#digitalbankingtesting

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What are the Challenges in Implementing 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:

Predicting user behavior and identifying any performance issues.

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

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

Assessing and managing highly complex workflows with scores of dependencies.

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

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.

Resource

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.

Article Source: dev.to

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Top Use Cases to Explain the Need to Test Banking Applications

Software testing is a critical requirement to be executed in any SDLC based on a set of principles, tools, and standards across businesses. However, there are certain sectors where such testing acquires an added dimension and salience due to the risks involved. The BFSI, or specifically, the banking sector, remains a high-profile one where banking application testing assumes critical importance. This is due to the increased threat of cybercrime and the fact that banking applications contain sensitive personal, financial, and business information. If it falls into the wrong hands, the information can lead to financial ruin for the victim and a loss of credibility for the bank. Also, since all other sectors directly or indirectly depend on the smooth functioning of such apps, the need to perform BFSI testing is a foregone conclusion.

Why conduct software testing for banking apps?

Any banking application is a complex and multifaceted structure comprising numerous features and functionalities. Each of these should be free of glitches, bottlenecks, or vulnerabilities to prevent hackers or cybercriminals from snooping in and taking advantage. It is only through quality assurance in banking that every aspect of the application is thoroughly checked for any security risks without compromising navigation. Banking application testing, in addition to ensuring the remediation or mitigation of all performance glitches and code errors, should see the application operate seamlessly across devices, browsers, operating systems, and networks. Further, testers should stay one step ahead of cybercriminals by continuously testing the app for the latest cyber threats.

Banking or financial services application testing, besides monitoring, evaluating, and upgrading the application’s performance, looks into many other aspects, as mentioned below:

Functionality: To ensure whether the modules work as per expectations, separately and overall.

Data protection: A banking application with bugs or glitches can be exploited by threat actors to steal data. And by ignoring data protection measures, the customers’ financial assets can be exposed to risks and put the bank in harm’s way. Further, the bank can pay a high price for being careless with a litany of court cases, strict penalties, and/or criminal prosecution.  

Performance: Issues leading to performance woes such as slow page loading, stability, and low responsiveness are tested, identified, and fixed, especially on mobile devices and against increasing load thresholds. Unless remedied, these issues can have a negative bearing on user retention rates. Also, mobile banking application testing ensures the optimal performance of a banking application across browsers, devices and hardware configurations, and operating systems.

UX design: Bank professionals are not expected to have proficiency in operating web applications. Hence, banking domain testing should ensure the application is user-friendly and has clean interfaces and a great UX design with the main services being easily accessible.  

Security: Cybercriminals are always on the lookout to cause information breaches in web or mobile banking applications. With robust digital banking testing, testers look to eliminate potential risk factors or vulnerabilities that can be exploited by threat actors for nefarious designs. The lack of security in a banking application can directly impinge on the bank’s credibility and needs utmost attention. It is only by testing banking domain apps that their compliance with standard security and regulatory guidelines is ensured and incidents of hacking are prevented.

Use cases to test banking applications

The typical use cases that testers or QA specialists look into while conducting QA for banks are mentioned below:

Login checking: The testers check if the users are able to log into the banking application with valid login credentials. And should the users fail to enter data in one or two mandatory fields, the application should prevent login and offer a mechanism for restoration.

Performance of basic transactions: The banking app should support transactions between a user’s credit and/or debit cards with a particular account and between the user and another account. Further, to facilitate transactions, the application should have a mechanism to create regular payments.

Change of password: The software testing for banking apps should ensure the change or modification of login credentials, including passwords, by the users. Testers should check whether the mechanism to edit any personal data in the records by the users is safe and secure from all aspects.

Transactions with multiple users: The testers should ensure the users are able to conduct transactions with multiple users provided they have sufficient funds in their account.

Blocking an account: The application should have a mechanism to block an account after multiple login attempts to offer protection from brute force attacks. Also, the application should allow the restoration of the blocked account in a quick but secure way.

Conclusion

Since banking applications deal with large volumes of sensitive data, they should be subjected to stringent BFSI testing to mitigate risks and vulnerabilities. Banking application testing should ensure the delivery of an error-proof app where users can conduct seamless transactions in a secured manner and every regulatory standard of the fintech industry is complied with.

Resource

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.

Article Source: medium.com