Maintaining a good testing strategy in Banking Sector

No one can deny the fact that a banking application is one of the most complex applications or software in the world of software development and testing. With billions of transactions happening every second and trillions of dollars in the system, maintaining a good testing strategy in the banking sector is an absolute necessity.

Banking applications have a multi-tier functionality in order to facilitate thousands of user sessions happening at the same time. There are several other features that need to be tended to, like secure transactions, proper functioning of the massive storage system, strong auditing of customer grievances and robust reporting of transactions. For all of these and many more functions, software testing plays a crucial role in ensuring that a banking application works just fine.

In this article we will first take you through the challenges faced by a banking application in current times and then will give you an idea about how to come up with a good testing strategy for the same.

Challenges faced while maintaining a banking application software

Consistency over devices and systems – One of the most common and imminent challenges is surely the inability to maintain a consistency in the functionalities of the application over devices and systems. With thousands of different hardware out there, achieving that level of consistency is quite tough. This is where a robust testing strategy has to be formulised that involves continuous testing, which focuses on the changing trends of the hardware in the market.

Secure data transfer during system migration – The most taxing challenge in such cases is the issues that creep in during a system migration. Migrating data from an old system to a newer system has to be done in a systematic way that involves security and no loss of data. A thorough end-to-end testing strategy has to be created for this.

Lack of real-time updates – A mobile banking app must be capable enough to provide real-time updates about anything related to the customer’s account or to the bank. Integration testing plays a crucial role in such scenarios.

Meeting customer requirements and the changing market trends – Meeting the customer’s expectations is always a challenge for any application but when it comes to a banking application, the constantly changing market trends play a crucial role as well. The app must go through system changes whenever the situation demands for them.  

What is a good testing strategy for such applications?

A good testing strategy for such complex applications that faces regular challenges has to be woven around its features. To start with, all the requirements must be gathered such as the functional aspects of the application and the use-cases of the same. It has to be a customer centric application. For this business analysts and banking experts have to sit with the QA team to jot down the requirements. Features like Transfers, Loan Accounts, Credit Cards, Bill Payment and even Trading can be a part of it.

Post this, all the gathered data has to be reviewed thoroughly by the stakeholders, QA engineers, software development and testing heads and other business analysts. This ensures the creation of the right workflow, which in turn leads to the creation of the right business scenarios. Business analysts have to check whether the important business requirements are met while creating the workflow.

With the Agile and DevOps testing methodologies taking precedence over the waterfall method, development and testing of applications simultaneously have become quite common and such an approach is exactly what is required for a complex product like the banking application. Once the detailed analysis of requirement gathering, requirement review and business scenario preparation is completed, the application should then go through a series of software testing techniques while the development cycle is still under process.

Here are the top software testing techniques that play a crucial role in maintaining the quality of a banking app.

Functional testing – While performing functional testing for a banking application, the QA tester has to have a certain level of knowledge about the banking sector. Since the app involves sensitive data of the users, every business scenario should be tested so that the functions perform the right way. Since a banking application offers so many services, each and every function has to be tested whether they work in the intended manner or not.

Database testing – If there is any app in which the database plays an incredibly crucial role, it has to be a banking application. In fact, it is just as important as the functions done at the UI level. The Database of a banking application is incredibly huge with data of potentially millions of users and hence is a separate layer altogether. Therefore, special database experts and testers check for functions like data loading, database migration, testing DB schema and datatypes, rules testing, data integrity and many more. The purpose of database testing is that the user can retrieve and store data in the database, without hampering the system. Since there are cases when the transactions are aborted, the system must be efficient enough to avoid any mismatches in the data in such cases.

Integration testing – As mentioned above, a banking application has several features and it is important to integrate them seamlessly before validating their performance. Special test cases are to be prepared for this in order to find out the flaws and for this the testers have to have prior knowledge about the banking sector.

Usability testing – A banking application is something that appeals to people from different sections of society and it is absolutely necessary that it be easy to use. The design and the functionality of the application should be such that even a non-tech-savvy user can use it. Comparative usability testing and explorative usability testing are the two most popular testing techniques used by testers in this scenario.

Performance testing – There are certain days or time periods in a year that see extremely high traffic in a banking application. Pay days, festive seasons or and periods towards the end of the financial year are some of the examples of such times. At such instances, the application should be able to manage the heavy traffic flow and continue performing the way it was intended to be. Here, several test cases are built with respect to load testing and stress testing in order to ensure top-notch performance.

Security testing – It is one of the most important testing stages for such applications, as they are the most vulnerable to hacking. With millions or billions of dollars under the scanner, the need for security testing is paramount. Furthermore, the application also has to adhere to the Federal and Industry Standards. The test cases are built in a manner that they first check if there are any loopholes in the application that can be exploited in a way that there is loss of data or money or both. They then check against any malicious attempt by hackers to break in the system and lastly check for any vulnerability in the network or servers that host the application. To successfully complete this testing process, there are certain security tests that should be conducted like, vulnerability testing, penetration testing, security scanning, SQL injection and risk assessment and so on.

A banking application is a complicated software with hundreds of functions and billions of transactions happening every second, involving highly sensitive data. Naturally, you need to create a robust and continuous testing strategy to maintain such an application. To get the best test strategies and services for your product, get in touch with TestUnity now.

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