Published: 20 Mar 2017
Key Challenges in Testing Financial Applications
Last Updated: 29 Jul 2022
Functional Testing of any financial application is crucial to establish its reliability and proficiency. Banking institutions have introduced a wide array of financial services to meet growing customer expectations, and this has increased the need for quick consolidation and continuous availability.
Contents
1. Testing Financial Applications
2. What are steps QA should follow while testing financial applications?
3. What are some effective use cases QA should follow for financial app testing?
4. Challenges Associated with Testing the Financial Apps
5. Advantages of TestingXperts’ Financial Application Testing
6. Conclusion
Testing Financial Applications
The financial services sector has been a front-runner in scaling and adapting to the IT changes as and when they occurred. It is, therefore, no surprise that Digital Transformation has been indicated by the future digital initiatives and trends like P2P transfers, Mobile Wallets, Ping Pay, Omni-Channel Banking, etc. to be the prospect of the BFSI industry.
The financial domain has been bursting with the ever-changing technology and complex functionalities entangled into the applications. Being in the middle of a hard-core commercial activity, it has a huge functional framework spread across payment gateways, cards, delivery channels, service offerings such as centralized banking, corporate banking, to name a few. Smooth and secure support for transactions, performance, and ease of access and use are imperative for any financial application to succeed.
What are steps QA should follow while testing financial applications?
Performing Data Segregation:
It is the initial stage in banking app testing where a QA specialist has to research to get domain knowledge so that it helps in understanding the required business standards.
Analyzing the test requirements:
According to the information or the data collected in the initial stage, the teams have to identify the requirements for testing. These requirements should include both functional and business needs.
Separating banking app test cases:
An online banking app test suite is created by a QA specialist; and here the collected test cases are separated based on functionality, user experience, performance, security, etc.
Validating the Functionality:
In this stage, the teams run test cases to verify whether the app is functioning as expected or not.
Ensuring the Data structure:
It is essential for every financial app to have data in a structured and easy to use manner. In order to maintain this, the QA team has to follow proper database testing measures to ensure effective data structure, data restoration or migration is maintained.
Protecting the banking app from breaches:
For banking apps, it is very important to handle unauthorized access for protecting the user data that is available on the application. For this, the testers should follow security testing practices to improve user authentication and efficiency of data encryption.
Verifying the App Usability:
The QA teams are required to verify whether the users are able to navigate the app or not. The testing teams have to perform usability testing to ensure that the app is accessible to people with special needs.
Monitoring the app performance:
The QA teams should check the app performance by verifying the speed to load a page, the app performance when exposed to more traffic, and should also check the app response on various browsers, etc.
Testing User Acceptance:
In this stage, the app is used by a limited number of users to verify its performance. This will help the development teams to examine the user experience with the app. Based on the participants’ feedback, the teams can effectively find the bugs and resolve them at the earliest.
What are some effective use cases QA should follow for financial app testing?
– To change a user password: It is important for the testing team to include the feature of modifying login credentials. To ensure this, the development teams have to implement a secure way for editing personal information.
– To enable login with valid credentials: It should be ensured that the users login their accounts with valid credentials; if they fail to provide the right information, then there should be a restoration mechanism enabled for the users.
– To send transactions to several users: The teams have to ensure that users are allowed to send funds only when they have sufficient funds in their account.
– To block an account after multiple login attempts: In order to secure the user account, the teams have to make sure that the account gets blocked after multiple login attempts. However, there should be an account restoration method, wherein the user can login by providing valid information.
Now after having known about these banking apps, the main question that arises is why are these financial applications considered to be mission-critical? Can they afford to fail? If yes, how would the failure be defined? All of these questions do not have simple answers. Let us briefly discuss all the challenges associated with testing the financial apps.
Challenges Associated with Testing the Financial Apps
Security testing:The variation in the networks and operating system across all devices makes security testing a challenging task. Financial applications are sensitive due to the nature of the data it handles. Software Testing should make sure it adheres to all the security standards across networks, platforms, and OS.
A wide range of devices: Testing of applications in any sector can be challenging owing to the devices, networks, and platforms that the application needs to be available on. Proper attention has to be given to ensure the application provides an optimum user experience across networks and devices.
Lack of knowledge on the Finance domain: When testing the financial applications, it may be a challenge to the QA team if they do not have the required familiarity in the industry.
This may lead to ignorance on important financial rules, common issues and may require an experienced tester to resolve such queries. However, to avoid such situations in financial applications, it is crucial to train the teams on all financial requirements. Helping the teams to gain needful knowledge ensures in achieving proper results.
Time-to-Market: Financial service providers or banks are usually in haste to attract clients with their new features. This haste causes testing teams to cut down their usual time for testing, which sometimes can have consequences on the security front. It can also affect the customer trust and loss of credibility.
System migration: The IT industry is growing with new frameworks and technologies with high frequency. This is effectively increasing the need to optimize the existing applications or creating a new one to meet the market standards. Migrating from one system to another system is a great challenge to the financial sectors as it involves the migration of sensitive data. In order to make this procedure to be smooth, the teams should complete the Data Migration Testing and perform regression testing on both the systems to ensure that the data is matching.
Our team at TestingXperts specializes in providing testing solutions to the financial and banking services sector.
Advantages of TestingXperts’ Financial Application Testing
• Skilled and dedicated talent pool proficient in finance software testing
• Convenient and ready to use test packs for financial application testing
• Faster turn around and expert application testing team that works according to the client time zone
• Enhanced product scalability with the help of performance testing tools
• Dynamic team extensions
Conclusion
TestingXperts, a specialist in providing QA solutions for financial applications, ensures that the software meets all customer expectations. TestingXperts’ QA specialists have accumulated wide domain experience in testing a variety of financial software applications including financial statement verification, account reconciliation, and transaction matching. Our comprehensive approach to specialized software testing and software quality provides our customers with peace of mind that the risks have been reduced and managed.