Payments Testing - March 19, 2024
Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote this line in my blog Why You Need MORE Stress in Your Life: “After a long, hot summer here in the USA, many must be asking themselves if their lives could get any more stressful. COVID-19, hurricanes, wildfires, drought, floods, and of course, politics, have combined to make everyday life very complicated.”
Two paragraphs later, in the same blog, this sentence appears, “Regrettably, none of these issues are likely to go away anytime soon…”. And so here we are, a year later, still struggling with the latest COVID-19 variant, still reeling from the latest series of catastrophic natural disasters, and still dealing with messy politics. Even the rays of hope provided by widely available vaccines and the re-opening of our economies have been tempered by both escalating violence in our cities, ongoing supply chain issues, and shortages of everything from chicken to coffee to computer chips. It seems that the new “normal” is even more stressful than the lives we led before the COVID-19 virus struck.
“There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.”
– Henry Kissinger
Still, the Payment Industry remains a bright spot in these strange and unprecedented times. In spite of all the difficulties mentioned above, overall retail sales will continue to see a significant uptick throughout the rest of the year. Prospects remain strong for those organizations that can deal most effectively with adversity and change.
With that said, surviving and thriving in the current business environment will not happen by accident. To quote former US Secretary of State Colin Powell, “There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.” Early in the COVID cycle, many organizations learned that they were not prepared to deal with a global pandemic or the requirement to support a fully remote workforce or drastic changes in consumer behavior. Many organizations discovered that their testing and QA processes are way more important than they had thought and also much more fragile.
The More Things Change, The More They Stay the Same
Even after everything that has happened in past 20 months, the goal of testing and QA remains the same – ensuring the best possible user experience for your customers. This means delivering innovative new products and services on time, uncovering and fixing bugs in your software, as well as finding and addressing bottlenecks in your processing environment before they cause a system outage.
The last thing any of us need right now is for our customers to experience the stress of having a transaction denied, getting locked out of their accounts, or having any sort of negative experience because we failed to adequately plan for and test our payment systems.
We are fortunate the industry continues to grow and prosper, but it also continues to be a very dynamic environment to work in. In order to satisfy the evolving needs of our clients and consumers, we must keep developing new payment types, adding new transactions, enhancing technology, and upgrading our security – all things that require extensive testing.
“Success occurs when opportunity meets preparation.”
– Zig Zigler
A comprehensive strategy to automate and integrate testing for your payment systems will help improve quality, optimize transaction response times, and minimize production outages. Effectively testing and exercising all of your systems will help ensure that your organization provides the best consumer experience possible.
