Yethi Consulting

Shift-Left Testing: Why It Matters for BFSI

In the fast-changing BFSI landscape, delivering secure and reliable digital solutions is critical. Shift-left testing plays a crucial role by moving testing earlier into the software development lifecycle.

Key Benefits of Shift-Left Testing in BFSI:

Early Defect Detection: Identifies issues at the requirements and design stage.

Reduced Costs: Fixing defects early is less expensive than post-production fixes.

Improved Compliance: Ensures adherence to strict financial regulations.

Faster Go-to-Market: Enhances agility for launching new products and services.

Customer Trust: Delivers reliable, secure, and seamless digital banking experiences.

The digital transformation journey is gaining momentum in the banking and financial industry. But when did the journey first start? As per a Gartner report, 69% of organizations believe that the Covid-19 global pandemic has accelerated the digital initiatives, 60% have increased the focus on improving the operational excellence through digital businesses, 50% have increased the focus to drive higher levels of cost optimization through digital initiatives, and 48% are investing on digital initiatives. Covid-19 may not be the sole reason for the growing digital business, but it has sparked the growth.

Banks are adopting new technologies on their digital transformation journey. They are taking every step to digitize the services and move processes online. Banks are also accommodating backend changes which is an essential step towards digitalization and supports the transformation. Any digital move is incomplete without ensuring security against scams and fraud risks. Banks initiate many digital moves but eventually strive to succeed or manage the pace. It is because they lack support or skill in many aspects, which are essential to compete with digital-native solutions. Digital transformation does not end with the integration of digital systems. It is a move that includes meticulous attention to ensuring user experience, security and performance of applications, monitoring infrastructure and more.

In this article, we will explore the objectives and goals banks and financial institutions are setting up for themselves and the steps they are taking toward the digital transformation journey.

Goals and objectives for digital transformation journey in banks and financial institutions

The digital transformation journey of banks and financial institutions did not start overnight. There was a pre-conceived idea behind such a revolution. Banks and financial institutions envisioned their goals and objectives before their journey. Let’s explore them one by one.

Improving customer experiences

Customer requirements have changed with the passing years. Today, customer demands quick and easy solutions. They require digital solutions (mobile devices & digital apps) integrated with new technologies, improved use of data and analytics and more. It enables the customers to get the exact services quickly whenever they want them.

Payments is considered the heartbeat of banking and is an area that is witnessing significant disruption. Transactions today occur not just through debit/credit cards but also wallets and other micropayment systems — not to mention the surge of cryptocurrency. In addition, regulators globally are encouraging competition and innovation by granting licenses to pure-play payment providers. Payment platforms handle a large volume of transactions and the need for better/faster/ more accurate reconciliation is also therefore growing. Ensuring faultless systems with fast processing times and robust security are the need of the hour.

Increasing the diversity and speed of testing how payment messages are generated, processed and reconciled would help reduce mis-steps and need for manual reconciliation. While there have been significant attempts to automate testing of Transaction Entry, testing of the entire payment lifecycle remains largely manual.

Till recently, financial institutions have generally relied on manual testing methods for quality assurance of payment systems, compliance, and security. However, digital transactions have grown a whopping 338% in just one year. This has been brought about by innovation and advent of new players. Banks, who provide the backbone for all payment transactions are finding that the rate-of-change is extremely high requiring significant improvement in exception handling. Testing / QA of these platforms is gaining a higher focus due to the volumes and values involved.

Manual vs. automated testing for electronic financial payment systems

1. Capital and resources

Manual testing heavily relies on human experience and expertise for execution. In this case, building a reliable hub of QA engineers and state-of-the-art testing tools is of paramount importance. This is not as capital intensive when instances are low. However, as real-time payment systems become more popular, it becomes imperative for engineers to adapt, or you may face a higher risk of manual errors and leave significant loopholes in security.

On the other hand, automation testing is quite capital intensive, but the ROI becomes significant when much of the recurring tasks are completed at record speeds without human intervention. Note that the upcoming generations prefer the convenience of digital services over the user experience of traditional brick & mortar branches.

2. Flexibility vs. replicability

Manual testing systems are inherently advantageous for catching one-off ambiguous errors. A manual testing system that is equipped with the latest tools and techniques can accommodate for versatility and be highly responsive.

Technology is ever-evolving with new advancements making its presence every day. Organizations are constantly updating their legacy systems to the new ones to take advantage of these developments and align with the constantly changing end-user preferences. However, the major challenge lies in migrating to the new system without losing data. Data owned by organizations is an asset that provides critical insights to plan future endeavors, hence, organizations cannot afford to lose them.

Though data migration is a tedious process that requires enormous effort and time, it is a significant process that plays a crucial role in application redesign. Data migration cannot yield favorable results without a thorough testing process in place. Migration testing ensures that data integrity is maintained while upgrading, integrating, or transferring the system, while making data migration a success that affects your business positively.

Migration testing ensures the data migration has not resulted in any disruption and all functional and non-functional aspects of applications are retained even after migration. It is extremely important to undertake Data Migration Testing to find out the discrepancies that arise while migrating the data from the parent or legacy database to the new or destination database. Organizations must efficiently conduct testing while migrating data for smooth operations.

The need for migration testing

Testing of the system is critical even when the slightest change is made, to ensure the incorporated change doesn’t create any conflict in the current workflow or make any further unnecessary modifications. Hence, it becomes important to carry out end-to-end testing during the system migration process. Migration testing is essential as it:

Ensures continuity and consistency after the platform migration – imagine if your mortgage computation changed because the lender changed systems?

Ensures no data loss when you move to the new platform – imagine if your broker could no longer locate your retirement account after her company upgraded their systems?

It identifies any defects in the new application and ensures that it works perfectly without any issue.

When migrating from one system to another, migration testing ensures proper flow and working of the application, as it was before migration.

Automation regression testing plays a vital role in maintaining software quality as applications evolve. Every time new features, enhancements, or bug fixes are introduced, there is a risk of breaking existing functionality. Regression testing ensures that previously developed and tested components continue to work as intended, even after updates.

By automating regression tests, organizations can significantly reduce manual effort, speed up the testing process, and achieve consistent, repeatable results. Automated regression testing tools can quickly re-run hundreds of test cases, detecting issues early in the development cycle. This minimizes risks, lowers costs, and prevents critical defects from reaching end users.

Another key advantage is faster release cycles. In today’s agile and DevOps-driven environment, frequent updates are essential. Automation helps teams maintain continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines by ensuring that code changes do not compromise stability.

Software testing is an inevitable part of the entire software development and deployment cycle, which is directly linked to the quality of the end products. In addition to testing for errors, bugs, and other discrepancies, it is also important to check the consistency of the test results. Sometimes, the results may vary for the same test code, making the process unreliable; failures due to inconsistent test results are called flaky tests. Flaky tests tend to hinder the developmental process, hide the bugs in code, increase total costs, and slows down the overall progress.

Flaky tests are highly unpredictable with higher fluctuation rate; there is no reliability on whether they would pass and provide desired results. Dealing with flaky tests is a critical challenge of automated tests and it becomes important to eliminate any fluctuating end results and improve the quality. Hence, companies are taking necessary measures to reduce the flakiness and create a reliable and stable product.

Reasons for flakiness in test automation

Flaky tests are an indication of unreliable test results, which will affect the quality and hit the brand adversely. It is essential for organization to identify and eliminate flaky tests for improving the quality. Flakiness may occur due to a number of reasons; the popular ones include:

Poorly written tests: Among all the other reasons, a poorly written test case is the most commonly occurring one. A poor test case will not give the results as expected, and often lead to fluctuation in the end result; thereby, creating a negative impact on the overall effectiveness of the process. Flakiness arising due to such reasons can be easily avoided by investing in good resource who can write best and unique test scripts.

Not having a strategic framework: Frameworks are a critical parameter to perform testing activities successfully. They comprise a set of rules/guidelines to design, create, and manage test cases. In scenarios where a strategic testing framework is missing, they may lack having an efficient test handling method, coding SOPs, standard repositories, resource access protocol, and a lot more. Without a standard framework in place, the test result may experience flakiness showing inconsistent results.

Shared test environments: Organizations often tend to share infrastructure, operational processes, and teams across multiple projects, to save on cost and resources. The shared environment can lead to overlapping of testing processes giving rise to serious conflicts. Further, the share environment may not prove to fix emergencies, delay deployment time, and doesn’t guarantee superior quality, leading to flaky tests. Enterprises should avoid using shared test environment to control and manage flakiness.

Issues of synchronization: Synchronization focuses on keeping test automation and AUT (application under test) in sync. In the event of failing to do so, the test result may be subjected to flakiness, showing inconsistent results. Hence, to avoid flaky tests, it is important to handle the issues of synchronization.

Introduction In today’s fast-paced software development world, quality is key. Test management plays a crucial role in ensuring that testing is planned, executed, and monitored effectively to deliver reliable software products. What is Test Management? Test management is the process of managing the entire testing lifecycle, including planning, designing test cases, executing tests, tracking defects, and reporting results. It ensures testing activities align with project goals and quality standards.

Why is Test Management Important?

Improves software quality

Enhances team collaboration

Ensures timely defect detection

Provides clear reporting and insights

Reduces risks and delays in releases

Key Components of Test Management Test Planning – Defining scope, objectives, resources, and timelines.

Test Design – Creating test cases and scenarios.

Test Execution – Running manual and automated tests.

Defect Management – Logging, tracking, and resolving bugs.

Test Reporting – Providing visibility into progress and quality.

Best Practices in Test Management

Use test management tools (like JIRA, TestRail, Zephyr).

Integrate automation for efficiency.

Collaborate closely with QA, developers, and stakeholders.

Regularly review and update test cases.

The technological trend is changing at a faster rate than we anticipated. With this changing technological landscape comes the need to constantly update new and old systems for security, regulations, and market risks. For example, many financial companies have recently started moving towards offering cryptocurrency services, which are highly unregulated and volatile. Thus, companies need to incorporate robust software testing methods to ensure that their updates and new product offerings meet the industry standards while offering a seamless customer experience.

The standard component of software service includes:

Application workflows

Datastore and validation

UX and performance

Security and fail-safes

Integrations and 3rd party dependencies

These services are offered to a large customer base, across multiple channels and devices, in real-time and at a 24/7 availability while also navigating compliances on privacy and data protection. It means shipping an application from start to finish requires efficient stakeholder management and robust component testing at every step.

To successfully test these complex software, companies have to rely on Test management or Quality Assurance software that offer both manual and automated testing solutions. Let’s discuss the goals and approaches for both the testing methodologies.

Manual Testing

Manual is all about testing the application using a manual approach. The testers use this process to identify issues, check core functions and find out areas that require deeper attention. The execution process has a high degree of flexibility and helps structure the next steps in the automation testing process. However, manual testing is a slow process that is hard to scale. It is important in the early development cycle as the test environment evolves quickly.

The immense digital growth witnessed over the last decade has moved digitization beyond being a mere business option anymore. It has become the driving force that allows organizations to sustain and succeed in this highly competitive world. Companies are constantly upgrading their legacy systems to cope with the ever-changing and evolving customer expectations. The upgrade often involves migrating the workflow process from an outdated system to a new one. Though migration might sound easy to achieve, migrating without losing any data is quite challenging. With advancement in technology, data has proven to become one of the most valuable assets of any organization. Data provides the right insights that help organizations make better decisions with a fact-based, data-driven approach. Hence, losing data while migrating to new systems can adversely affect the company; this is the key reason why data migration testing becomes vital.

Data migration testing is a verification process to ensure successful data migration to new systems with minimal disruption and data loss while maintaining data integrity. It also helps in ensuring that all the functional and non-functional objectives of the transition are achieved post-migration. However, not all data migration testing is effective enough to ensure all the goals are achieved. Following the best practices and strategies are essential as well as using appropriate data migration testing tools is important to make the migration successful. These best practices will help companies get the desired results from the tests.

Best Practices and Strategies for successful Data Migration Testing

Data migration errors can lead to adverse business and compliance risks that can make any company easily vulnerable to cybersecurity attacks. A thorough data migration testing can minimize the chances of errors and make the new systems more resilient. Here are the best practices to follow while performing data migration testing:

Multidisciplinary team approach

Business processes are constantly evolving to suit the requirements of the modern workplace, hence, letting enterprises reorganize their existing systems/workflows. The reorganization process involves the implementation of new technologies backed by strong testing teams to ensure there is no compromise on the quality. This profound reassessment and drastic reorganization to generate substantial gains in terms of performance metrics such as price, standard, facility, and quickness is called reengineering, and the testing process associated with it is called reengineering testing. Reengineering is important to increase the business agility and flexibility, thereby, improving the business operations for better growth and revenue.

Information technology plays an integral role in the reengineering efforts. The application of modern information technology can help to redesign the processes to improve performance. The redesigned test management can solve the problems of the decentralized and unstructured test management process. It is to be noted that software reengineering and business process reengineering are a part of reengineering test management to improve the overall outcome of testing. The aim of software reengineering and business process reengineering is also the same, i.e., redesigning the process to improve the performance and quality of the software.

Features of Reengineered Test Management

Below is the list of primary features of reengineered test management:

Test Procedure and Test Design Development

Test design is the stage in testing that involves the creation of test documents, such as functional specifications, requirement validation, etc., that defines the testing scope, objective, and other relevant information. The test development stage involves documenting the tests with execution steps and their respective expected results. Test management provides the templates to document test cases easily. The documents are placed in the centralized database that helps in achieving consistency and standardization. It helps in test coverage and traceability too.

Organization

The banking sector has undergone a massive digital transformation in recent years, with customers increasingly relying on online and mobile platforms for everyday transactions. While this shift improves convenience and accessibility, it also introduces new compliance and regulatory challenges. Banks must ensure that their digital systems adhere to strict frameworks such as PCI DSS, GDPR, SOX, and RBI guidelines. Any lapse can result in hefty penalties, reputational damage, and loss of customer trust. To overcome these challenges, many banks are turning to test automation as a reliable way to maintain compliance while accelerating digital innovation.

Why Compliance Matters in Digital Banking

Compliance is not optional in banking—it is critical to maintaining the integrity of financial systems. Regulatory requirements ensure that customer data is protected, fraudulent activities are minimized, and financial reporting is accurate. In the digital era, where system updates and new features are deployed rapidly, ensuring compliance manually is time-consuming and error-prone.

The Role of Test Automation in Compliance

Test automation provides banks with the ability to validate compliance requirements consistently and efficiently. By leveraging automation, banks can:

Enforce regulatory adherence: Automated test scripts check systems against compliance standards, ensuring data encryption, secure authentication, and audit trails remain intact across releases.

Eliminate human error: Automated compliance checks reduce the risk of mistakes that often occur in repetitive, manual testing, especially in complex areas like KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti-Money Laundering) validation.

Support faster audits: Automation generates real-time reports and evidence of compliance, making it easier for banks to demonstrate regulatory adherence during internal or external audits.

Strengthening Security and Risk Management

Security lies at the heart of digital banking compliance. Automated security testing helps detect vulnerabilities in APIs, mobile applications, and payment gateways before they can be exploited. Penetration testing, data privacy validation, and continuous monitoring through automated frameworks enable banks to meet stringent security guidelines while mitigating risks.

Keeping Up with Evolving Regulations

Regulations in banking are constantly evolving, requiring banks to adapt quickly. With test automation, test cases can be updated to reflect new rules and executed across multiple applications without delay. This agility ensures that compliance does not slow down digital transformation initiatives.

Building Customer Trust Through Compliance

Customers expect secure, reliable, and compliant banking experiences. By embedding compliance checks into CI/CD pipelines, banks can deliver faster releases without compromising on regulatory standards. This not only helps avoid penalties but also strengthens customer trust—a valuable currency in today’s competitive market.

Conclusion

As the world is witnessing a huge transformation at the technological front, organizations are constantly upgrading their legacy systems to keep up with the trend. Though updating to new systems is the need of time, a major challenge lies in migrating data without losing it. Hence, it becomes important to plan out an efficient data migration strategy to ensure that migration happens without any data loss.

Testing of migration is as important as migrating data; failing to do so, organizations may face issues of discrepancies causing expected results, which can affect the organization adversely. Furthermore, to carry out efficient migration testing a well-defined strategy is required, without which the organization can be left financially drained of resources after setting up more processes than they need. They may even find that their commercial success is negatively influenced by not exploiting their data to the fullest.

What is Data Migration? Why Do Organizations Undertake Data Migration?

The process of moving data from one system to another, preferably from a legacy system to a new one, is known as data migration. However, the process is not as straightforward as it may seem because it involves a change in storage and database or application. The data migration process involves three defined steps extracting data, transforming data, and loading data. When the data is extracted from the sources, it must go through a series of cleansing to eliminate errors and inaccuracies to qualify the data for efficient analysis and load them to the targeted destinations.

Organizations perform data migration for varied reasons; first, as a part of their system revamping plan, the other possible reason could be during the upgrade in databases, while another possibility could be when creating a new data warehouse or merging data from acquisitions. But it’s most common when teams are deploying other systems alongside their existing applications for integration purposes.

Why is Data Migration Strategy Important?

Let us consider that you have a critical project idea, and you want to set up an automation testing framework. A complex mobile application will need a lot of iteration right from the beginning. The complexities of the application may arise due to frequent changes in functionalities, adding new features, and running regression frequently to validate the changes. This will sway your project back and forth, consuming time, money, and effort, and the result will not equal up the effort made.

To end all the confusion, CI (continuous integration)/ CD (continuous deployment or delivery) is introduced at the very beginning of the software development lifecycle. The process offers a stable development environment and facilitates the continuous testing framework with speed, safety, and reliability. It eliminates the challenges like lack of consistency and the numerous errors that arise due to human intervention of an application development process, ensuring that the users receive an error-free, end-product with a seamless user experience.  

What is CI/CD?

Technically speaking, CI/CD is a method that is frequently used to deliver apps to customers by using automation early in the app development stage. The main concepts associated with CI/CD include continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment.

We can think of it as a solution to various problems for the development and operations team while integrating new code.

API testing is a critical part of modern software development. It ensures that your application’s interfaces function correctly, securely, and efficiently. Unlike UI testing, API testing focuses on the business logic layer of your software and validates requests and responses without involving the user interface.

What is API Testing?

API testing is a type of software testing that evaluates application programming interfaces (APIs) to ensure they meet functionality, reliability, performance, and security standards.

Key Points:

Verifies endpoints, request types, and response formats.

Checks for correct data handling, error codes, and security.

Can be automated or manual.

Importance of API Testing:

Early defect detection: Catch issues before UI or integration layers.

Faster development cycles: APIs are tested independently, accelerating development.

Improved reliability: Ensures consistent communication between services.

Security validation: Detect vulnerabilities like unauthorized access or data leaks.

Types of API Testing:

Functional Testing: Checks if the API behaves as expected.

Load/Performance Testing: Determines API performance under stress.

Security Testing: Validates authentication, encryption, and access control.

Integration Testing: Ensures APIs work correctly with other services.

Application Programming Interface or API is a current trend in the banking and financial industry that helps organizations in their various service lines. APIs have many benefits that result in banks creating multiple APIs to ensure their services spread across client servers to eliminate toggling between ERP platforms and banking systems. Currently, banks are using APIs for UPI collection, Reverse MIS, fetching bank statements, account balance checking, payment enquiry, opening account, and adding beneficiary, to name a few.

APIs have become an integral part of banking transactions as it simplifies the banking processes and eradicates complexities. Banks distribute complex transactions to open-source platforms to offer ease of use to the users and reduce the liability on in-house banking systems. But testing Application Programming Interface (API) is not easy. There are always initial challenges when it comes to testing APIs.

Lack of applicable simulator in sending requests/responses while executing API testing for open-source, commercial and more

Integrating multiple API testing tools

Impact of change, as a small alteration can impede the entire output

Lack of understanding of business application logic and functionality knowledge

Managing extensive test data

Feeding incorrect input values

Inadequate knowledge of combination parameters

Background of API testing

Initial setup – API automation testing is necessary to ensure if APIs are sustainable to bear the performance load and pressure.

Handling response – It relates to data formatting that ensures if APIs are capable to handle requests and responses.

Parameter combination – Another challenge is to test all possible parameter request combinations in the APIs related to problems within specific configurations.

Arranging API calls sequence – API calls must be arranged in the correct order to eliminate errors. A proper sequence of API calls can reduce errors. However, the challenge increases while working with multiple-threaded applications or multiple APIs.

Validating parameters – Validating the parameters sent through APIs can be challenging for the testing team. Every parameter sent through API requests must capture the correct data type, fits within the length, and value range, and pass the validation criteria.

Tracing system integration – It is a challenge to ensure that the API testing systems work correctly with the data tracking systems. It is crucial to monitor API performance to ensure that they bring correct responses or calls.

Ensure security as the data is sensitive: Banks must maintain API security in many layers as data is highly sensitive and vulnerable to cyber threats. But maintaining multiple API security at different layers is challenging.

The Current Scenario

The United Arab Emirates was already in the process of digital transformation when the pandemic struck. COVID has propelled the growth and aided the shift to online or digital payments. Consumer behaviour is forever changed, which is now unlikely to be reversed. As per a survey report, almost two-thirds of the UAE population expect to go completely cashless by 2030 and 7 out of 10 businesses in the UAE plan to go cashless by 2024 to meet their customers’ expectations. As is the trend worldwide, the transition seems inevitable, but the only question is how fast and big the adaptation will be.

Customer desire convenience and banking testing need efficient payment, reconciliations, hassle-free cross-border transactions and more, which has driven the global economy to innovate in payment systems. As per World Payment Report 2021 by Capgemini, the current payments are embedded and invisible. Apart from experiencing enhanced banks’ reconciliation and control processes, there is an immense need to enable function to provide an immersive, seamless, and frictionless customer experience.

Dubai’s Government is working out plans to shift all payment transactions to secure and easy-to-use cashless platforms across all sectors. They are also preparing a roadmap for the planned transition towards a cashless society, which includes a plan to explore emerging technologies and embedded new and advanced services. The process of building a strong digital foundation leads to new growth and thriving.

Over 83% of the UAE population owns debit cards and uses mobile applications. There are more than 10 e-wallets in the country that people use. The digital expansion did not stop there; instead, the Government, private sector, and stakeholders are exploring other possible ways to engage in transforming the cashless transaction initiatives.

In the fast-evolving world of digital banking, applications have become the lifeline of financial institutions. From processing transactions to enabling secure mobile banking, these apps are mission-critical, with no room for error. A single bug can compromise customer trust, regulatory compliance, and even financial stability. Yet, development teams are under constant pressure to deliver features at sprint speed. How can organizations balance the urgency of meeting deadlines with the uncompromising need for quality?

The Dual Challenge: Speed vs. Quality

Agile and DevOps practices have accelerated release cycles, but traditional testing often struggles to keep pace. In banking, where applications handle millions of transactions daily, ensuring reliability, security, and compliance is non-negotiable. Delayed releases risk losing competitive edge, while poor-quality releases can damage brand reputation and incur regulatory penalties.

Shift-Left: Embedding Quality Early

A key best practice is adopting a shift-left testing approach, where testing activities begin early in the software development lifecycle. By involving QA from the requirements and design phases, potential defects are identified before they reach production. This reduces rework, lowers costs, and accelerates delivery.

Automation as the Backbone of Agile QA

Manual testing alone cannot meet sprint timelines for banking applications. Test automation plays a crucial role in speeding up regression, functional, and API testing. With mission-critical apps, automating key workflows such as payments, authentication, fund transfers, and compliance checks ensures rapid feedback and consistency across builds. AI-driven automation further enhances efficiency by enabling self-healing scripts and intelligent defect prediction, reducing the maintenance burden.

Continuous Testing in CI/CD

Continuous testing integrated into CI/CD pipelines ensures that every code change is validated before deployment. This practice helps teams achieve quality at speed, enabling faster go-to-market while minimizing risks. Automated pipelines can run comprehensive test suites covering functional, security, and performance testing, ensuring that mission-critical apps are always production-ready.