Information technology has completely changed the way banks use to operate until last decade. The criticality of banking IT systems lies in their sheer size, vast number of transactions they facilitate every minute, and wide range of their portfolio offerings. With their expansion plan mounting day by day, need to integrate the IT systems in various branches with main IT stream is becoming more challenging and complex.

 
Testing & re-testing becomes inescapable in case of banking applications as even a minute error can result in loss of repeat business, revenues and permanent damage to organization’s reputation. Further, a small mistake can put the banking & financial institution through severe legal scrutiny.
The characteristics that make any banking application a nightmare for testers are as follows:
 
1) Recurrently changing regulatory & market requirements: Increasing competition in the market via various banking products and services heaves new functional requirements for banking applications in an ongoing manner. In addition, the regulatory firms keep adding new standards which are mandatory from legal and requirement perspective, and have to be fulfilled by every banking application. As a result of this, the business application has to go through frequent releases and upgrades throughout the year and needs to be tested multiple times. Whether a bank is using customized software or a standard product, the frequently changing regulatory and market requirements affects both.
 
Test execution for every single release generally includes major portion for regression testing. It is something which is not very exciting among the testers including business users. Running these tests multiple times also increases the cost of the application.
 
2) Maintaining data confidentiality & test data requirements: Testers are more likely to use the data copied from production systems as a test data. However, recent bank secrecy laws and standards in various countries does not allow anyone to use the test data as it is from live servers so as to protect the confidentiality of the data. Banking industry, being a service provider to almost every organization in some or the other way, needs to build trust more than any other industry in order to gain its customer confidence.
 
Employing internal or external IT developers and testers use the production data for testing purposes increase the probability of legal breaches & reputational damages. The data confidentiality requirements mount with the stringency of the country specific laws and with the international distribution of business and IT.
 
3) Complex legacy & application systems: Banking applications are often too complex to understand. The know-how about each and every system involved in it functionality is scattered within and outside the organization. The dependency and integrity of one application with other further leads to complications which imply the risk of being overseen when new releases are developed. It only gets worse when legacy systems are involved having a lower level of documentation and cluttered data design. In addition, such applications root interfaces to external apps for market data and for settlement of transactions in the trading and payment area.
 
As an outcome, the data that is being used in app under test actually originates from another app that is far up the stream. This makes it difficult for testers to produce test data which suites and fulfills all the cross application data constraints.
 
Offering a risk-free transaction is the ultimate motto of every bank. But in order to achieve this objective, the applications should be put under scrutiny which demands a focused and strategic approach from testers. We will soon discuss the approaches to overcome the above mentioned challenges in the next article.