Methods to address QA challenges in banking and financial services

Many of the challenges of releasing quality software are commonly experienced by most firms, while all firms have their own unique issues too.

A maturity assessment will uncover opportunities to improve development, testing and release management practices, and provide a roadmap of changes to help firms achieve their business objectives, quality goals and regulatory compliance.

Quality assurance (QA) challenges in banking and financial services refer to the difficulties and obstacles that banks and financial institutions face when ensuring the quality and reliability of their software systems. These challenges include ensuring compliance with various regulations, ensuring data security and privacy, maintaining high availability and performance, ensuring scalability, ensuring security, testing for user's needs and expectations, and testing and validating the software to meet the quality standards. Addressing these challenges requires a comprehensive QA approach, including the use of specialised tools and techniques, and the participation of skilled QA personnel.

Watch the video to hear the insights shared from our Testhouse experts and clients

What are the methods and technologies you have deployed to address the challenges?

Mike Jarred, Director of Customer Success UK & Europe, Testhouse, welcomes the industry adoption of Agile: “Agile, when done well, is an incredibly good vehicle to bring all the key stakeholders together to rapidly inform and build software, check it works and release it to market quickly.”

However, he adds: ”Understanding how to do good testing in Agile is really important. How to use the right blend of automation processes within Agile and DevOps is a challenge. The other thing is getting the right balance between quality and speed to market.”

Effective testing is key to achieving that balance. Andrew Holmes says: “Ensure that you engage third-party testing very early on in the lifecycle. So, by that I mean getting them involved really early on in the design phases.”

"Understanding how to do good testing in Agile is really important."

Mike Jarred

Director of Customer Success UK & Europe TESTHOUSE

What actions would you recommend to bring stakeholders together to address quality challenges?

Andrew Holmes believes it is vital to make sure that all stakeholders, from the Board down, understand the nature of the build: “There’s a lot of complexity associated with finance and banking and building out the necessary applications, processes, systems, and solutions. So, making sure that everything is visible to all stakeholders is absolutely fundamental to success.” To achieve that, he recommends inviting all the stakeholders to monthly update events.

Watch the video to hear the insights shared from our Testhouse experts and clients

Michael Harriman recommends: “Outsourcing to a third-party Software Testing or Quality Assurance provider is beneficial. We've had success in at least two projects that I've worked on that use outsourced quality assurance services".

"Outsourcing to a 3rd party quality assurance provider or testing provider is beneficial."

Michael Harriman

Senior Advisor - Information Technology REDWOOD BANK

Testhouse Recommends

Improve use of automation tools to make testing, environments provision and release management more efficient

Enhance Test Data Management to reduce the cost and time overheads of test data provision

Bake in performance and security by design, and use best of breed tools within the development team to enable early feedback of non-functional defects within the sprints, rather than waiting to be ‘dev complete’ for a full-scale performance or penetration test

"Usability, accessibility, security, performance and functional testing are all different types of testing that need to be undertaken in a holistic way to help make sure that the customer experience is a good one and that the end user journey flows are as they would expect them to be.”