5 Steps to Ensuring Online Banking Quality and UX
As we all know, the Digital Banking or Online Banking industry is perpetually growing in demand. It enables financial services to leverage business efficiency, cost savings, increase accuracy, enhance security, etc. To meet these business objectives, such organizations need to have a well-defined and executed quality plan that can both test as well as monitor the services and guarantee continuous operation.
Most of the online banking services are offered through web or responsive web apps. Such apps can be either accessed via a desktop PC or a mobile device (Smartphone/Tablet). Ensuring quality of these apps relies on the following:
1. Proper device and desktop browser test coverage
2. Functional testing of the apps
3. User experience testing and performance
4. Security testing
5. Accessibility testing
Proper Device and Desktop Browser Test Coverage
You’re introducing a great business risk if you’re not testing on the platforms your end-users are using in their specific geographies. The digital landscape is huge and consists of thousands of smartphones, tablets, and various mobile browsers that customers are using. In addition, the desktop browser space is extremely dynamic and is seeing at least a monthly release of Chrome and Firefox browser versions. Creating a proper test coverage matrix that leverages the current market state and covers the leading permutations and matching the web traffic analytics data is a key for success.
In addition to the above calendar, there are various usages of browsers across geographies, hence, it’s critical to keep an eye on the usage through sites like StatCounter.
As you can see below, the market share and browser usage vary across geographies.
Global Browser Market Share — June 2018
European Browser Market Share — June 2018
Functional Testing of the Apps
Especially for banking apps, the feature set, the dealing with various 3rd party services like databases, location services, payment services, and others is very hard. Functional testing of the app throughout the entire set of screens and use cases is a clear and obvious requirement. Testing such continuously upon each code-commit, through continuous integration (CI) is a necessity for release velocity. In this case, following testing standards for robust test code (treating test code as production code), leveraging best practices around object identification, and using advanced agile practices like ATDD/BDD can help align the counterparts from business, development, and testing on the right product features implementation.
User Experience Testing and Performance
Users that do not get exceptional digital experience switch to different websites, apps, and simply leave such brands. To prevent that, in addition to the above-mentioned functional testing requirements, product teams should emphasize the importance of non-functional testing that involves accessibility, performance (response time/availability of the websites), and UI. Even for responsive websites that adapt automatically based on the platform they are being executed on, it is important to perform UI and visual testing to assure layouts, CSS, and other visual elements that in some cases are dynamic, are shown properly. For online banking sites, there are even more challenges since these sites involve specific sensors that behave, and produces pop-ups that are context-aware, location-aware and platform (Mobile/Web) aware.
Security Testing
As a continuation to the previous point on UX and nonfunctional testing, especially for banking, the testing of authentication, authorization, data encryption across all platforms is a huge challenge and a key for the business success and also compliance with the standards in that domain. Since the market is heavily practicing Agile, such tests that involve static code analysis, dynamic analysis, and other malware testing ought to be shifted as much as possible left into the build process so issues are always being automated with the build acceptance process, as well as issues are identified as soon as possible by the developer.
Accessibility Testing
As mentioned in the security paragraph, Accessibility isn’t a new requirement, however, it is a tedious task that must be automated to the maximum level possible and executed at key product milestones against the proper platform coverage to identify the issue, comply with the regulations and better serve all types of this vertical audiences.
Bottom Line for Online Banking Quality
Online banking quality assurance is an ongoing challenge and a task that requires a fully automated process, robust test automation, and a lot of “smart” insights to enable teams to be successful while moving fast in that domain. Banks and financial services cannot innovate properly and release fast and with high quality without keeping in mind the points mentioned in this blog post — building a robust testing that utilizes the best test framework, scalable testing on the right platforms, continuously execute multi-testing types throughout the pipeline is essential.
Originally published at www.testcraft.io on July 25, 2018, by Eran Kinsbruner.
