The Banking and Financial Services sector faces a unique set of problems in software development and quality assurance. The banking transformation challenge is a puzzle with many pieces. Regulatory compliance is one factor that impacts the process.
Firstly, controls, processes, and technology for change management must be developed and documented according to guidelines.
Secondly, dev teams need to test systems not only against the functional specifications but also against the mandated policies and regulation.
Moreover, the tools or products used to develop and test software need to be intuitive, provide all the features out of the box. At the same time, they need to have a lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
Let’s take a look at how the right test management tools for BFSI can help you meet the mandate.
1. Regulatory Compliance
Apart from functional testing, load testing and security testing, systems used by BFSI need to comply with a range of constantly evolving regulations. These regulations are mandated by organizations like Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), European Central Bank (ECB) and similar bodies.
With each change in the regulatory landscape, you need to update your test plans, verification and validation, and system requirements.
So, documentation is your friend. Checklists, handoffs, and validations gain a renewed significance in this case. Appoint team members who have expertise in compliance as the gate keepers for the process. Use a tool that makes documentation easy and provides an intuitive way of managing requirements, test cases, and validation scenarios. A tool that provides centralized access and a comprehensive solution to manage your tasks. From creation, importing, tracking, and an approval workflow, you need to stay on top of the changes, version history, audit log, and execution status.
2. Test Backlog Blackhole
Often banking and financial services use older architecture and conventional tools. Even their QA processes are stuck in the past. This causes a range of problems from lack of integration to lack of collaboration and over-reliance on manual testing.
To truly accelerate their release cycles and be up to speed, enterprises need to embrace automation. This is because automation can optimize your test suites and clear the massive backlog of test cases that have become a bottleneck.
Luckily, new tools like QMetry have now emerged to cut through the test cases clutter and enable rapid automation.
In fact, it is designed to maximize efficiency by providing different ways to reuse tests. This saves considerable time and provides easier maintenance of existing test cases.
With the help of features like analytics, you get relevant information and actionable insights at the right time, helping you to optimize testing.
3. Speed
Agile and DevOps are mainstream practices. Both emphasize the need for rapid builds and frequent delivery of software and system updates. In banking especially, the faster release cycles of digital products and services are important due to the competitive landscape.
This requires that both the tools and processes support agility and collaboration. As a result, test automation has gained momentum in the past couple of years.
Your test management tool needs to support automation frameworks to import results and merge into your existing test suite.
Other features like requirements management, cross-project reporting, real-time custom dashboards, and advanced reporting help in quicker decision making and prioritization.
QMetry Test Management is designed for Agile and DevOps teams with specific features to address the pain points of Agile testers. Yet, it provides full support for hybrid methodology or teams using the waterfall model to get up to speed.
4. Lack of interoperability/integration
Over a period, any enterprise inherits and collects many tools and software to meet the evolving needs of customers.
For instance, many organizations use Jira for issue tracking and project management; and Jenkins as their continuous integration server (CI). If there is no integration or partial integration, then users cannot use these tools to their full potential.
QMetry supports integration with several tools including Jira, Jenkins, Bamboo, Maven and Gradle. This enables users to import automation results into their test management tool in multiple ways – including Rest API.
Better integration results higher visibility and better collaboration. You can make more sense of this data and provide actionable insights to drive more innovation in their releases.
5. Traceability
Traceability is increasingly important as all changes to systems need to be validated and managed according to defined processes and regulations.
In banking it is all the more important because of compliance.
Your tools should then allow you to map between requirements, tasks, controls, test controls, staging builds, and release.
QMetry Test Management provides end-to-end traceability so that there are no loose ends and no risk of missing critical functions.
All critical test cases and high-risk test cases have stories mapped to them. This allows managers to check the execution status and ensure that all the top priority user functionality is covered.
In addition, you can use the traceability report to view the relationships among stories, test cases, test runs and defects. Search for a specific test artifact and discover the web of its relationship with other artifacts. Drill down to a specific test asset and analyze the links between various assets.
6. Security and Audit
Since Security and Audit compliance are critical for regulated enterprises. QMetry offers Approval workflow and auditing reports with eSignature to produce evidence that can be used for SOW and similar requirements.
Apart from approval workflows, the eSignature feature helps enterprises to regularize the test case workflow and executions.
QMetry’s eSignature feature also verifies that the test run was documented accurately and authenticates the test run status assigned to the Test Case.
To help QA teams align all their efforts to construct quality test cases, QMetry empowers the management to keep check on the changes to a test case and how it can be integrated into test executions.
Conclusion
Each sector be it healthcare or finance has a specific set of challenges for achieving their digital goals. Your processes are as important as the tools you use especially if you work in a highly regulated sector. Above all, consult with test management tool vendors who have relevant industry knowledge to guide you on this path.
