The Necessity and Challenges of Testing in The Banking Domain

Banking domain applications have multi-layered workflows, a broad range of features, and a complex structure. Above all, many of them deal with sensitive data and, as a requirement, must have impeccable data protection.

involves assessing the various facets of banking software. It helps developers ensure their application has secure transactions, provides one-click access, and has stable performance. These are crucial in online and mobile banking.

Development teams usually collaborate with QA teams to analyze and test the software before releasing the final version. The testing process starts with a framework outlining the process steps, time, and budget estimates.

Here’s a banking testing process checklist you can refer to:

Identifying requirements

In this stage, testers document every requirement. They sort these requirements into two sections: Functional Specifications & Use Cases. Testers further divide requirements into modules, and each module covers one aspect of the application: mortgage, loans and deposits, money transfers, and bill payments.

Reviewing requirements

Once testers prepare the application requirements list, it goes through further refinement. All stakeholders arrange a meeting and review different scenarios and workflows. They do this to ensure cases work together in unison and the app performs to its peak.

Building a test case suite

During this stage, automation engineers decide which test cases they can automate and create custom test scripts based on this information. Additionally, QA specialists can opt for manual testing; however, to achieve this successfully, you will need to assemble and allocate responsibilities to a team of testers.

Functional testing

A QA specialist runs functional tests. These tests ensure you can carry out the primary user workflows without errors or bugs.

Database testing

Database testing helps the tester ensure the app’s data integrity, and the QA team analyzes data loading speed, procedures and stored functions, and data types and database schema.

Security testing

Banking applications contain sensitive user data. Due to this, developers must put a concerted effort into protecting user data. helps QA teams ensure the apps comply with security standards and regulations and that it exposes no sensitive data.

User Acceptance

Lastly, development teams must ensure that their users have no issues with the application’s functionality. To ensure this, QA teams bring in focus groups to help test the app and understand app functionality and user acceptance.

Why Do You Need Banking Testing?

Banking domain application testing provides business owners new insights into their apps – ones they did not notice earlier. It also helps fix bugs in a relaxed environment instead of releasing the app and rushing to fix the bugs. Identifying bugs sooner enables you to pinpoint exact issues without worrying about user expectations falling.

Here are a few more testing benefits:

Detecting and Fixing Performance Issues

Through testing, developers and testers can predict user behavior, helping them identify the main issues users may face while using the app; this allows the organization to ensure their app is bug-free when released.

Development Teams Better Understand Workflows

Testing helps verify banking modules, assisting developers in ensuring that these modules don’t clash. It also helps them ensure that the workflows are transparent, and secure, and work independently.

Helps Testers Deal With Tech Debt During Maintenance

An inevitable side-effect of legacy code is Tech debt. While testing does not ensure that developers can avoid it altogether, having the ability to retrace your steps by viewing old logs is helpful. Programmers can remember their thought processes and work accordingly. Many testers use unit tests as documentation.

Improves Complex System Management

Banking systems have thousands of dependencies, have multi-layered workflows, and are generally highly complex. Testing can ensure that you can assess and monitor even such complex systems. 

Improves User Retention

Testing helps developers know the number of users their system can accommodate and identify page load times. It allows developers to optimize the performance of their apps to provide quality financial services and ensure the user retention rate is always high. Since testing will ensure your app is transparent and thought out, user retention rates will continue to increase. 

Challenges in Banking Domain Testing

Testing complex applications is always a challenge, and that is true even with banking applications. These are the common challenges QA teams deal with when working with and testing apps in the backing domain:

Issues with security – Implementing a strict security system

Banking apps must have a secure system for asset protection and private information. QA teams usually need to create a secure environment before testing and implementing security measures like access validation codes and one-time passwords.

Complex databases

Testing teams require a broad account pool to test banking applications. QA teams use automation tools to control a database’s logical functions and test its connectivity. Since user requirements need protection, QA specialists use VPNs to ensure security. 

Integrations with other tools

Third-party integration testing involves dealing with many issues and bugs. QA teams must prepare to deal with integration incompatibility or access issues.

Real-time data support

Real-time data support is a challenge. The QA team must test network connectivity so users can access their accounts seamlessly at any time.