#digital software testing

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.

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.

Digitization has had a transformational impact on businesses and their revenue models. The success of the number of digital products both in the B2B and B2C segments is underpinned on customer experience. The better the quality of customer experience offered by a product, the better is its user adoption and impact on brand loyalty. To ensure the same, businesses need to follow a robust strategy of digital assurance and testing. Consequent to the strategy, a product can incorporate the best of design elements and leverage various digital channels to achieve the business objectives. With advanced technologies such as AI, Big Data, Augmented Reality, IoT and Analytics making their presence felt, digital products cannot but remain oblivious to their impact. These technologies are increasingly leveraged by businesses to transform their brand building strategies and to enhance customer outreach.

The digital transformation market is driven by changing customer preferences, innovation, the spread of new devices, the advent of new platforms, languages, and frameworks, and the adoption of new technologies like IoT, AI, and cloud. If one talks about software applications, they are needed to be updated from time to time. This is needed to keep the applications compatible with the latest devices, platforms, browsers, or OS while pre-empting threats from malware at the same time. Even though most of these updates are delivered free and on a real time basis, they can disrupt the customer experience a great deal. To ensure such updates are delivered quickly causing the least disruption to the customer experience, businesses should embrace digital assurance and testing in the Agile-DevOps mould.

How to ‘manage’ customer experience in the Agile-DevOps mould?

Managing the customer experience can be a difficult task given the proliferation of digital devices and growing innovations in technology. And unless the workforce has incorporated the values of agility and innovation, and created a quality culture, meeting business objectives related to customer experience can be a herculean task. The biggest bottleneck in achieving customer experience can come from within the organization. It is observed that departments generally work in silos not to speak of even working at cross purposes occasionally. And unless the department wise objectives are aligned with the overall business goal, the digital product will not function to its optimum level. This calls for the implementation of the Agile-DevOps model of software development, testing, and delivery.

According to this model, the digital assurance services are made part of the development sprint. This results in a faster identification and elimination of glitches and consequent saving of costs. Moreover, the quality culture created as a part of DevOps ensures the customer feedback about the product is acknowledged and acted upon in real time. The business should create a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery pipeline to update the product throughout its lifecycle. The digital assurance services enable businesses to enhance their value proposition, achieve ROI, and maximize outcomes from the digital campaigns.

The digital transformation testing of today is all about incorporating automation and using real time data analytics across multiple digital touchpoints. Automation gives the opportunity to validate specific features and functionalities of a product by using test variables. This negates the use of actual demographics in specific regions to validate a product. For example, instead of testing a particular feature of a digital product related to the customers in the USA, the same can be validated through digital QA and testing services during the development and integration stages itself. The use of virtualization can help create the right test variables to validate the test scenarios.

Map the user as well as customer experience

The digital quality assurance exercise should look into the customer journey and identify pain points that he or she experiences. The pain points can be experienced by the customer during his or her interaction with digital touchpoints across devices, channels, and platforms. Also, the digital testing strategy should be clear about mapping both the user and customer experiences. Even though the two are used interchangeably, they are markedly different from each other. If user experience is about an individual’s interaction with a digital product, a customer experience is related to the entire lifecycle of the product.

Conclusion

Any digital software testing exercise should aim at providing a great customer experience by using test automation in the Agile-DevOps mould. It should take into account aspects like a faster turnaround time, addressing the security risks, and expanding the test coverage area for maximum effect.