Engineering Banking: The Benefits of Automated Testing

Financial services technology needs to be tested rigorously before it reaches customers. Mistakes and defects can not only impact brand reputation but also subject banks and CUs to litigation and/or fines. Testing is time consuming and prone to human error. For that reason, it has become increasingly automated. In this blog post, I’ll describe what is software testing and why automation is important.

The Importance of Quality

The importance of quality is obvious. It directly impacts what users think and how they feel about your organization. The work of people like William Deming has demonstrated how quality impacts reputation, brand value, customer satisfaction, revenue, and ultimately, profits.

If that is too abstract, we should focus on the impact of quality on project cost. According to the IBM System Sciences Institute, fixing a production defect is 100 times more expensive than fixing it during earlier stages of the project. This is one of the main reasons why technology projects typically run over budget and take twice as long as planned.

The Benefits of Software Testing and QA Automation

Before I dive into benefits, let’s discuss what Software Testing and QA Automation means. Software Testing or Quality Assurance is the practice of monitoring the design, development, and implementation of solutions to ensure they correspond to defined standards. These standards encompass functionality, security, and performance. Test automation is the process of using software and tools to automate the execution of test cases that would otherwise be manually performed by QA Engineers.

There are many benefits of automated testing, but there are two in particular that are often overlooked and that I find most beneficial.

It can dramatically accelerate the last 10% of your project. I would even dare to say it can cut the time it takes to complete the last mile by two-thirds.

During the last 10% of any project, any change requires a full regression test. Regression testing ensures that new changes didn’t break functionality that was working before and they can take weeks. This means that even if your change takes a couple of hours to implement, it still requires hundreds of hours of manual testing. Most projects go through this 3 or 4 times before they reach 100% completion. By using test automation, you can cut the time it takes to conduct regression testing by more than half.

Test automation makes adding features in later stages of the project faster and easier.

Another benefit that is typically overlooked, is how faster it makes adding features later on. Because software consists of many modules that interact with each other, making changes to one module can often break things in a completely different module. These defects are difficult to detect and difficult to fix. As solutions grow more complex, it becomes increasingly hard to understand how modules affect each other. Introducing QA automation early in the project creates a safety net that helps your dev team add features more confidently as the solution grows in complexity.

In Conclusion.

The benefits of automated testing are clear. It can dramatically reduce the time it takes to complete a project and makes it easier to add features later on. Automated testing is an important part of any financial services technology project and should be considered early in the development process.

If you want to learn more, read my blog post on internal quality: Engineering Banking: Project Success, Internal Quality, and the Last Mile, and reach out via Twitter @aarvil.