Testing is an important stage in the development of an IT product. Testing is an important step in the process of developing solutions for the banking industry, as it is about the security of consumer money and data. In this article, we will look at the rules that financial product development company follow when preparing for testing fintech applications.
Tips for fintech solutions testing
Quality Assurance minimizes the impact of the human factor, reduces the time to market banking products, and improves their safety and quality. How to effectively set up testing, how to do it and what results will it lead to? Let’s look at the main testing rules.
Attract testers with strong technical expertise and engage them in your product development
What should be done:
It is necessary to improve technical competence. The weak technical knowledge of the tester leads to insufficiently deep testing due to a lack of understanding of how the task is implemented, and how it is interconnected with the rest of the product functions. Only superficial errors are detected, and cases that users may encounter under certain circumstances are not checked. For example, without knowing how cookies work, a tester can miss security errors or not check for cases where a cookie has expired;
It is necessary to increase involvement. If the tester is not interested in the success of the product and does not see the final goal, then he does not make valuable suggestions for improving it, but simply looks for bugs in tasks. The result is a product without bugs, but inconvenient, with non-obvious logic, and not user-friendly.
The result:
The quality indicators of testing are improved (not only the number of detected bugs is reduced, but the product itself begins to work successfully as part of the overall system of the bank). Based on the suggestions of testers, the product is further improved during development and testing.
Let testers learn about your sector and become experts in it
What should be done:
Deep understanding of the industry. A tester, not having a deep understanding of the nuances of business processes, works exclusively on tasks and cannot test deeply, that is, check not only obvious user functions but also non-obvious technical relationships between them. He can’t give recommendations for improving functionality, or warn against the mistakes of competitors. For example, if you don’t understand what an Individual Investment Account (IIA) is, you may not notice that the “Withdraw funds” button is active even if the account was opened less than three years ago, although this is not possible.
The result:
Increase the speed and quality of testing. By understanding how business processes are structured and what industry terminology means, the tester does not waste time figuring out “what it is” and “how it works”, and quickly finds relationships between modules. In addition, it becomes possible to check more specific cases and notice such inconsistencies, as in the example with IIA.
Do not separate testing from development
What should be done:
It makes sense to include a tester in the team when setting a task. In this case, testers will be able to detect bugs and inconsistencies even at the planning stage, and these errors are the “cheapest” ones, their elimination requires the least amount of money. In addition, testers will be able to make valuable suggestions during the planning phase, rather than during the testing phase. And if the proposal is worthwhile and they take it to work, you won’t have to redo the whole task.
If testers do not interact with developers and do not understand how the task is “done”, they have to figure it out longer than when there is someone to ask all the questions of interest. It is difficult for a tester to react quickly, to quickly decide whether this is a bug or not. For example, a developer has decided that the connected API has a limit of 10 requests per minute, so refusing a request above this value would not be considered an error. If the tester does not know about it, then the list of bugs will be replenished with an irrelevant task.
Result:
Testers take part in the development of the project from beginning to end, constant communication with developers will allow testers to quickly track bugs and fix them as they appear.
Implement and ensure testing standards
What should be done:
- Testing new functionality in parallel with development; deviation from the scheme is acceptable when:
- a release build is performed and only then the entire release is tested with the subsequent elimination of identified bugs;
- in the test environment, many unstable, untested tasks are simultaneously uploaded, and this complicates the localization of bugs;
- Efficient automation. Automation must be effective and easy to use. If only a narrow circle of people can set up and run it, such a solution slows down all processes.
- Organizing documentation. If the product description is a ton of haphazard, unreadable documentation with no glossary and no idea how to use it, this will create serious onboarding problems for new workers. There will also be problems when you need to remember how the old functionality works, what services are used, how to deploy the project locally, what bugs are already known, and how this or that feature works.
The result:
Time to fix bugs is reduced and the amount of functionality that is tested within one sprint is increased, as a result, the product is brought to market faster.
Wrapping up
Testing fintech products requires serious preparation from testers, as a lack of understanding of the terms and the mechanism for carrying out certain operations delays the process and reduces the quality of testing. If you need comprehensive support in the development of a fintech solution or assistance in testing, we recommend you to contact a reliable fintech development service provider Aleph One. Since 2015, the company has been providing services in the development of applications for the banking sector. You can implement an idea using innovative technologies, including blockchain, AI, etc.