Financial Application Testing – A critical bent of testing

No industry survives on a same pattern of services, it constantly changes as that’s the key to the establishment and success of any industry. Similarly financial services industry constantly changes and that’s the reason why IT companies choose a complex design to develop financial applications to ensure the application runs in a desired secure manner.

We all know the how critical any financial error is, the applications have to deal with complex transactions in real time. No one will ever tolerate any crisis in the financial application. It is here that software testing and quality assurance plays a vital role where the guidelines have to be followed strictly. Therefore the developers and testers of financial applications should have a  sound domain knowledge and good understanding of finance.

The testers have the understanding that different financial applications have different software testing and QA requirements. Whether the application is related to trading, online/mobile banking, accounting or processing insurance claims, it cannot be tested till the time the tester has gained knowledge in this domain because a financial application is not just tested for knowledge but also for underlying logic. Once the tester is fully equipped with knowledge, he can proceed with the testing activities.

It is essential to create a test plan, stating how various testing jobs such as functional, user acceptance, product, performance and security testing must be carried out. In some cases, depending on the complexity of the application there may be a need to consider specialized testing services such as Data Warehouse testing, compliance testing, regulatory testing etc.

An ideal testing team would assimilate well defined well organized and well documented software testing and QA procedures for financial institutions in order to create reliable and safe financial applications. The testing operations must be streamlined and standardized in order to carry out all activities in a planned manner.

IT companies are advised to use a combination of automation & manual testing in order to leave nothing rather cover all aspects of application while testing, as financial applications are mostly vast and complex. To carry out this kind of testing, the testers should have strong technical skills. The testers should know that white box testing is a must for testing financial applications. The tester’s job will be to test the code and check if the logic is rightly implemented and all the other coding standards are implemented in the correct way.

Financial Application testers can be different from the software testers because testing techniques followed for testing financial applications can be little different from the general software testing techniques. The reason being that financial applications often are multi tier in nature and can be accessed by several people at the same time. The business work flow can be complex in nature and it may require real time batch processing. The transactions of financial applications must be safely guarded. Testers, keep a check, no risks to be taken.

The test cases made for testing financial applications should be generic but must cover all the work flows and business logic that are implied in the application. Test cases must consider the functional and security aspect. The tester should also check for concurrency, user experience and data integrity. Financial application testing certainly needs a much more careful eye than other generic software testing.

360Logica has in-depth applications and testing capabilities in finance. Our finance testing solutions cover:

Financial application software testing, including treasury software, capital market software, trading software, credit domain software, payment engine software, investment banking software and wealth management applications related to institutional equities, corporate advisory, investor relations, and investment management.

Banking application software testing, including retail banking software, corporate banking software, mobile banking software, private banking software and other software related to money transfer, credit cards and loans, computation, accounting, microfinance, net banking, and customer service.

Insurance application software testing, including claims processing software, customer service portal software, portal inquiry and search software, financial accounting software, and software related to dynamic insurance management.