Top Challenges for Banking Domain Application Testing

The banking domain has become all-encompassing by embracing digitization in a big way. It is multifarious and omnichannel with mobile, cloud, social media, and portal forming the overall ecosystem. Banking applications have brought conveniences that were unthinkable a decade ago with activities such as money transfer, paying utility bills, booking tickets, and many others, being done at the click of a button or a swipe on the screen. However, given the fact that these applications deal with sensitive customer data including their financial details, they should have impregnable data protection measures. And banking domain application testing helps in ensuring the accuracy, scalability, reliability, and most importantly, the security of data across digital touchpoints. Let us understand what banking application testing is all about.

What is quality assurance in banking?

With the banking sector riding the digital wave, there is a critical need to ensure the digital elements and/or avenues used in the sector are impeccable from the perspective of quality, accuracy, stability, responsiveness, and security. Banking domain application testing is the process of assessing various aspects of the banking software and ensuring its fitness for the final release. The critical areas or aspects to look into while going to test banking applications include:

l Predicting user behavior and identifying any performance issues.

l Enabling a better understanding of banking modules and workflows, especially their ability to work independently, transparently, and securely.

l Dealing with technical debt at the time of maintenance, a side effect of legacy code.

l Assessing and managing highly complex workflows with scores of dependencies.

l Optimizing the performance of the software and knowing the thresholds of traffic it can handle.

l Improving user retention by optimizing the performance of the application

What are the challenges for QA in banks?

Quality assurance in banking entails a host of challenges, which both developers and testers need to deal with in order to deliver a banking software that is robust, responsive, scalable, secure, navigable, and quick.

• Implementing an impregnable security system: Every banking software holds sensitive customer information, which if fallen into wrong hands, can be catastrophic for the users (individuals and businesses). They need to have a secure system in place to protect assets and private information. During testing, the testers need to create a holistic and secure test environment to implement security measures such as one-time passwords, codes, and access validation, among others. It makes mobile banking application testing for security a time-consuming and cost-intensive affair vis-a-vis other projects.
• Different operating channels: Users may access the bank through a portal, a banking application, or a digital wallet using a host of devices, browsers (chrome, IE, Firefox, etc), and net connections (dial-up, broadband, etc.) Testing banking domain apps should check the performance of all digital touchpoints in an omnichannel environment. It should check whether the performance of the page is optimal when accessed from different browsers and connections.

Complex data: Banking applications contain a variety of information including passwords, data, and assets, stored in the backend. It is of paramount importance that the application databases are secured against the ingress of malware or other types of cyber threats. During testing, the database connectivity and logical functions should be checked continuously. However, care must be taken to do it over a virtual private network or VPN for enhanced security considerations.

Configuration vulnerabilities: It has been observed that many banking applications are improperly configured and have deviated from the best practices. Any mobile banking application testing should identify such deficiencies to ensure customers' accounts and information are not compromised.

Security: Given the preponderance of threat actors across the digital landscape, BFSI testing for security is of critical importance. However, the variance in networks and operating systems across device platforms makes such testing a challenging exercise. Besides, there are plenty of security standards across digital channels, which need to be adhered to at all costs.

Usability: The banking applications should be simple in design and usage so that customers across the divide of age, gender, location, status, education, and skillset, among others, can use them to perform the banking tasks easily. So, the website or banking application should be tested for efficient and simple design.

Conclusion

With banking operations becoming accessible across the digital landscape, they have brought in their wake a host of benefits. These include usability, convenience, speed, and personalization, among others. However, the banks need to ensure the security of the digital touchpoints given the ever increasing threat of cybercrime. And the challenges related to security and other aspects can only be addressed by implementing software testing for banking apps.

James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies. I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality that yields strong results and always happy to create valuable content & share thoughts.