Electronic Payments Testing:
A Testing Terminology Primer

Unit testing, integrated testing, functional testing, regression testing, system testing, acceptance testing—how do all of these terms relate to electronic payments testing? Everyone who uses your system is a tester of sorts, but who is responsible for each type of testing, and when does it occur in the development and testing schedule? This article provides an introduction to terms frequently used in financial transaction testing and describes the roles of the testers that are most often responsible for these processes.

To grasp any area of technology, one needs to be familiar with its unique terminology. Sounds simple enough but, in reality, the meanings of terms frequently vary from one industry to another - and sometimes from one company to another. Developers and testers of electronic payments technologies frequently use terms to categorize and classify the tests they perform, or to define their roles as testers. This article provides an introduction to the terminology used by electronic payments testers and provides examples of the various categories of tests.

Software Development Approaches: The Framework of Testing

Before introducing the terms that describe various types of testing, it might be helpful to look at a few examples of approaches to electronic payments software development, since these often determine the test approach favored by your organization. Your organization may use one of these approaches, or a combination of them, as determined by the needs of the project or preferences of your developers. (If your organization uses a different development methodology, investigate the testing approaches most often employed by that method.)

Agile Software Development

Agile software development uses face-to-face communication between developers, "customers," and testers to develop software in fairly short-term development cycles. In the case of electronic payments software, a customer may be an internal customer, such as one of the system's users inside the organization, or an external customer, such as a merchant acquirer. Because agile software development is collaborative, testers and developers work in tandem and Agile test plans and results may be spoken rather than heavily documented, as is typical of other approaches.

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