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In today's digital era, mobile banking applications have become an integral part of our daily lives. They offer a convenient and secure way to access and manage our finances on the go, from transferring funds to making payments. To improve customer experience and stay competitive in the banking industry, ensuring the banking app's quality has become a priority for businesses in the BFSI sector.
This is where automation testing comes into play. However, implementing banking test automation can be a daunting task, and banks need to consider several factors before embarking on it. In this article, we'll discuss some requirements for banking test automation to ensure a reliable banking app.
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2. Maintenance and Scalability
3. Multi-Component and Cross-Platform
5. Test Reports, Test Progress and Result Monitoring
Concentralisation
In a fast-paced digital environment, decentralised test automation can make QA experts challenging to control and implement appropriately. In contrast, a centralised QA function will operate more effectively since a banking app is particularly complicated and getting one feature to function flawlessly before release requires the contribution of different teams. Centralised test automation ensures test scheduling, execution, and reporting can be coordinated in a central place and managed in a multi-user environment.
Here are some reasons why centralisation gives banks more return in the long term:
- Standardise the enterprise testing process: Centralised test automation ensures that all test scripts follow the same standards and guidelines. This ensures consistency across different teams and projects, making it easier to manage and maintain the automation framework. It also improves collaboration between teams and reduces the learning curve for new team members.
- Increase efficiency: Since the test execution and reports are gathered in one place, it helps reduces the time and cost to find and collate the works that have been performed by different teams, making the testing process more seamless and reducing duplication of efforts.
- Improve test coverage: Centralising all work will provide you with a comprehensive picture of the development process, from that creating test cases that cover all aspects of the banking app, including edge cases and complex scenarios. By improving test coverage, you can also identify potential security vulnerabilities, which are critical in the banking industry.
Maintenance and Scalability
Automation testing in enterprises should be maintenance-friendly. Especially at the beginning of the development process, the requirements may change frequently. Within the scenarios where banking apps are constantly evolving and updating, it might cause more time and resources to implement new test cases.
Therefore, the automation tests should be designed in a way that allows for easy updates. Maintenance-friendly automation testing ensures that the tests remain relevant and effective even as the app changes, helping banking organisations reduce the cost of maintenance, increase efficiency and agility, and provide a better user experience. This requirement is also beneficial to respond more quickly to market needs and customer preferences, leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Multi-Component and Cross-Platform
The “develop once, use everywhere” practice implements not only different tests but also different platforms and components within a test.
A multi-component approach allows testing of all the different components of a mobile banking app, including the user interface, back-end services, APIs, and databases, to ensure that they function seamlessly together. By testing all the components, banks and financial institutions can detect and fix issues before they affect the user experience or security of the app, which are their primary concentration.
Besides, since banking consumers may use a variety of devices with different operating system versions to log in, your automation testing should be cross-platform to guarantee compatibility with different platforms, such as iOS and Android. Especially with the growing number of mobile devices and operating systems yearly, cross-platform testing has become more critical than ever before.
For example, if a bank is using a payment gateway that requires a specific protocol for processing transactions, the automated testing tool should be able to work with that protocol and verify that transactions are being processed correctly. Similarly, if a mobile banking app needs to work across different operating systems and devices, the enterprise testing tool should be able to support testing across different platforms and environments.
Testing all the components of the app simultaneously and across different platforms can significantly reduce the time-to-market by streamlining the testing process.
Cost-effectiveness
This is an essential factor to consider when implementing test automation for mobile banking apps. Automation testing can help banks save time and resources, but it's also necessary to ensure the testing is cost-effective. In comparison to manual testing, it can be cost-effective in several ways:
- Reduce the resources spent on repetitive test cases: Automated testing can be executed quickly and efficiently, help accelerate the testing process and free up QA experts for other tasks. In the banking app, repetitive test cases are meaningful because they help to ensure that the banking app is reliable and consistent in its performance. Some features of banking apps that should be tested repeatedly include Login and authentication, Transaction processing, Account management, etc.
- Catch defects early in the development cycle: By running the tests automatically at the beginning, defects can be identified early when they are less costly to debug.
- Offer open-source frameworks: some automation testing tools, such as Katalon or Selenium are freely available and can assist in lowering the cost of testing. Moreover, these frameworks have large communities of developers who can provide support and contribute to the development of the framework, which can lead to a more robust and reliable testing tool.
Test Reports, Test Progress and Result Monitoring
Test reports and analytics provide a detailed overview of the tests that were conducted, the results obtained, and any issues that were encountered. These reports may include details on the different types of tests that were conducted, such as functional testing, performance testing, and security testing. For instance, a report may provide information on the average response times for different API endpoints or transactions that the banking app recorded.
Test progress for a banking app may involve tracking the number of tests that have been completed, the number of tests that are still in progress, and the number of tests that still need to be conducted, ensuring that it is on schedule and within budget. Besides, by monitoring the results of the tests, developers and testers can identify any defects or issues that need to be addressed and make the necessary changes to improve the product.
API Usability
API usability is an important aspect of automation testing, particularly in today's software development landscape, where APIs are becoming increasingly common. Well-designed APIs can make it easier to develop automated test cases, as they provide a clear and consistent interface for accessing and manipulating data. This can help speed up the testing process and reduce errors, resulting in a more efficient banking app automation testing process.
However, if you don’t concern the API usability, it could be more challenging to maintain and update over time, which can lead to increased technical debt and reduced agility. If the APIs are not well-documented and easy to understand, this can make it harder for developers and testers to modify or update the app, which can lead to additional costs and delays in the long run.
Integration
Integrated banking automation testing refers to the ability of automation testing to seamlessly integrate with other tools and systems used in the banking industry. This includes test management tools, defect tracking systems, continuous integration/delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, and other third-party software applications.
For example, integrated automation testing can be used in the CI/CD pipeline to automate testing at each stage of the development process, ensuring that new features and functionality are thoroughly tested before being deployed to production.
By integrating automation testing with other tools and systems, testing teams can effortlessly manage and track test cases, share test results, and quickly identify and resolve defects. This also ensures that testing is an integral part of the development process rather than an afterthought.
Read more: Automation Testing Requirements for Banking App
Sum Up
Quality attributes such as concentralisation, cost-effectiveness, maintenance, usability, and more are key to ensuring successful automation testing in banking applications. Investing in automation testing with a robust tool like Katalon can help banking organisations improve the quality of their apps, reduce costs, and increase efficiency, ultimately resulting in better customer experiences and increased competitiveness in the market.
KMS Solutions has worked with Katalon to provide fit-for-purpose testing solutions to global organisations such as GIC real Estates, Maxis, and many more. If you're finding ways to accelerate your mobile app testing process, find more in our weekly insights!
