07 Jun Why we need to automate testing of bank IT products
Are you launching a new digital product – a mobile bank, for example? Even at the design stage – both in-house and outsourced – you need to minimize the risk of any errors (“bugs”) and ensure the smooth operation of your solution.
This is where automating the testing process helps solve several problems:
- improve the quality and stability of mobile banking;
- preserve the bank’s good reputation and customer trust;
- test a large-scale product faster than if you were to do it manually;
- You don’t need to waste specialists’ time on manual testing-you can divert resources to other business tasks. For example, developing personalized RBS offerings that will help you outperform even the leaders in the banking sector.
Below we will consider in more detail how automation helps, but first we will answer the crucial question: why can’t you do without it?
The threat of missing tests
Neglecting testing these days is extremely risky. News about bugs in popular applications, especially financial ones, spread quickly and affect the company’s reputation. Surely you remember the biggest bug of the financial world, which occurred in 1996 at First National Bank of Chicago. Over 800 customers received an erroneous “raise” in their accounts overnight — $900 million each. The bank’s senior vice president, James Lancaster, admitted that it was “a software error in the computer” — fortunately for the bank, none of the customers had time to exploit the error.
Even the IT giants don’t avoid it. For example, Google admitted cases of data leakage, Android admitted mistakes when choosing the addressee of personal messages, and Windows smartphones caused a lot of smiles when they demanded that users “insert the installation disk and restart the computer”.
Bugs in the online systems of both state banks and leading commercial banks receive widespread publicity on social networks. Many banks are focused on cooperation with users and thank them for the bugs they find. But as you know, the best way to solve a problem is to avoid it.
Why do you benefit from automated testing?
There are at least 5 reasons why test automation makes sense.
- When you offer a new product – for example, an online mortgage calculation – you must ensure a high quality release. Automated testing reduces the risk of human error. Even the most skilled programmers and testers can miss a bug (as we have told you, examples of this are Google, Windows and other giants), but testing will help you detect defects in time and release an excellent mortgage product.
- automated testing is an investment in your time. You only need to lay down the testing architecture for any banking service to significantly speed up future test writing and testing in general. The development timeline for a banking digital product includes both debugging and regression testing (verification of previously implemented functionality).
And this is where automation reduces the time to market – the time to bring a banking product to market. Pay attention: the bank, which will provide users with convenient services earlier than competitors, has an opportunity to gain market advantage.
- Availability of testing at any time of the day. This is important when you are testing several features of your banking product simultaneously. For example, you are introducing a new feature – marking the nearest ATMs on the map. This means you need to check whether it affects other functions. To do this, you can run automated testing after hours (at night) so that you can check everything in a few hours and make adjustments if necessary.
- A unique opportunity to test everything that cannot be controlled manually. Particularly with load testing automation is simply necessary, along with the involvement of human resources. The test allows you to safely test whether your program can handle a huge number of bank transactions (for example, as it happens during Black Friday and other worldwide sales).
- Monitoring the performance of the banking product in a continuous development environment. Yes, you probably believe that your solution is done reliably and “doesn’t break”. But any product becomes more complex as it evolves.
Perhaps the authorization and account and transaction view systems work stably separately, but there are errors in their interaction – for example, imagine that the input data entered during authorization does not allow you to perform a transaction. If you don’t run any tests at all, you will have to spend both money and time on debugging the product. Automated testing helps you detect problems in time and fix them with minimal effort.
The authorization and account and transaction view systems may work separately, but when they interact, errors can occur – for example, imagine that the input data entered during authorization does not allow a transaction to be performed. If you don’t run any tests at all, you will have to spend both money and time on debugging the product. Automated testing helps you detect problems in time and fix them with minimal effort.
Conclusions
So, even the most insignificant error can cause unwanted reputational consequences for the bank, costing from 100 to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Automated testing is far from being the only but very important stage of software development. At the initial stages, automation requires some investments (their size depends on the scale of the project), but it allows to achieve strategic advantages in several areas at once:
- increase the reliability of the software product;
- to save a lot of resources and to get rid of routine operations
- speed up product testing and time to market.