Dispatching the Demanding Dozen:
Preparing Your Testers to Face The Financial Industry’s Top 12 Challenges

What is the common denominator for virtually every change faced by financial institutions today? "Make this change and you’re going to need to test. And test again." Which changes will result in the foremost challenges to your FI? What will you need to test, and how? How do you begin to prepare your testers—and your management—for these challenges?

Count on Change - and on Testing Those Changes

Around 500 BC, Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, is quoted as saying, "Nothing endures but change" - and he never had to deal with EMV, SEPA, chip cards, or channel consolidation. Any employee of an IT department in a financial institution (FI) can attest to the breakneck pace of internal changes to payment networks, processing systems, and product and service offerings. Added to that are external forces, such as regulatory pressures, security threats, open standards initiatives, and card association mandates.

What is the common denominator for virtually every change faced by financial institutions today? "Make this change and you’re going to need to test. And test again." Which changes present the most significant challenges to your FI? What do you need to test, and how? How do you begin to prepare your Quality Assurance (QA) departments and system load analysts for their increasing testing burden? How do you alert your management to the impact these changes will have on your testing budget and staff requirements?

This paper identifies the top 12 challenges and the unique problems each poses during integration, regression, performance, and QA testing. And, whether you’re already using tools to automate testing or are considering automated testing for the first time, it also offers an outline for preparing your staff (and management) for testing requirements in the months to come.

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