6 Key Considerations for Testing Financial Applications

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Key Considerations for Testing Financial Applications
Many firms are struggling with the same issue when it comes to the test planning of the application. As different software requires different methodologies to make sure it works as expected, they also need different test strategies. Testing financial apps also requires well-planned test strategies to ensure their quality, security, and performance.

As per ResearchAndMarkets.com report, “The Global automation testing market size is expected to touch USD 90.81 billion by 2030.

The foundation of financial software is financial information management. It can run either independently or as a component of a financial information system (IS). The majority of financial software offers a wide range of capabilities, including basic financial data management, financial transactions and administration, budgeting, account management, and financial assets management, and it includes all parts of personal or commercial finance.

Some typical financial software solutions attributes include Large-scale integration, often a banking application interacts with several other apps like Bill Pay utility and trading accounts, multi-tier functionality to accommodate thousands of concurrent user sessions, and complicated business procedures They also entail batch processing and real-time processing, both of which have large transaction rates. The transaction processor, which can handle billions of transactions per second, could be a big-capacity mainframe or any other legacy system. This increases the complexity of financial applications.

Testing financial applications need an end-to-end testing strategy that involves different software testing techniques for:
  • Full coverage of the business requirements and banking workflow
  • Functional requirements of the applications
  • Security of the software
  • User Experience
  • Concurrency
  • Performance of the application.
In this blog, we will explore different factors that are important to consider while designing the testing strategy for financial institutes.

Top Key Considerations for Testing Financial Applications

Here are a few aspects the testing team needs to consider while testing financial applications:

Business involvement from business early stages

The testing team must work closely with the business stakeholders and the business analysts from the very beginning of the project to comprehend the business requirement of the application. Financial specialists or business analysts collect requirements based on consumer demands and document them. As the application may integrate many domains or encompass multiple lines of business within a single domain, writing requirements sometimes involve more than one subject matter expert. Using a banking application as an example, different modules for transfers, credit cards, reports, loan accounts, bill payments, trading, etc. may be included.

Understanding the application and domain

A financial application may be interacting with the different domains or the parts of different domain applications. The tester must have adequate knowledge of all the different domains involved in financial software.
Will we only evaluate the UI, functionality, security, load, and stress of the BFSI applications (Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance)? No. Only when we have tested the application by the user requirements for banking, working methods, commercial background, exposure to brokerage, etc., can we conclude that our testing is sufficient. Knowing the functional domain better allows us to develop and run more test cases, which is advantageous. It also allows us to more successfully replicate end-user behaviors.

Impact Analysis

It involves the analysis of the effect of the changes after the deployment of the application. it mainly focuses on the different application features that could be directly or indirectly impacted by the application changes or might need scrupulous regression testing.
The testing team of the financial application’s quality assurance is tasked with finding potential problem areas and fixing them. The method is known as “selective re-testing” since it concentrates on reusing the test cases that have already been run.

Functional Testing – White-box testing

Functional testing or White-box testing is one of the most important tests for financial applications. Testing software with complete knowledge of architecture, coding, and resources can help to reveal vulnerabilities and bugs more quickly. Functional testing needs to be performed along with the usual testing activities such as test case preparation, review of test cases, and execution of the test cases.
The following are services included in the functional testing:
  • Application testing
  • System integration testing
  • Regression testing
  • User Acceptence testing

Security and performance testing

  • Security testing is considered after the completion of functional and non-functional aspects of testing. Financial applications are allowing users to make transactions of millions of dollars in form of goods, stocks, currency, etc., so here security plays an important role. The testing team needs to pay attention to the financial breaches and take care of the sensitive areas of the software. Security testing helps to check for the different vulnerabilities and address them as per the federal & industry standards.
  • Applications for financial services are expanding into a variety of markets and goods, necessitating a greater understanding of the projected load on the application. Performance testing is essential across the entire development lifecycle as a result. It aids in system load estimation, testing, and management, allowing the application to be built appropriately. The software is expected to adopt the environmental ecosystem changes and fast-paced application development life cycle. Performance testing helps to ensure better quality and enhanced user experience for the customers.

Test Automation

Most financial service applications require rigorous testing for different scenarios. The test automation makes the process iterative and ensures the elimination of the errors that occur due to manual testing.
This will further ensure enhance user interaction of the testing team to achieve enhanced test coverage. The financial application’s efficiency and robustness can be improved with the help of a proactive testing approach as well as effective risk management.

Conclusion

The efficiency of the financial application can be improved with the help of proactive test strategies, proper planning, and risk management. Testing financial apps are challenging as well as interesting but it’s a huge process and the testing process needs to be followed strictly to ensure software quality and customer satisfaction.

If you are looking for the testing of your financial application then you need a team of experts who is working in the same domain for years. AgileSoft Sytem, Inc. experts are equipped with custom quality assurance testing solution for financial software to help you out with all your requirements.