Top Aspects of Software Testing for Banking Applications

Updated On : September 2021

The banking sector depends largely on technology-enabled products to ensure a great customer experience. Hence it is critical for banking software to run smoothly and be error-free in order to deliver safe and secure transactions.

The financial sector is undergoing tremendous changes with the advent of the latest technological upgrades and advancements, which is, in turn, strengthening the country’s economy. This makes it critical to ensure the security and accessibility of financial applications.

A banking application is designed to automate, assist and securely store sensitive financial data, and largely help in the management of business processes for financial transactions. Financial Services applications are the key to financial information management as they are built with multi-tier functionality on a large scale. They can be integrated with other applications like payment gateway services, merchants and trading accounts to generate complex business workflows involving Real-Time and Batch Processing with volumes of transactions per second. This makes financial application testing and quality assurance complex, yet crucial. Software testing of banking applications is targeted at ensuring maximum security of all transactions.

Here are some of the advantages of testing banking applications -

• Ensure laws and regulations are enforced correctly in financial transactions.
• Performance testing helps to ensure that the application and the infrastructure is able to handle the load, without causing any disruption, especially during peak business hours.
• Security testing helps enforce industry standards to ensure privacy and to secure financial transactions from attempts to break-ins.
• System Integration Testing makes sure that different modules of the application are properly integrated to achieve the objective of the client.
• Enhances user experience with effective end-to-end testing to deliver flawless performance
• With the emergence of new technologies to reach more customers quickly, mobile banking has come up with new apps which need to be thoroughly tested before going live.

Here are the top 5 aspects of testing banking applications in today’s digital era -

• Early-stage involvement of business heads
  Understanding the business requirement of the application is necessary, so it is important for the testing team to collaborate with the business stakeholders and the business analysts right from the beginning of a project. The requirements are documented by financial experts or business analysts with subject domain expertise and reviewed by all the stakeholders to make sure that existing business workflows or new workflows are not violated. The testing team also needs to be equipped with sufficient knowledge of the domain.
•  Impact Analysis
  This means analysing the effect of the changes in the deployed application or product. It identifies the parts of the system that needs careful regression testing because of being unintentionally affected due to the change in the application. The analysis is done and decisions are taken generally as a team. The Quality Assurance team has to find the impacted areas and get them fixed. This method is called selective re-testing as it reuses already executed existing test cases.
• Functional Testing
  Functional Testing is an essential step for testing financial applications. To test the system, it is necessary to have complete knowledge and check all source codes and architecture effectively, for any kind of vulnerabilities. Besides the regular software testing activities, functional testing includes Test Case preparation, review, and execution. It also includes application testing, system integration testing, regression testing, user acceptance testing.
•  Security & Performance Testing
  
  • Security
    Security Testing is usually the last stage of the testing cycle after functional and non-functional aspects are completed. With financial institutions trading millions of dollars worth every day, it is crucial to take care of security breaches and sensitive areas. Security testing helps to check for vulnerabilities across every platform and fix them in compliance with Federal and industry standards.
  • Performance
    Today’s financial services are venturing into new markets and products, increasing the load on IT systems and requiring more judgement of the expected load on the application. This calls for performance testing across the development lifecycle to help estimate, test, and manage the system load and build the application, accordingly.  

    The main benefits of performance testing are monitoring and reporting, enhanced productivity, reduced costs, and reduced downtime, ensuring enhanced quality and better experience for the customers.

• Test Automation
  Test Automation, done with automated test scripts/frameworks, makes the process of rigorous testing financial services applications iterative, eliminating errors that occur due to manual efforts. This further ensures testing of user interactions enabling enhanced test coverage. Test Automation can be executed across different software testing activities – functional testing, performance/stress testing, security testing to make the process faster, sustain quality, and achieve maximum test coverage.

In conclusion, Banking applications are extremely critical as they involve millions of transactions and are directly linked to customers with financial ramifications. Testing these applications is vital to improve their efficiency and ensure bug-free, high-performing and secure technology environments.