Testing is a critical success factor for financial services providers, ensuring the systems for processing transactions work properly for all products and services across all delivery channels.
Rigorous payment testing processes are necessary to ensure that all payment transactions are complete, accurate and secure for all participants - including consumers, merchants, issuers, acquirers and processors. Unfortunately, testing is complicated by the fact that each card brand and payment network uses its own interpretation of various messaging standards to facilitate the processing of its financial transactions.
This means that much of the payments industry is engaged in a never-ending process of analysis, testing and certification just to maintain compliance with card scheme mandates.
This is particularly important for new products and services. More efficient testing processes enable financial service providers to stay compliant with less effort, freeing-up resources so they can develop and roll-out innovative new products to the market more quickly.
Despite the importance of testing, many financial industry participants are still using manual processes and fragmented legacy systems to support their testing infrastructure.
To develop efficient, reliable and consistent payment testing processes that improve quality, optimize resource utilization and shorten delivery cycles, financial service organizations need tools and simulators that support and facilitate automated QA testing. In this blog, we explain why.
What’s the difference between manual and automated testing?
It is no longer practical to rely solely on manual testing. Here are a few key reasons why automation needs to be a part of any strategic approach to testing:
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Faster: Testing automation enables your organization to speed up testing processes and better allocate your resources to more complex scenarios.
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More accurate: Automated tests, once set up properly, are more accurate - giving you high-quality data that improves your results.
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Repeatable: Automation enables tests to be run over and over again, with little incremental cost, providing consistent and verifiable results and reports.
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Scalable: Automation provides an opportunity to continually expand test coverage.
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Available: Unlike human resources that are only available during business hours, automated tests can be run 24/7 - dramatically expanding your test coverage.
While we discuss the benefits of automation, it’s important to note that it cannot completely replace manual testing.
Automation should be used to augment your existing manual testing processes so that you can achieve better throughput, as well as more accurate and higher-quality results.
What are the benefits of testing automation?
Automation allows financial institutions to more efficiently handle many of the time-consuming tasks that were previously carried out by manual testers. This can dramatically speed up time-to-market for new products and services and ensure the organization is delivering a superior customer experience.
Here are just a few of the benefits that come with automated QA testing.
✔️ Increased productivity: Automating even the most common test cases can free up your resources to focus on higher-value tasks that drive real value to your business and the end-customer.
✔️ Improved quality: Automation allows tests to be repeated consistently and accurately every time helping to identify issues sooner and minimizing the possibility of human error.
✔️ Faster time to market: Automation clearly speeds up your testing processes, enabling projects to be completed more quickly and allowing you to get products and services to the market faster. This helps you beat your competitors to the market with industry-leading products.
✔️ Expanded test coverage: Testing automation will help your teams run and complete more tests in less time. Some of the time saved can be used to create even more automated tests, continually expanding your overall test coverage. This means you can significantly expand your test coverage.
✔️ Reduced costs: While there is an upfront investment required to build out your testing automation infrastructure, the long-term ROI can be significant. And more testing automation will deliver additional savings that can be reinvested in more strategic areas of your business.
Adding automation to your payment testing processes will help your organization deliver higher-quality products and services to the market more quickly and at less cost - ultimately giving you a competitive advantage and delighting your customers
Interested in learning more about how you can upgrade your payments testing processes with automation? Request a consultation with Paragon Application Systems today.
