Testing strategies for fintech software: A QA Engineer's perspective

Financial technology (fintech) software will always be in scrupulous need of quality assurance in order to help launch bug-free and highly competitive products. For this reason, it is vital to create a test strategy which is closely aligned to your product. Whilst fintech offers a multitude of different possibilities for banking and financial firms, it also brings several challenges that businesses within the industry have to consider.

Financial software testing validates an application from both a usability and reliability standpoint. Can it handle large transaction volumes? Does it meet current regulatory standards? These are questions that finance-specific software testing seeks to answer and a great testing strategy should clearly address them.

Let’s take a look at some of the high-level considerations when working with a fintech application before determining testing strategies:

Security

Financial technology applications store and use sensitive data such as banking, financial, and personal information. This information is susceptible to attacks by hackers and therefore these applications must be put through vigorous assessments, checking for any risk areas or vulnerability.

Reliability

The reliability of financial applications depends upon how accurately the application processes and stores data. A financial application should have a high level of availability. If an application crashes, it should have proper recovery management that can limit the impact on customer data.

Compliance Assessment

Financial organizations must strictly follow the rules and guidelines set by the governed jurisdiction in which they operate. These rules are ever-changing and therefore it is important to keep track of updates, evolve as the regulation demands and frequently review to confirm that your product portfolio remains compliant.

Product Usability

Usability is a key consideration when it comes to defining the quality of a product. Consumer experience tends to be one of the top items on a fintech’s priority list and it is the job of software testers to confirm that the product can be operated by users of all abilities. This testing must be done by both internal teams and by putting the product in the hands of real users. Usability issues can also be detected using high-quality defect tracking software.

When you look at the different assessment areas above, you will begin to see that your testing strategy is generally shaped by them.

Guided by the above assessment areas, OpenPayd has built a future-proof Banking-As-A-Service platform, supported by a robust QA strategy. With Continuous Integration (CI), we can also identify and rectify errors earlier within the process. Continuous Integration helps systems development teams to be agile and respond to rapid business changes, while at the same time ensuring that the actual hardware and software under development are in constant sync. CI allows team members to work effectively within their domain groups, staying focussed on the tasks within their areas of expertise. At the end of each day, the team know which of their contributions to the project are integrated and are confident that the component parts work together. And, if something doesn’t integrate - it’s quickly discovered.

So how does this work at OpenPayd?

Almost all of our microservices have automation. Thanks to these automations, we can perform both end-to-end and regression tests. We have Dev, QA, Sandbox, and Production environments. Since we generally adopt the early test culture, we run our CI connection when deployed from the Dev environment to the QA environment. This allows us to minimise the risk of a user encountering errors in the production environment. Since these tests are included in our provider tests, we can see whether third party applications work correctly in our system.

It’s also worth noting that our testing strategy is not limited to integration tests. We are trying to protect the system in the best way by testing user behaviour through UI tests. Just like the integration tests, we run UI tests after each release. This way we can keep the system both safer and operating at a higher standard.

Alongside each of the above testing areas, we also run performance tests. One of the biggest challenges when building new products and services is ensuring optimal performance. We overcome this by performing load tests and stress tests depending on the developments. By simulating thousands of transactions, we adopt the chaos engineering motto so that users do not face disruption to the service in the future.

For best results, start this process early in the development stage to avoid costly bugs that need to be fixed and to help protect your reputation in the marketplace.

If you’d like to be a part of the team and want to help shape these strategies in the future, join our Technology hub in Istanbul, where the future of Banking-as-a-Service world is being built today.

Yusuf Tayman, QA Engineer