Why is the domain-centric approach critical to test BFSI applications?

Digital technology has seen its footprint being extended and firmly imprinted in the BFSI sector. It facilitates customers to execute myriad transactions at the press of a button or screen swipe through seamless banking applications. These applications have precluded the need for customers to visit a bank or insurance branch for carrying out routine activities like depositing, transferring, or withdrawing money. They have become increasingly interconnected and complex and have to ensure the highest levels of security to save confidential financial or/and personal information from falling into wrong hands.

The banking applications enable banks and financial institutions to offer a wide range of services driven by the latest technologies. The services may include transactions per second, incident management, auditing and reporting, data storage, and integrations. Besides, the various functionalities offered by such applications may include diverse payment gateways, cards, and account dashboards, among others.

Since these applications deal with the confidential data of customers and businesses, they need to ensure protection against the growing menace of cybercrime. Moreover, they need to deliver superior performance, unmatched quality, ease-of-use, convenience, and excellent customer experiences. To enable these and allow the banks or insurance companies to maintain their competitive advantage, they should be subjected to rigorous end-to-end BFSI testing. One of the crucial outcomes of banking application testing is enabling the application to comply with regulatory standards. All said and done, testing of such applications can entail a few challenges.

Challenges in BFSI testing

While financial services application testing is a critical requirement to ensure the smooth functioning of such applications, it involves a few below-mentioned challenges as well:

Data security and regression testing: These exist as key challenges given the cost imperatives and the need to comply with stringent data confidentiality norms. So, to address these challenges effectively, the team running QA for banks ought to build a comprehensive test environment, a test suite, and implement test data management. The testers can use sophisticated data management tools to ensure data integrity through information masking. The best way to go about conducting regression testing as part of BFSI testing is to implement test automation. This will help to ensure greater speed, accuracy, and early identification of glitches.

Complexity: The BFSI landscape is very complex with the presence of legacy systems and calls for security and version updates to keep up with the changing regulatory and market requirements. For example, a typical web or mobile application release may involve the running of around 200 test scripts thereby making it a complex exercise.

Diverse testing environments: The applications need to be tested on a diverse range of devices, browsers, operating systems, and networks. Besides, with the advent of advanced wearable devices, the banking apps need to be tested on Apple Watch or Google Glass to validate their functioning for the digitally-savvy customers.

Why implement a domain-centric approach in banking domain testing?

Banking domain testing entails the assessment of different facets of banking software to ensure secure transactions, stable performance, and superior user experiences. The other benefits of taking a domain-centric approach are as follows:

Identifying and fixing performance issues: Testing banking domain apps helps the BFSI entity to understand user behavior and identify issues that app users are likely to face. This helps the business to be confident about the product/application once it is released into the market.

A better understanding of workflows: Testing allows the validation of banking modules and their seamless functioning. It shows whether the workflows are secured and transparent, and can work independently.

Technical debt during maintenance: Part of the legacy code, technical debt can be understood better by the programmer by analyzing the old logs. The use of unit tests and related documentation can help to deal with the complexities of a banking application.

Manage workflows and dependencies: The complex banking or insurance applications come with layered workflows and a huge number of dependencies. These can be better monitored and assessed through digital banking testing.

Retaining users: Testing banking applications can let a developer understand the threshold of the number of users the application can serve without facing latency, errors, or downtime. It allows developers to optimize the application’s performance and deliver high-quality services to the users thereby increasing the retention rates.

Conclusion

BFSI applications are vulnerable to security and performance issues, which is why the testing team should implement a detailed testing framework, especially domain-centric, to comply with regulatory standards, enable quick bug fixing, improve efficiency, enhance security, and allow future maintenance. BFSI testing will help such applications in driving conversions and upholding security.

Michael works for Cigniti Technologies, which is the world's first Independent Software Testing Company to be appraised at CMMI-SVC Level 5, and an ISO 9001:2008 & ISO 27001:2013 certified organization.