Quality Engineering in the Financial Services Market

The global stock market value is over $80 trillion, where billions of shares change hands in stocks every day.

The financial trading ecosystem is a highly complicated, interweaved market that deals with tons of daily data volumes. Today, above 80% of the stock market is automatic. This implies that algorithms take care of the significant part of calculations for traders, who can set their required entry and exit rules, and the computer will take care of the remaining.

Considering the everyday amount of data being generated, the volume of transactions happening, and the level of monetary risks involved in financial trading, it is essential that traders have access to a secure, reliable, and robust platform.

An online trading platform or an electronic trading platform facilitates various financial instruments, including equities, mutual funds, and commodities. Such online portals have held the market open and traders working even during the global lockdown situation due to the COVID-19 outbreak. However, there has also been a growth in the incidents where technical glitches stopped trading on various stock exchanges.

Lately, technical glitches at online brokerage platforms like Schwab, Fidelity, and others caused many traders to avoid the opportunity of the U.S. stock market rally. Todd Kenney, Chief Technology Officer at Sterling Trading Tech, commented, “No one ever examined the sheer load that is getting into these platform layers. People have this expectation that their data is at their fingertips by clicking on their iPhones or logging into an internet site , and everyone that information will be returned in real-time. When you do not have an idea of the way to affect that load or find out ways to permit more people onto the (service), you run into these issues.”

As digital becomes the primary method of operations for every industry, including financial services and Stocks and securities markets, the scope for such glitches also widens. The only thanks to prevent these software-related issues is to require a proactive approach for eradicating any bugs, establish a practice of engineering quality instead of just assuring quality at the end, and implement a cycle of continuous feedback and continuous improvement.

Shift quality to the highest on the priority list

The financial services and the trading market is a fast-moving landscape with several interdependencies. For an online trading platform or application to justify trading activities’ digitization, those interdependencies must be woven into the media’s development. While having multiple features in a trading platform can be convenient to the traders, it can also pose high risks in functional, non-functional, and security issues.

Having a feature-rich application is one thing. Having a feature-rich application that operates seamlessly under a large load, is reliable, and functions easily are whole another ball game. And that’s where the scene for quality engineering requires to be brought in.

Unlike with the traditional development methodologies, quality should become the topmost priority. The end-users should get a product at high speed instead of delivering quality and value at high speed. To do so, quality requires to be created in or engineered into the software application.

Quality Engineering and shift everywhere

Given the high-risk nature of monetary services and trading applications, quality may be a business-critical necessity. Therefore, the trading platform providers must include a quality-first method in their software development lifecycle.

Quality Engineering entails QA involvement right from the start of the SDLC, such as the quality-related processes run parallel to development until the ultimate release. Indeed, this is not feasible to do manually, necessitating the employment of test automation. Moving QA to the beginning stages is recognized as the shift-left strategy. But, shifting-left is not quite enough in the day and age of continually emerging customer requirements and volatile financial markets.

Quality should be everywhere, giving rise to the requirement for a shift-everywhere strategy for QA. From shifting left for commencing QA early to turning right for channeling continuous development through user feedback, a shift everywhere plan, and a Quality Engineering approach result in an application that scores high on all the significant parameters of functionality, security, reliability, and performance, among others.

Conclusion

The recent technical glitch at the online brokerage platforms has been attributed to unique volumes of activity caused by U.S. election results and the Pfizer vaccine’s success. COVID-19 outbreak was exceptional, but we can always be extra equipped to deal with such technical issues.

A quality engineering method for generating trading platforms can enable financial organizations to predict and anticipate unanticipated software failures. Taking a proactive and preemptive approach toward fixing these issues using financial services testing alters into high returns, improved user satisfaction, enhanced reputation, and better trust among users in the long run.

Connect with our financial services testing experts at TestUnity and schedule a discussion regarding how we can help you deliver the best-in-class application to your users.

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