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

• Automate testing. Automating tests facilitates wider application coverage, test depth is improved, and fewer errors are introduced into the test pool. For example, if your organization uses test-driven development (a process that has developers write very specific unit tests prior to development to test their changes to the code), suggest that the developers create additional tests to verify the integration of their code into the system. Those integration tests could then be passed on to QA for use during regression testing and to production support for use when testing fixes.
  
  
• Share across department lines and build a collaborative team. Testing occurs throughout your organization by developers, QA personnel, system analysts, and production support. Take an inventory of the test tools used by each department, employ their expertise, and examine the similarities of your test goals. Make the best use of test cases by sharing and reusing them.
  
  
• Talk to industry peers and discuss their test approach and the tools they use. If you already use tools, ask your vendor to refer you to other users who may have valuable insights on how to get more out of the tools, or who may be able to recommend other processes or tools. If you currently don’t use automated test tools, you may be able to obtain tool recommendations from other financial institutions, software development companies that you have used, or your ATM or EFT vendors.
  
  
• Communicate actions and results, identifying possible solutions. Increase the visibility of the testing already occurring across your organization. Alert management to the threats you’ve identified and how proper testing can thwart them. Create a sense of urgency. Hundreds of thousands of dollars can be lost when a single obscure change is not properly regression tested, or when fraudulent transactions are not trapped, even though an alert was posted, because an effective test case could not be constructed. Make certain managers understand that the right tools and tests can save your FI from loss of credibility as well as financial losses. Provide an analysis of the tools used by your organization, as well as any tools you want to acquire, including a comparison of their features and their suitability for the testing you have targeted.
  
  
• Acquire any additional tools you need and schedule training for staff members who will be using them. Ensure you make complete use of these solutions throughout your organization.

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