#digital qa

The financial sector, especially the banking system has seen tremendous growth in its footprint primarily driven by technology. Although technology has helped the sector to improve efficiency and enhance the scale and speed of delivering services, there is still scope for improvement. The leading banks and financial institutions have leveraged technology to improve their operational models and aim at meeting the growing customer expectations. The technologies enabling the financial sector to address the challenges of the day include Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence driven chatbots, process automation using Robotics, and distributed ledger technology among others.

Even though these technologies help in enhancing the serviceability and customer experience, they are needed as per the new norms mandated by regulatory bodies – BASEL III, GDPR, and FATCA to name a few. As customers are becoming busier and more techno savvy, they want their banking services to follow suit. Importantly, the customers of today, especially the millennials, are no longer limited in their choice of banks. In fact, they are more likely to gravitate towards the ones that put customer satisfaction at their core.

The complexity of banking and financial services needs the application of stringent digital testing in driving quality, integrity and customer satisfaction. The complexity encompasses activities such as auditing and reporting, large scale integration, seamless transactions, robust data storage, and pre-emptive incident management.

To sustain competitive advantage, the banking applications should be consistent in delivering top notch performance, easy access, stringent security, and better user experience. Also, since the financial sector deals with critical business and personal data, it should be secured from the activities of fraudsters and cyber criminals. Thus, to ensure quality across the digital landscape that is part of the financial sector, banking application testing should be performed in right earnest.

In addition to the above deliverables, digital testing can help mitigate glitches, support customer friendly initiatives, comply with stringent data standards, meet industry regulations and roll out market ready software applications

What ails the financial sector?

The  BFSI sector using legacy systems are mostly non-compatible with evolving technologies. Ensuring compatibility would incur huge costs.

Building and adopting customized applications with the right functionality given the plethora of choices available in the market.

Technology often suffers from hiccups when real time applications face latency or  downtime sending the customer experience for a toss.

The implementation of new technology can cause disruptions or witness teething troubles, even if on a temporary basis.

The strict compliance to regulations mandated by industry or government bodies are not comprehensive or focused every time.  

Software testing for the financial sector enabling customer satisfaction

The interconnectedness and complexity of financial applications necessitate the execution of end-to-end digital quality assurance. These involve omni-channel testing, performance testing, security testing, customer experience testing, scalability testing (load and stress), and mobile app testing. It is only by implementing comprehensive digital transformation services that the financial sector can handle operational risks, improve productivity, and enhance customer experience.

Testing digital quality for the financial sector

The digital landscape enveloping the financial sector has become highly complex thanks to the presence of legacy systems and the adoption of the latest technologies. To ensure synergy and compatibility between the two strands – legacy systems and latest technologies, the digital quality of the same should be tested.

To cite an example of the inherent complexities, there is a need to execute around 200 test scripts for every release of a banking application. The releases are warranted due to the frequent changing of regulatory requirements and market dynamics. Also, people developing such applications can be under pressure to reduce the time to market thereby allocating less time for digital QA.

·         The digital quality assurance team should use automated testing to validate the quality of applications across a plethora of device platforms, browsers, operating systems, or networks. Also, the banking applications should be tested on wearable devices such as Apple Watch and Google Glass as well.

·         Conduct robust banking domain testing using an effective test suite and in an enabling environment. The testing should ensure data integrity while masking information.

·         Implement test automation and pre-empt the ingress of bugs or glitches in the early phase of the SDLC.

Conclusion

The financial sector should embrace digitization in a big way to drive innovation, productivity, and quality, besides enhancing the customer experience. It should implement robust digital QA before rolling out new products or services to address the issues around security, serviceability, customer experience and competition.

The growing complexity and scope of software applications have necessitated the use of cloud-based resources. This helps to bring down the cost of investment and offers businesses a host of benefits. The cloud provides tremendous scope for enterprises to enable digital transformation and gain viability. This is important, for digital transformation does not limit itself to developing applications alone but enhances the capacity of people, processes and technologies.

Besides enabling the development of applications and storage of data, the cloud has opened new avenues for digital testing as well. Traditionally, testing has not been given its due importance by business stakeholders. This is due to the infrequent usage of an otherwise costly in-house test infrastructure. So, when the complexity of applications has grown significantly high owing to the presence of myriad digital touchpoints, maintaining an in-house test infrastructure to mimic the real time environment has become highly capital intensive.

This is where the cloud-based resources or cloud testing services have become important. In fact, the cloud has helped enterprises to eliminate the need for high capital investments and has offered the benefits of virtualization. For example, testing the usability and functionality of a complex software application by using scores of users spread across geographies might not be possible in an actual test setup. However, the same can be achieved quickly in a cloud environment by enabling test virtualization. Thus, cloud testing services have helped enterprises meet their operational and financial objectives.

Let us delve into the reasons as to how digital testing on the cloud can be beneficial.

The advantages of cloud-based testing

Lower Capital Expenditure: Executing digital assurance and testing on the cloud can help in lowering costs by doing away with capital expenditure. Moreover, the cloud can create sophisticated test environments that mimic the real ones. In addition to cost benefits, cloud-based testing offers on-demand flexibility and ensures better collaboration among departments, improved efficiency and a reduced time-to-market. Moreover, since testing happens to be a periodic activity, in-house test environments often remain underutilized. So, moving digital testing services to the cloud can be a safe and economical bet for enterprises due to the latter’s minimal impact on business activities.

Importantly, small and medium enterprises with low capital inflows can leverage the cloud for digital software testing. This way, SMEs can save money on creating and maintaining costly test infrastructure and in obtaining tool licenses. Also, for private cloud, the infrastructure can be decommissioned once the testing activity gets over thereby saving additional cost on maintenance.

Scalability: Software applications have become increasingly complex and distributed, bringing new challenges for the digital assurance experts. The new age web or mobile applications should be validated across a multitude of operating systems, frameworks, browsers, devices, and hardware systems.

Also, a large number of users should test the applications in real-time to validate the latter’s performance as per the business specifications.

However, creating a real time test environment mirroring the complexities and multiplicities can be capital intensive and time consuming. On the other hand, provisioning on-demand cloud-based resources for testing can be time and cost saving besides enhancing the quality of applications. The cloud-based test platforms (public, private or hybrid) can help in scaling up the number of virtual test users from hundreds to millions. This helps to test an application’s threshold for breaking or the point at which it can function unpredictably. Thus, enterprises can prepare themselves better to meet the peak demand and remain competitive.

Supports Continuous Integration and Delivery Outcomes: Since achieving customer delight has become the ultimate differentiator for enterprises to become successful, they aim to achieve the same with every new application. Also, by embracing the Agile-DevOps model of development and testing, enterprises look to achieve outcomes such as Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) in real time. Cloud testing offers a seamless and collaborative platform for testers to leverage Agile-DevOps model. Also, continuous integration is achieved by deploying new modules or patches faster and within the scheduled turnaround time. By providing a robust virtual test environment, the cloud helps test experts to validate applications on metrics such as performance, usability, scalability, functionality, and security.

Conclusion

Setting up a capital intensive in-house testing infrastructure would mean following its protocols and ensuring the test requirements fit into the demands. However, a cloud-based digital QA and testing infrastructure can be used as per your testing needs. It provides the opportunity to conduct multiple tests at a given point in time leading to higher quality standards.

Going digital has become the latest buzzword for businesses to embrace and stay competitive. This is happening right across the business verticals wherein some are looking at re-engineering and shifting their entire business portfolio into the digital medium. While others are looking at incorporating suitable digital elements into their existing business models and legacy systems. The ultimate aim of going digital is to achieve a high growth trajectory by leveraging advanced technologies and a growing customer base. With customer satisfaction becoming the ultimate differentiator for businesses, the digital testing of technologies, products, and services has become critical.

Digital technologies are evolving at a frenetic pace and are being accessed by customers and businesses alike on a multitude of device platforms. Since these technologies help a business to realize its digital transformation goals including streamlining its workflows and empowering stakeholders with better analytics and planning, these should be of high quality. Hence, to deliver a delightful customer experience across all channels, digital software testing has become mandatory. However, the same comes with several challenges as well such as:

·         The smooth functioning of digital technologies depends on their compatibility across platforms, frameworks, cloud, browsers, and networks. Thus, digital testing should involve validating a host of APIs.

·         Testing the integration of services and end-to-end workflows across digital channels.

·         Testing the consistency of solutions across multiple touchpoints.

The changing dynamics of customer behaviour, technologies, and business outcomes has forced digital testing services to change track and adopt new paradigms. These include Agile and DevOps with testing moving shift-left and comprising outcomes such as continuous delivery and integration. Let us now have a look at the top five factors influencing digital assurance and testing.

Top 5 factors to consider while testing digital technologies

#1. Ensuring top notch customer experience: Businesses of the day engage with customers through a multitude of platforms such as web, mobile, and social media. Each customer transaction can involve interfacing with a number of channels, devices, browsers, frameworks, databases, servers and networks. Thus, there is a need to provide a seamless and consistent customer experience across channels. So, instead of the digital QA and testing services validating the functions of a software application, the focus has squarely shifted to validating the customer experience. This calls for testing the functional and non-functional aspects of an application across multiple channels and technology platforms.

The objective of ensuring a consistent customer experience has been bedevilled by the challenge of maintaining data privacy and security. Any digital QA strategy should cover multiple customer touchpoints to ensure compatibility, usability, and accessibility. Also, customers should be offered personalized experiences, be it in the form of using themes, layouts, and styles or a quick feedback to his or her queries.

#2. Being Agile: Staying in competition has become a challenge for businesses as they have to churn out quality products or services at a quick pace. This calls for the digital testing services to be extremely agile in learning, innovating, and adapting to new technologies. Since development cycles are getting increasingly shorter, digital quality assurance is embracing paradigms like Agile and DevOps. The aim of testing is to provide optimal test coverage, better integration, and quick identification of glitches. This can only be achieved by using test automation and service virtualization among others.

#3. Open technology: Most businesses are continuing with legacy systems while planning for digital transformation. This is due to reasons such as high cost and large scale disruptions that moving to an alternative technology platform can incur or cause. The digital QA services should check if the application and its various touchpoints are kept open to support better API integration with third party systems – be it with existing legacy systems or while moving to an alternative robust architecture.

#4. Data security: Upholding the privacy and integrity of customer data has become critical in view of the recent GDPR and other regulations. As more customer data moves into the digital domain, testing services should validate the quality of their storage, access points, and the medium of transfer.

#5. Time and budget constraints: The testing team should choose the appropriate processes for test automation besides selecting a suitable test tool to save time, cost and effort. Also, choosing the right test model such as waterfall or Agile should depend on the complexity and size of the project – more dynamic the test requirements, greater should the focus on adopting Agile.

Conclusion

As implementing digital technologies can have implications for businesses, workflows, workforce, and customers, digital software testing should be executed by keeping a slew of parameters into consideration. This ensures the development and delivery of a robust and secure software application thereby driving a delightful customer experience.

Digital transformation implies connecting each and every system and processes of an enterprise to achieve a slew of outcomes including quicker decision making. This has come about as a result of increased internet connectivity and a proliferation of digital technologies. Digital transformation has spawned many new age companies that are agile, lean, focused and result oriented. To compete with such newbies, enterprises saddled with legacy systems and used to the traditional ways of doing things need to transform themselves.

Although Digital transformation services aim at reorienting the systems, processes, and stakeholders in an organization, they are prone to risks as well. These risks can be manifold – from having vulnerabilities in systems, processes, networks, and products to dealing with untrained resources. Moreover, since digital transformation services aim at accelerating the time to market as far as the products and services are concerned, quality is often given a short shrift. This often leads to the failure of products in meeting customers’ expectations. When enterprise digital transformation initiatives do not yield the stated business objectives, the need for digital quality assurance becomes critical.

Why digital quality assurance?

To identify and eliminate glitches present in the systems, processes,     networks, products and services.

To meet the rising customer expectations for better quality     products/services.

To stay in competition by delivering quality products/services with reduced lead times.

To accelerate the time to market with better products by using Agile and     DevOps methodologies.  

To adhere to quality and security regulations.

To prevent hackers from exploiting the systems, products or services.

To ensure brand loyalty among customers.    

To achieve business objectives and ROI.

A robust digital testing strategy requires incorporating the shift-left approach. This is mainly to pre-empt the creation of glitches by testing the product during the development phase itself. With Agile and DevOps paradigms becoming the benchmarks for a digital testing strategy, how can test automation stay behind? Digital QA through test automation helps businesses to future proof their systems, products or services. It does so by increasing the test coverage area and carrying out repetitive functional and non-functional testing seamlessly. 

7 factors influencing a digital transformation test strategy

#1 Security: Security is arguably the biggest factor influencing the digital software testing of products. It involves aspects like vulnerability scanning, penetration testing, risk assessment, and security auditing among others. Here, testers identify the weaknesses in a system or product by using an automated software. Also, a simulated attack is carried out a la penetration testing to check for potential vulnerabilities, which when removed, can prevent the system or product from external or internal hacking.

# 2 Cost: This can have two different connotations. On the one side, the cost incurred by the business when a product fails to live up to the users’ expectations is taken into account. While on the other hand, the cost of implementing manual/test automation is considered. In the case of choosing a test automation software, the need for an open source or licensed software is decided based on the overall cost and the type of tests to be carried out.

#3 Presence of legacy systems: Digital QA involves the testing of a software product across devices, networks, platforms, frameworks, browsers, and operating systems. This requires faster systems with the latest test software. However, if an enterprise is beset with legacy systems then the test strategy needs to be looked at afresh. This is done by considering the capability of such systems and the cost of replacing the same.

#4 Reliability: The software systems that enable digital transformation should be tested to know the extent to which certain functions of these can perform on a continuous basis. This includes feature testing, load testing and regression testing.

#5 Scalability: The changing dynamics of business requires an enterprise to be flexible. The flexibility should be in terms of expanding the capacity of its systems and processes to meet any future demand. The test strategy chosen should check the scalability aspect of the systems.

#6 Interoperability: An enterprise will have a number of software programs running its digital transformation initiative. These programs should have a better interface with each other to achieve the overall business objectives. Hence, the test strategy should check the programs’ interoperability.

#7 Skillset: The success of a test strategy depends on the expertise of the test team. The test strategy should consider this aspect along with the need and cost of training.

Conclusion

The success of digital transformation initiatives by a business enterprise is critical for its sustenance. The systems enabling this transformation should be rigorously tested based on the factors mentioned above.