces for modern banking applications. Financial institutions are hosting API-based cloud services to meet user requirements. Yet there is a challenge that organizations must overcome. Cloud offerings change and evolve, and to keep up with API integrations requires continuous testing.

We all know that continuous testing without automation requires time, effort, and money. Organizations must opt for no-code continuous automation testing to prevent code breakage, poor usability, and accessibility. APIs require regression testing frequently, and the QA team manually conducting regression testing is not a viable solution because repetitiveness, monotony, and frequency nature of continuous can introduce errors in the software and take much time to resolve.

Testing APIs are often time-consuming, which also includes a chunk of investment. Thus, organizations are opting for no-code automation testing to reduce the time, money and effort while eliminating errors. No-code automation testing platforms allow developers to create applications following the visual programming models.

No-code automation makes it easy for the team to create API tests and verify functionality and uptime. More the QA and DevOps teams use the no-code automation testing solutions, the faster they will discover an incomparable way to validate high-quality integrations and their UI representations.

What are the crucial areas that need to be examined in API Testing?

API testing focuses on the three most critical aspects of the testing process – connectivity, response, and performance.

  1. Connectivity – Testing the connectivity with the server is the first aspect of API testing. Users who wish to test the connectivity can dial the API using the service URL. The code of this service command is 200. The users can establish a connection if the server responds to the call. Similarly, if there is no response, the connectivity fails.
  2. Response – The second aspect of API testing is to test the correct response time for different API requests. It involves validating the response command with accurate values and an appropriate status code. Following are the examples of validated status codes commonly found in API testing.
    1. Error response code is 401 UNAUTHORIZED in case of missing or invalid authentication token
    1. Error response code is 403 FORBIDDEN when the user is not authorized to perform the operation
    1. Combining the above two, the error response code will be 404 NOT FOUND owing to security reasons
    1. Error response code is 409 CONFLICT if there are duplicate entries or users try to delete root objects
    1. Error response code is 500 INTERNAL SERVER ERROR when the consumer cannot identify the exact error from their end
  3. Performance – The third most important aspect of API testing is the performance of the API. The API performance is tested and validated by calculating the response time of the API request sent. The APIs must handle the load of many requests. The fast response time and resilience toward high loads are the two criteria for evaluating the performance in API testing.

An API may register multiple users. An API must be able to handle the load by distributing, efficiently performing, and responding to a web service call without disrupting the API performance. The quality of APIs is evaluated based on their core functionality, uptime, speed, and end-to-end performance. The end-to-end API assures that all workflows are functional and in perfect order.  

The use of API in the BFS sector

The covid-19 pandemic has changed the financial and banking sector by creating new avenues for API workflows. The banking and financial industries use APIs to address user requirements through this embedded technology. Financial institutions are using APIs in three ways.

  • Private API: Financial institutions use Private APIs to improve their internal processes, operational efficiency, and productivity.
  • Partner API: Financial institutions use Partner APIs to collaborate with third-party partners like clearinghouses, brokerages, underwriters, and custodian banks, where the partners use the bank’s platform to provide outstanding services to their customers.
  • Open/Public API: Financial institutions use Open APIs to gain business and improve their customer bases. With open APIs, organizations are growing their business by extending their services.

Is API testing difficult to conduct without no-code automation solution?

API testing is critical in short release cycles as there are frequent changes. API testing does not affect the test outputs in anyways with the frequent occurring changes. API testing ensures product quality throughout the CI/CD processes. API testing requires users to handle chunks of JSON responses to match fields and surface issues. However, the difficulty will arise for non-developers to implement as testing API responses involves writing code, analyzing JSON, and writing it to variables.

It would be difficult to test asynchronous endpoints, as asynchronous APIs take a little longer to respond due to the unpredictable behavior of background server processes. It requires an infrastructure for continuous testing to test such asynchronous services. What a no-code automation solution does is blend the API and continuous testing. As the automation testing solution is codeless, it is easier for non-developers to implement codeless testing to validate API responses.

How no-code automation testing improves API accessibility for BFS sector?

No-code test automation solution works best with unit testing and regression testing. Both these tests are an integral part of API testing. To improve the API accessibility, the testing team considers integration testing with unit testing. But the fundamental difference between a unit test and an integration test is that the former covers an isolated part of a system with no external dependencies, and the latter covers more of the system put together, which uncovers bugs when multiple units are combined.

Unit tests cover underlying APIs that measure the accessibility of information or interactions to the right place. APIs include UI components validated by unit testing to gain better accessibility to underlying APIs. Additionally, integration testing can also be automated to improve accessibility. Automating both unit testing and integration testing can help reduce regressions effort, simultaneously improving the value and the quality of the applications.

Automating APIs with no-code testing solutions can help reduce the burden of manual testing for the team. Organizations opt for a no-code test automation solution instead of manual testing to be more efficient in their testing services. By building a clear test strategy and adding coverage for accessibility, teams can ensure and inform the quality of the codes within the process and prevent regression burden from deploying to production.

Conclusion

Adopting continuous API testing is a wise decision as it helps resolve underlying API problems like outages, technical failures, and functional glitches. Continuous API testing helps detect early API errors and reduces mean time to recovery (MTTR).

With a no-code API automation testing solution, continuous integration and deployment happen faster and are validated immediately, helping organizations save time, money, and effort.

At Yethi, we understand that the future looks promising in API testing. An increasing number of applications operating on Cloud platforms using ‘as-a-service’ business models need stable and secure functioning APIs. Driven by constant innovation, we utilize it to help organizations reduce the testing time of their applications. We know what it is like to keep up with the competition in the market, and we help financial industries to maintain their commitment. 

With years of experience and expertise in quality assurance of business applications, we combine traditional testing and modern functional and security testing to ensure the quality of APIs in terms of their functionality and platform security. We have developed a library of more than half a million test cases, including used cases, like UPI and lending. With our codeless test automation platform, Tenjin, we have moved up a level in testing and innovation. We automate your end-to-end software testing cycle and validate the request and response configuration of APIs.

Our services and solution align with the open banking ecosystem, and we offer validation coverage that includes functionalities, API security, performance, and automation. Our solution is built with cutting-edge technology and accelerators, adding significant value to time, cost, effort, and customer satisfaction. Contact us for a free consultation.

Is there a difference in QA services for Retail and Corporate Banking?

QA services for retail and corporate banking

The need for QA services in the banking and financial industry is increasing with the rise of technology and innovation. Following the digitalization trend, banks and financial institutions are transforming their front-office and mid-office. The back-office operations, which were still on pen and paper, are slowly brought into the digital platform. And with this sudden burst of digitalization, banks cannot long put their QA needs on the back burner. On the contrary, alongside the digital transformation in banks and FIs, the quality assurance services are also going through a massive digital transformation.

Banks’ digital transformation journey has been in the limelight for over a decade, but the years 2020-2021 have been significant when it comes to growth in digitization. As per a report in Sensor Tower, nearly 1.24 billion financial applications were downloaded in the second quarter of 2020, which in the first quarter of 2022 has gone up by 1.74 billion.

Banks’ digital transformation journey is driven by customer demands, new trends and technologies, and market competition.  Banks have no other options but to evolve and embrace the digital transformation journey. If we track the current trend in the banking sector, we will understand that banks are currently using advanced technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, cloud services, and blockchain to digitize the banking systems. If banks must cater to customers and ensure customer satisfaction digitalization is the only option. However, in this digital transformation journey, customer experience and data security will be on focus for banks and financial institutions.

Whether in core banking, capital markets, retail banking, or corporate banking, digitalization has become a revolutionary movement across all financial and banking sectors. The financial industry now depends greatly on technology. They deal with multiple clients and handle various transactions daily. Banks need to have essential QA strategies to ensure that the systems work at all times without any disruptions. QA testing helps banks improve their systems and products and ensure customer satisfaction with an error-free transaction mechanism.

In this article, I will compare the QA services in corporate and retail banks. Is there a difference in the QA services for retail and corporate banking? What is the striking factor differentiating the QA services in these two banking segments? We will also explore the service lines in these two banks and the types of QA services offered to ensure the quality of their services. 

Understanding the Retail Banking

Retail banking is also known as consumer banking or personal banking. The services in retail banking are tailored to cater for individuals and small companies. Many banks offer a basic range of services like account maintenance, lending, line of credit, mortgages, credit and debit cards and more.

Retail banks offer branch banking and online or digital services based on specific customer needs. Retail banks help the consumer maintain saving accounts, earn interest on saving accounts, withdraw funds, pay for products, loans, and more. Retail banks in the current time have undergone massive digital transformation. They are offering a range of services on the digital platform to ensure customer convenience.

Services and digitalization in retail banking

Retail banks offer the following services to consumers,

  1. – Customers open bank accounts to keep a track of their money, savings, transactions, and more.
  2. – Customers can keep their jewellery and valuables in the safe lockers available in banks.
  3. – Customer can maintain their deposits through CDs as the accumulation of interest amount is higher in CDs than in saving accounts.
  4. – Retail banks provide various loans to the consumers like home loans, auto loans, education loans, personal loans and more based on individual requirements.

Apart from the services mentioned above, a few commercial banks offer services like investment banking, commercial banking, and more. Some investment and commercial banks have dedicated services for retail customers to expand business relationships.

Digitalization in retail banking – Retail banks are building mobile applications to offer various services to customers online.  Through mobile applications, customers maintain their accounts, transfer from one account to another, pay bills, pay for products and services at the merchandise, and more. Consumers can also avail of loans online without any paperwork.

These days customer bank accounts are linked with the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) platform to provide a range of services to the customers through APIs. As per a report by Business Standard, UPI processed nearly 6 billion transactions worth Rs 10 trillion in May 2022, the highest volume ever recorded since the launch of the UPI platform in 2016.

QA services in the retail banking

The number of customers in the retail banks is more. Because of the services retail banks offer their customers, the banks tend to receive multiple requests at the same time. It creates an immense load on banks’ servers and systems. Consider a scenario; a bank receives multiple customer requests on a busy weekday building a performance load on their systems. If the bank’s systems cannot handle the load and send delayed responses to the customer, it will create a negative impression on the customers.

Bank systems are expected to be up and running all the time. Ensuring that the systems perform as expected even during high traffic requires an adequate QA service. However, the QA services are not just about checking the performance criteria of the banking systems. The scope and scale of quality assurance are much broader in retail banks. From system integration to functional acceptance and maintaining system security, the banks’ systems must undergo end-to-end system validation to ensure that they offer outstanding customer services without disruption.

Ensuring the quality of systems requires thorough strategizing, planning, preparation, and execution. Standard QA services for retail banks must encompass the ability to validate core banking solutions, lending platforms, CRM, payment, various channels, digital platforms, and more. The following comes as a bundle of QA services that retail banks require to ensure the quality of the banking systems.

  1. Requirements Assurance – Organizations do a thorough requirement analysis of the application under test before starting with the test process. As the scope of testing is wide and varied in retail banks, it is critical to gather the requirements before executing the test.
  2. Integration Assurance – The systems running in retail banks need multiple features to be integrated. The integration must be validated with the application suite and system landscape. The system integration ensures that the application has all the required fields added to the applications and systems.
  3. Functional Assurance – The retail banks’ systems will fail if users face accessibility or usability issues. The retail bank systems must pass the functionality tests to ensure that they conform with user acceptance.
  4. Non-functional Assurance – Due to the heavy volume of transactions, the systems in retail banks face two common issues performance bottleneck and security. Both are essential aspects when it comes to ensuring the quality of the systems. An adequate quality assurance service cannot do without validating these critical aspects.
  5. Automation Testing – The time to market the banking services and products has reduced significantly due to rising customer demand. Financial software is one of the data-intensive applications and the time-to-market is less. Hence, banks and financial applications require extensive test automation. Automation testing significantly reduces the time of product launch, improves accuracy, enhances team productivity, and most importantly it saves money.
  6. Regression Testing – Regression testing is one of the essential testing processes for retail banks. As retail banks serve multiple customers simultaneously, the applications in the retail banks require frequent changes in the features and functionality to enable them to offer personalized services to their customers. By adding new features and functionality, the existing features may respond with some errors. Regression testing in retail banking systems ensures that the existing application features work just as fine in collaboration with additional new features.

Understanding the Corporate Banking

Corporate banks are a part of business banking that offers their services only to the corporates. Corporate banking offers several benefits to its corporate customers. Since the services are tailored to suit the requirements of the corporate customers, corporate banks offer unique propositions on customers’ salary accounts, regular salary updates on websites, corporate card facilities, multiple reimbursements, and allowances such as meal vouchers, medical reimbursements, leave travel allowances, gift cards, conveyance, fuel allowances, and more.

Corporate customers can also receive special rates on National Pension System, captive ATM within the company premises, travel cards, working capital, long-term loans, and structured finance. Many corporate banks offer transaction banking like trade finance, supply chain solutions, remittances, cash management and escrow services to their corporate customers. Corporate customers can also get facilities on investments like term deposits, mutual funds, and structured instruments. Corporate banks also offer treasury services like debt capital markets, forex and derivatives. To cater to corporate requirements, some corporate banks also offer value-added services, like cloud solutions, travel services, tax assistance, concierge services, and more.

Services and digitalization in corporate banking

The services in the corporate banks are value-intensive and tailored to suit the specific requirements of corporate customers. Following are the types of services that corporate banks provide to their customers.

  1. Corporate banks offer loans and other credit products to their customers to help their businesses expand
  2. It offers treasury services like debt capital markets, forex and derivatives and cash management services, and trade finance
  3. Corporate banks also offer equipment lending to help their customers grow their business
  4. Corporate banks also handle commercial real estate requirements and employee services

Digitalization in corporate banking – Corporate banks offer a bundle of services to their customers. They offer packaged offers to the employees of their corporate customers. The banks that serve both retail and corporate accounts, build mobile applications and based on their requirements offer tailored services to the customers. Through mobile applications, customers maintain their corporate accounts, apply for loans, invest in mutual funds and stock markets, apply for business and travel cards, and check the Forex market.

QA services in corporate banking

Corporate banking is more value intensive. As it caters to a specific customer segment, the products and services are more exclusive than services in retail banking. QA services in corporate banks are much more complicated than in retail banks. It does not follow the same line of services but customizes based on client requirements. Consider a scenario; the first payday, when companies are to credit the salary accounts of their employees. The performance requirements of banking systems will not be the same as all other days as there will be an immense load on banking systems due to their maximum usage on that particular day. There will be a delay in salary processing if the system faces performance issues. When banks opt to cater to their corporate clients, they must ensure system capability and sustainability on the days when the traffic is at its peak.

Corporate banks need quality assurance services to ensure that their systems are tenable during the days when customer traffic is high. In addition to checking the performance of banking systems in the corporate banks, it is also essential to check other quality aspects of the banking systems. Corporate accounts have distinctive features and do not follow the conventional line of retail services. As mentioned, banks customize corporate accounts based on clients’ requirements.

The corporate accounts are a mix of corporate and retail services. Hence, the applications require adequate validations. It is crucial to ensure that the systems’ elements of both the services are integrated without errors and working without any issues. It is also essential to check for the system’s security as it contains more than individual data like customer mutual fund details, investment records, loan details, and more. Corporate banking systems must also undergo thorough end-to-end testing to ensure seamless system performance.  

Ensuring the quality of corporate banking systems is equally important. Banks must strategize, plan, and prepare before the start of the test execution. Standard QA services of corporate accounts encompass validating customers’ lending platforms, trade and treasury accounts, digital platforms, and more.

  1. Requirements Assurance – The services in corporate banks are heterogeneous in nature and tailored to suit the specific requirements of customers. Requirement analysis of corporate banking systems is necessary to understand the requirements of the application under test.
  2. Integration Assurance – As there are multiple services bundled together it is also essential to validate the feature and functionality integration with the application suite and system landscape. The system integration ensures that all required functionalities are added to the applications and systems and work seamlessly.
  3. Functional Assurance – Since the functionalities in the corporate banking systems are diverse it is essential to validate the response of features and functionality. Based on the customers’ requirements it is critical to ensure that the added functionalities are working as per customer expectations.
  4. Non-Functional Assurance – As the corporate banks deal with valuable information maintaining the security of these corporate platforms is of the highest importance. The corporate banks’ systems might face security and performance issues. Quality assurance services remove performance bottlenecks and address the security issues of corporate bank accounts.
  5. Test Automation – The customer needs faster access to financial applications. But it is impossible to release financial applications in the market without thorough testing. For a data-intensive applications like financial apps automation testing is an easy solution. Automation testing significantly reduces time to market and money. It enhances accuracy and team productivity bringing the application nearer to customers faster.
  6. Regression Testing – Corporate banking applications undergo frequent changes in application functionality. Regression testing in the corporate banks is necessary to ensure that the existing application features remain unscathed with new additional changes.

Comparing QA services in retail and corporate banking

Even if on the surface, we do not see many differences in QA service for retail and corporate banks, there will be a significant underlying difference between the QA services of both banks. The systems in both banks require thorough end-to-end testing. Retail banks have a high volume of transactions, whereas corporate banks focus more on value. Performance testing for the systems in retail and corporate banks is essential, but in retail banks, the requirement is more intensive than in corporate banks.

Risk-based testing is important to validate the systems in both banks. But since corporate banks emphasize more on value, it is critical to maintain the risk index score matrix for corporate accounts. The systems in both the banks are validated based on the risk parameter like regulatory, financial impact, customer servicing, operations, and systems risk. For value-intensive accounts like corporate banks, the parameter of the risk score will be higher. Corporate banking handles many critical transactions, where the risk factor will always be on the medium to high scale as compared to retail banking, where the risk factor will be low to medium on the risk scale.

Since corporate banking combines several services to form a package, microservices testing is essential for corporate banking. Testing of corporate banking systems requires both banking and testing expertise to segregate between the intensity of test case scenarios. Corporate banking offers services like trade finance, supply chain finance, and more that require extensive testing to ensure error-free performance. The regulation impact is higher in corporate banking and testing corporate banking systems is tougher and impossible without adequate domain and testing knowledge. Corporate banking is more requirement based as compared to retail banking.

Retail and corporate banking both have a digital impact. Retail banks have undergone a digital transformation of their front-office and back-office processes. Whereas corporate banks are digitalizing their workflow in front-office, mid-office, and back-office processes. In the process of ensuring the security between value and volume, corporate banking has complex system architecture, which requires a specialized risk team to ensure the platform security.

Conclusion

Testing the systems in both banking segments requires specific knowledge about the platform, modules, and technologies used in retail and corporate banks. If a team has to execute testing for systems in either of these two banks or the exclusive part of the retail segment in corporate banks or exclusive corporate services in retail banks, they must have adequate knowledge to differentiate between the critical aspects of testing the systems in retail and corporate banks. 

At Yethi, we have a combined industry experience of more than 30 years. We have executed functional (functional acceptance, user acceptance, integration, regression, UI/UX) testing and non-function (performance, usability, security, data migration) across more than 22 countries globally. Our testing centre of excellence (TCoE) is formed with domain and testing experts who have successfully offered services and transformed business for more than 100+ clients.

Our 5th generation robotic test automation solution, Tenjin, can be integrated with a major banking platform. This intuition test automation solutions speed up your testing process, reducing time-to-market and money. Our QA services are a combination of tool-based and solution-based, always ensuring the quality of your banking platform.

Test Automation and Monitoring: The Key to Building Consumer Trust

Test automation and Monitoring

The key to building a successful business is meeting consumer requirements and gaining trust. There is no place for error in the modern competitive digital landscape, or even if there are, consumers expect them to be resolved at a bullet speed. Businesses must sustain their status quo with massive expansion in the economic landscape. Whether normal circumstances or difficult scenarios, customer relies on organizations to manage their transactions and data.

Let us consider the financial and banking sector for instance: as they thrive highly on customer reputation. Many banks and financial institutions have faced the consequences of going wrong with their digital services and platform. In fact, a research paper from 2017 titled Banking System Trust, Bank Trust and Bank Loyalty highlights that the implications of losing trust in banks are significant. This paper also highlights the six determinants like competence, stability, integrity, customer orientation, transparency, and value congruence as the catalyst to restoring consumer trust and loyalty towards the services that banks offer.

Consumers’ behavior changes towards banking services when they are confident about the brand and services. Trust is the most critical factor in a consumer-bank relationship. Consumers want the BFSI sector to be dependable, transparent, and approachable. To minimize the negative impact on consumers, banks must re-establish themselves as trusted advisors and providers of assistance. But it is not just the word of mouth that is impactful; it must be backed up with services that include manual assistance and system responses. Banks and financial institutions are adopting automation testing and continuous monitoring of systems to ensure bank representatives offer their services quickly, efficiently, and effectively.

Why Test Automation?

Banking has always thrived on customer loyalty and in-person interactions. Its transition to the digital realm will benefit consumers and financial institutions.

Waiting in lines for banking hours and squandering Saturdays going in and out of banks are now a matter of the past. Digital banking allows you to access your bank accounts quickly and easily from any location using your smartphone. Banks are spending less on infrastructure and saving their operating costs with digital banking.

With the advent of digitalization, banks must focus on delivering a positive customer experience at every touchpoint. A robust testing framework is vital for delivering a superior customer experience. Test automation is critical to the success of digital testing projects.

Consistent integrations, set up with automated tests and continuous monitoring, can substantially reduce the testing life cycle. These test automation strategies are required for banking institutions to successfully navigate the digital upheavals.

Through rigorous automated testing of a banking software program, a financial organization can ensure:

  • Accurate execution of activities while effectively shielding the personal data of clients
  • Following all financial guidelines strictly
  • Enforcement of all legal norms and guidelines
  • Effective transaction management without disruptions, especially during peak hours
  • Preventing fraud and cyber-attacks, making the banking application safe to use

Test automation indeed reduces time in the testing lifecycle phase, but test execution has two critical steps; one of those steps is test monitoring. Test monitoring helps evaluate all testing activities and efforts. Continuous test monitoring tracks the ongoing process and testing metrics, assessing future actions based on test data and highlighting the feedback based on the progress of the testing process to the concerned team and the shareholder. Test monitoring validates if the test process produces the desired result. Let us explore the effects of test automation and monitoring over banking and financial platforms in the light of the six determinants of ensuring consumer trust and loyalty.

  • Competence – Test automation and monitoring evaluates system competency to offer high quality service and response to the customer request.
  • Integrity – Test automation and monitoring ensures system performances as intended to function without any disruption.
  • Customer orientation – Test automation and monitoring prepares your systems to address customers’ needs.
  • Transparency – Test automation and monitoring allows companies to maintain a transparency of the transactions and trades.
  • Stability – Test automation and monitoring ensures system stability and performance even during high traffic or during unforeseen events of performance failure.
  • Value congruence – With test automation and test monitoring companies prepares systems to exhibit positive work outcomes. It ensures direct, positive effects on customer satisfaction, trust, affective commitment, and customer loyalty.

Improving quality with robust testing to build consumer trust

Through effective automated tests and continuous monitoring strategies, you can improve the reliability of your core banking systems and can significantly reduce costs.

1.        Automated tests save time and money

Software tests are repeated several times during development cycles for quality enhancement. It is conducted every time a source code is altered or modified on every hardware configuration and operating system. Manually repeating these tests can be highly time-consuming and expensive.

Automated tests are convenient in such circumstances because they may be run repeatedly without incurring additional costs. Automated tests can take hours instead of days to complete these repetitive checks, providing customers with qualitative service whenever they want. It is a time-saving benefit that also saves money for banks.

2.       Increase in test coverage

Continuous monitoring, backed by automated testing, leads to an expansion of the scope of the tests, which improves the software program’s quality. Lengthy tests, which are frequently avoided during manual testing, can be efficiently conducted via automated testing.

The tests can successfully run on multiple computers at the same time with distinct configurations. The performance and quality of banking software can be tested through automated tests that display data tables, memory contents, status of the internal program, file contents, and so on. By executing numerous complex tests throughout the test runs, automated tests can expand coverage in a manner that manual testing cannot.

3.       Improvement in testing accuracy

Even the most skilled testers can make mistakes while performing manual testing. The use of automation testing, however, results in identical procedures being performed in a precise manner and the results being recorded in extensive detail. This leads to improved banking software providing customers with better service.

4.       Avoid errors of manual testing

Automated testing can simulate numerous concurrent digital users interacting with web, software, and network applications. Customers benefit from this by being able to use the banking software for their needs in a hassle-free manner with minimal to no delays caused by network issues or internal errors.

5.       Boon for testers and developers

Automation tests provide several capabilities that help developers and testers save time. Developers can quickly identify troublesome areas of software through automation tests and focus on resolving the issues. Automated tests can run by themselves every time the source code is modified, and they can notify the team in case of failure.  With the additional time, developers may concentrate on creating more specialized software to improve the customer experience.

6.       Improved morale of the development and QA team

Manually performing repetitive testing tasks can take much time and get monotonous for testers and developers, limiting their creativity. Automation testing frees up time for the development and QA teams to work on more challenging and profitable projects. This boosts the team’s morale and confidence, which favours the organization.

Conclusion

The digital era has inextricably linked banking and test automation. The automation of the BFSI sector, which involves RPA (Robotic Process Automation) and RTA (Robotic Test Automation), AI (Artificial Intelligence), Traditional Automation, and so on, has led to the development of an efficient and sustainable economy. Automation tests generate standardized audit trails, allowing financial institutions to adhere to industry standards while incurring minimum expenses.

Test Automation in banking is relevant to address today’s needs for high-quality customer experiences and agility. Excellence in test automation is essential to encourage continuous innovations and speedy rollouts of new banking services and products to customers. Banks are quickly rising to the challenge and implementing automated testing programs to save time, increase employee productivity, and enhance customer experiences while fostering trust and loyalty.

Yethi blends the testing services and test automation solutions to help the banks and financial institutions on their digital transformation journey. We focus on improving the quality and efficiency of the organization’s core software system. We are a niche QA service provider helping several global banking/financial organizations increase the agility, consistency, and accuracy of the platform.

With our efficient codeless test automation solution, Tenjin, we have taken the test automation to the next level with an accuracy rate of nearly 100%. It is a revolutionary solution, which is easy to integrate and rapidly scan through the software and detect errors. Its intuitive features empower banking and financial solutions to work 3x times faster than any other automated testing system, while the simple plug-in and play design enables easy integration. Tenjin is developed with a focus on continuously helping banks and financial institutions across the globe to build a robust and resilient testing process.

Shifting to UI Automation Testing

As the digital space is evolving at a tremendous speed, the use of digital devices has also witnessed immense growth. Digital devices like laptops and mobile phones have become a significant part of our daily lives with almost 80% of the world population using them. Hence, when an application is developed, either mobile or web, it should offer a great user interface (UI) as it forms the first point of contact with the end-users. If the app fails to create a first great impression, chances of the users not exploring the other parts of the app becomes high. This is one of the reasons why organizations are investing in UI testing to ensure they offer a seamless user experience. UI testing which was earlier conducted by the manual approach has now shifted to UI automation for better outcomes.

UI testing automation increases brand value, reliability, and time-to-market while reducing cost. Moreover, the process of execution is easier, more efficient, and less time-consuming when it is automated. Let’s understand UI automation better and explore its benefits and future scope.

What is UI Automation?

User Interface is considered to be the face of an application that creates the first best impression among the users. If the UI fails to connect with the end-users, it can completely break the brand. Hence, it is important to test the UI thoroughly to offer an exceptional user experience. Manual UI testing is often found to give inconsistent results due to its tedious nature. However, shifting to UI automation has proven to give accurate and consistent results while saving on cost, time, and effort.

UI automation is basically the automated process that is conducted to test if all the parts of an application’s front-end work as expected. UI automation testing provides an elaborate report on the end-user interface performance by checking if the application is running correctly and keeps a track of simple interactions or by simulating real user requests. Here, the test scripts are written to automate the execution of the tests. This technique allows the process to be controlled through software code instead of testing it manually.

Why should you consider UI Automation Testing?

The UI automation testing process is conducted to effectively test the application’s interface for its features and performance. It is often considered an end-to-end approach to testing as it can:

  • simulate and test the behavior of the application’s users by acting on the computing system’s interface with simulated user input
  • automate all testing operations for the software programs
  • incorporate user interface testing into the development process
  • can submit test results and generate reports.

Benefits of UI Testing

Benefits of UI testing includes:

  • Automated tests are useful for teams running on agile software development workflow as good test coverage rates can be achieved by it
  • Well-tested code makes it easier to find and fix bugs faster
  • Once the automated tests are set up, they can easily be reused; this makes the whole process cost-effective
  • Automated tests run multiple folds faster than manual ones
  • Automated tests are more accurate than manual testing.
  • Human errors can be easily avoided in automated testing
  • They’re cost-effective and time-effective

Why is there a shift to UI Automation?

Developing a product can be challenging and it isn’t always easy to determine the best way to test the developed product. Testing is a crucial part of the entire product deployment cycle as it ensures the quality of the product is top-notch before it reached the end-users. Though there are manual and automated testing processes, it is important to understand both of them before you decide to choose the one that works for you.

Manual UI Testing

In manual UI testing, testers prepare test scripts manually and run individual UI scenarios inside the application. It involves scripting actions or inputs that lead to specific outcomes in order to verify a user’s experience. Since it requires a lot of manual effort, the process gets mundane and tedious giving rise to errors. This is a cumbersome process involving a significant amount of time and effort.

UI Automation Testing

UI automated testing is a valuable tool when it comes to developing software tools or applications. This type of testing relies on pre-programmed scripts that are frequently called tests or test cases. These tests tell the program what to expect under different UI circumstances. Automated software testing provides a repeatable process that allows developers to thoroughly cover every part of their codebase. Automated testing can work with each iteration to determine whether certain elements in an application need attention or revision.

Why UI Automation Testing over Manual Testing?

  • Manual testing takes time and cannot keep up with several development cycles, while automation can effortlessly identify errors without human intervention
  • Manual testing is time-consuming and expensive, while automation testing involves lesser time and effort
  • When conducting repetitive tasks, manual testing is more prone to errors due to its mundane nature. Automation, on the other hand, minimizes the likelihood of such errors
  • When executing complicated iterations, manual testing is difficult to rely on. However, automation testing offers accurate and consistent results under all circumstances

UI Automation Testing Tools

UI automation testing is a complex task, which depends highly on the tools and techniques that are used. Though there are plenty of tools available in the market, one cannot simply rely on a random tool. Proper research can help one to pick the best tool for automation testing based on their requirement, which will make a difference to the project in the long run.

Here are some key points to consider while comparing automated UI testing tools so you can make the best selection:

  • Building and maintaining test scripts is straightforward
  • Allows seamless entry of huge amounts of test data during load testing
  • Non-technical people may easily execute test suites
  • It offers an extensive reporting facility
  • All UIs are supported – web, desktop, smartphone etc.
  • For versatile test script development, a wide range of languages is supported
  • For automated builds or deployment, seamless connection with other tools inside the CI/CD pipeline is expected
  • Easy maintenance
  • Modifications to pre-existing scripts are simple to implement
  • The ability to test complicated user interface elements
  • Affordable pricing

Conclusion

Test automation is a way to quickly and efficiently ensure that the user interface of the application is performed throughout the entire testing cycle. Although setting up automated tests might require extra effort at first, it is proven to be easy and effortless in the longer run.

UI testing forms an important aspect of the overall software testing process. A good UI will help retain the existing users and provide scope to attract new users too. An impressive UI will help the organization to build brand credibility, create a loyal customer base, and generate good business revenue. Hence, automating UI testing will help organizations to improve their business like never before.

Performance Testing in Agile Environment

Performance testing is a critical part of any testing strategy as it indicates the maximum user load the system can process, thereby, helping to mitigate the associated risks. It won’t be wrong to state that good performance of the application alone can help you stand out in the market. With the increasing focus on performance, organizations are moving their testing strategy from traditional approach to agile methodologies for creating successful products.

Conducting performance testing in an agile environment has its own benefits. Agile environment improves the application performance testing by executing tests on continuous integration and continuous delivery simultaneously, which is otherwise difficult with the conventional approach. It helps organizations develop higher quality software in less time while reducing the cost of development.

What Is Performance Testing? The Need to Test It in Agile Environment

With the increasing trend of digitization, the use of websites and mobile apps is increasing. Popular apps and websites like Netflix, Google Pay, etc., have millions of users all at the same time. The load created during the peak traffic period is immense; in case, the system fails to keep up the load, it can disrupt the business. To ensure that business continuity is uninterrupted while offering a seamless customer experience, even during unrealistic traffic, performance testing is conducted. Performance testing creates reliable software applications with great speed, stability, scalability, and responsiveness. It is one of the important criteria directly related to the user experience.

Organizations are adapting to creating new software in agile environment to improve the process, promote change, and embrace innovation. The agile environment offers a flexible space for the organizations to improve the process by emphasizing on the working software, developer/testers, customer collaboration, and responding to the changes. When performance testing is carried with the agile approach, it helps to deliver quicker results with better ROI.

The prime approach of using performance testing in an agile environment can be understood by considering the complete software development project. Moreover, the automation test scripts to run performance testing lets the organizations develop high-quality software in a lesser time frame with reduced developmental cost. It mainly focuses on testing the performance in the early stage of development and testing. Looking at the advantages offered by performance testing in an agile environment, performance testing gets consideration in the complete agile SDLC process. It also helps in testing the application behavior under heavy load.

Critical Considerations for Running Performance Testing in Agile Environment

When conducting performance testing using agile testing methodology, the application testing is conducted in smaller cycles. As a result of this trend, with every iteration, the application gets better than the previous release. The process is streamlined and also allows making any further change or addition of new requirements anytime. Key considerations include:

  • Having a clear vision of the expected result is critical. Having a clear context set for the project will help you determine the further requirements such as building architecture, implementing new features, setting the timeline, and determining the scope of performance testing
  • Determining the reason for performance testing by observing the trends in resource usage, checking threshold, responsiveness, and collating the data to plan for the required scalability
  • Creating a strategy to incorporate performance testing value additions like integrating external resources, emphasizing on the concerned areas, checking the load range etc.
  • Deciding the tools and resources to be used for syncing up with the test environment
  • Identifying and executing the tasks are of highest priority criteria to decide the performance of the system
  • Another important consideration involves creating and analyzing the report to check if the outcomes are as expected

Resolving Performance Issues in Agile Environment

To get maximum efficiency under an agile environment, one should identify and resolve the performance issues in the base code to avoid further bottlenecks. There are three stages to consider while resolving performance issues:

  • Optimization: Tests should be implemented at the base level to avoid issues at a later stage
  • Component Testing: It removes defects at the application component level
  • App Flow Testing: It helps to test app flows that determine the UX consistency for varying loads

Different Factors That Affect Performance Testing Within Agile Environment

A performance tester gets involved from the beginning of the sprint so that quality products can get assured by the end of the development cycle, and delivery within the estimated timeline. Below are the different factors affecting the performance testing process:

  • Non-availability of trained resources for critical projects
  • Unavailability of flexible tools for performance testing
  • No prioritization of performance testing to take care of performance defects
  • Performance testing criteria might not be planned for every sprint in the case of some agile projects

Advantages of using Performance testing in Agile Environment

Performance testing in agile Environment has proved to be helpful for all organizations; its benefits include:

Capacity Management: It helps determine if the current hardware can handle a specific amount of traffic by identifying the capacity and size of the server required. It also helps in saving the investments made on private Cloud.

Testing Speed: It can be determined by mimicking the multiple scenarios and then testing the reactions of all those paths under different situations. In this way, all the significant flows and the user journeys can get tested for an application, even the unknown cases.

Increased Team Efficiency: Agile follows detailed planning and documentation, which can help in making the development process efficient and faster. It also helps in fixing the issues at a very early stage during development.

Competitive Advantage: These days, the end-users have a low tolerance for performance issues and bugs. Performance testing proves to be helpful in having a higher retention rate and demonstrating the company’s competitive advantage.

Yethi’s Performance Testing to Offer Seamless Experience

Yethi is a QA service provider to banks and financial institutions across the world. Highlighting Yethi’s performance testing process, our test automation tool, Tenjin, conducts the test efficiently to eliminate any performance issues and ensures that the application works at its best. It monitors and handles the test to check the response time, speed, scalability, and resource usage under the standard workload, thereby, creating a robust and scalable system that works without any disruption.

Yethi has helped several global banking/financial institutions with an easy and efficient test automation solution. Our revolutionary solution has changed the course of test automation by providing nearly 100% accuracy.

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.

Importance of UI and UX Testing and Yethi’s Role

Creative designs and seamless navigation of the website determines the fate of how well the organizations connect with their audience. Only a visually appealing (UI) application with an easy user interface (UX) can stand out in the crowd, attract new customers, and retain the existing ones. Both, a good UI design and an exceptional UX design are necessary to offer a seamless and impactful user experience, failing which the company’s reputation would be severely affected. Hence, it is essential to carry out detailed UI/UX testing to make sure they work without any flaws.

The UI and UX parameters are critical for improved user experience and creating new inclusions of a smarter and future-oriented reality that will take your business to newer heights. Let’s understand what UI/UX is and why testing them is crucial.

What is UI testing?

UI, stands for the user interface, is the design layout of applications running on multiple operating systems. UI testing ensures that the application elements and stages, including the links and buttons, work without disruptions. Through UI testing, the developers and testers continuously enhance the application quality by fixing all its elements and functionalities.

What is UX testing?

UX, is the abbreviation to user experience, ensures end-users response, engagement and association with the website or mobile application. UX testing includes the overall look and feel of the website considering the user engagement. Whenever the company adds some new features to its product, the testers must perform UX testing to check how it impacts the user experience. Frequent feedback from the customers will help improve the product.

Importance of UI and UX testing

Businesses aim to improve their efficiency and profitability, acquire new customers, and retain the older ones. With this being the focus, it is essential to approach business smartly and intelligently. Companies need to learn different user perspectives so that products and services can meet customer expectations.

Through User interface testing (UI testing), testers ensure that the buttons, fields, labels, and other items on the screen work without any functionality errors. UI testing further checks the control over toolbars, colour, fonts, buttons, sizes, icons, and more and how these functionality responds, whenever there is some input from the users. User Interface tells us how the user interacts with the mobile and website applications. Testing of UI removes the blockage so that the users are easily able to connect with the software. The four parameters to check the product

UI of tested products are:

  • Easy to use and easy to navigate
  • Use consistency for the users
  • Easy user access of information and features  
  • Application compatible for uninterrupted performance

Sometimes users purchase and use a product followed by customer reviews, while others would opt for a product based on application interface and user experience. Every customer has a particular purpose for using applications. UX testing helps in identifying and achieving these purposes. When customers use products, they wish to obtain maximum value; hence, it becomes important to deliver applications of higher quality.

Through UX testing, an organisation ensures that they provide a fully functional quality software or application to the customers enabling them to navigate through the app without experiencing system errors or malfunctions. UX testing allows you to find a few of the core issues of applications, which are as follows:

  • Identifying the damaged links
  • Fixing the page errors
  • Resolving the content and language issues
  • Solving poor page design layout
  • Focus on enhancing messaging, images, and branding
  • Ensuring site and application uniformity

The smallest modification in the application interface, at the development stage, may have a significant impact on the software functionalities. Since the development team frequently incorporates changes in the User Interface, the UI and UX testing must be an integral part of the continuous development process. Since it is affordable to fix the UI bugs in the development phase, companies are likely to avoid incurring the cost during the product release by testing the application UI at the development stage.

Benefits of UI and UX tests

Cost-efficient

It is essential to build a high-quality product development and ensure the application performance rather than fixing the design. Conducting usability testing just before releasing the product to the market can help save more time and money. It also ensures customer satisfaction. It can bring down on unnecessary expenses and help you release an error-free product in the market.

High Conversion Rate

Website usability testing ensures improved user experience, which helps in enhancing website conversion rates by up to 75%. By improving the UI and UX of applications you are aiming to offer your users a fully functional application, which ensures complete user satisfaction. The user experience encourages long-term commitment from your users. By welcoming constructive feedback from your users, you encourage them to provide you with fresh ideas to improve your application functionality, further improving the product quality.

Brand awareness and loyalty

All businesses have different purposes and accordingly, they release solutions. But the success of each solution depends on how well your users relate to the brand. The secret of establishing brand success depends on how your users are encouraged to use the solution. The users must have an adequate understanding of the solutions provided to them so that the organisations are able to build brand affinity and expand the strength of their target audience.

Yethi’s Role as UI / UX Testing Partner

Banking is leaping towards digitalisation, and as a result, companies are investing in applications to gain more mobility. There are diverse mobile applications, and each comes with several challenges. To overcome these challenges testing across multiple devices and networks is essential.

At Yethi, we offer exhaustive test coverage throughout all aspects of digital transformation. From UX and UI testing to functional, compatibility, usability as well as security, we provide test across a large set of devices, OS, and browsers.

Yethi’s test automation solution, Tenjin, ensures quality testing of data elements on your digital and mobile assets. It incorporates real-time testing of native and hybrid mobile applications across diverse platforms, thereby eliminating delays and redundancies. Tenjin can reduce the testing time by 15-20% as it has a domain-specific test library of over half a million test cases.

Conclusion

When it rolls down to UX and UI testing, Yethi’s test management solution delves into the essential aspects of testing. To significantly bring down the testing time of an application, we follow the test selection method, i.e., we pick and choose only those test cases relevant to your domain. Having a collective industry experience of more than 25 years, we understand the importance of end-to-end development flow to minimize UI and UX issues and errors.