This Is Why a Professional QA Team Should Test a Banking App
Tags: testing, qa, apptesting, fintech
Published: 2022-07-11 10:40:58

Every banking app has a multifaceted structure. It’s a maze of functions, policies, regulations, and designs. To ensure the accuracy of fintech applications, a company should entrust testing to a professional QA team. 

The QA process is an essential part of the Software Development Life Cycle, not just a “nice to have” option. And though the majority understand this, the responsibilities of a QA engineer can sometimes fall on someone else’s shoulders, especially if we are speaking about an Agile team. However, there are many reasons why a team should not do it. 

## What Does Banking App Testing Cover? 

As a rule, a software testing company can offer a vast test coverage or even a full cycle of QA services. That’s one of the few advantages of starting a cooperation with a professional QA provider. Depending on the particularities of a service, a QA team will suggest the ultimate coverage and prepare the right strategy. 

In general, any banking app, fintech app or home bank app requires a thorough check of the following aspects:

- **Functionality:** core user flows, user interface, business-critical features. Integration, smoke tests, UI, regression tests etc. allow verifying the features per requirements.
- **Security:** user verification, data integrity, account protection, etc. It’s one of the key things to pay attention to in fintech and banking apps. 
- **Availability:** easy access to the core functionalities for different user groups. It implies both compatibility testing (to ensure support by different browsers and OS) and accessibility testing (to ensure that the service is suitable for users with disabilities).
- **Digital convergence:** verification of the system as a whole. As a rule, a banking app has a complex infrastructure with multiple components included – web & mobile platforms, digital wallets, and numerous third-party services.

##Why Is Banking App Testing a Task for Professional QA?

Each of the above aspects reveal the specific features of banking apps and, probably, challenges that come with quality assurance for such products. QA professionals are aware of those things and have experience of dealing with them successfully.

###1. Team Members Should Remember About their Roles and Responsibilities

Every member of the team has a specific role and responsibilities based on their competencies, skills, and experience. 

- Developers are responsible for writing code for the future app or website, selection of the architecture’s type, analyzing feasibility of the tasks, and time estimation for implementing a particular solution. 
- QA engineers analyze the requirements, check the readiness and correctness of the project and its parts from the end-user perspective.
- Managers monitor deadlines and team performance, and act as a key link in the communication.

So, for a QA specialist, testing is a direct responsibility. Developers and managers perform other duties in this work chain and have other tasks to focus on. Similarly, QA specialists have domain knowledge and proper training to prepare a testing strategy and run tests. The price of an error in an end-product is too high, especially when we are talking about banking software. When everyone does what they do best, the risks of slipping up are minimized.

###2. Everyone in a Team Should Get an Adequate Scope of Work

Combining two or three types of work that focus on totally different things usually result in a low-quality implementation of a certain part of the project. The fact that there are different specialists in a development team speaks for itself. Moreover, QA experts can have different proficiencies and specializations within a QA team. Working with mobile applications, web apps and websites, billing, transaction systems, etc. requires a completely different approach and knowledge. 

###3. Specific Knowledge and Skills Help to Meet the Set Deadlines

QA engineers have the necessary skill sets for carrying out in-depth testing – from writing basic test cases to detecting unobvious errors. They check how end-users would interact with the product at greater length and in more detail. 

When it comes to the development team, writing test cases for every new addition will slow down the whole process and plunge productivity (needless to mention the efficiency of such testing and employee motivation). Usually, software developers are not so enthusiastic about testing a code that they have written before. 

###4. Expertise & Experience Are What Makes Testing Efficient 

Software testers can distinguish a bug from a feature and an issue from the requirements. Not every manager or even a developer of the highest level can do it. Moreover, an experienced QA engineer is able to detect problems before development and thus, save time on the very same development.

Developers and managers simply don’t know how to test a product as thoroughly and properly as a professional QA team (and that’s perfectly okay). They won’t run tons of different checks unlike software testers. 

One more point is testing documentation. Neither developers nor managers can write test cases or checklists that will be that efficient. It is likely that managers write test cases using personal preferences instead of technical requirements. As you can guess, that is not always correct and it delays the process significantly. 

In addition to that, QA engineers create test data and entities (users, products, etc.) that allow them to save time in the long run and check some points much faster.

###5. Attention to Details Is Essential for Testing

One of the funny cases our QA team shared was a ticket with a localization bug. As learned from the description, the data was displayed in, let’s say, Japanese instead of English. It would be a problem if a manager who reported it hadn't forgotten to change the locale before proceeding to the functionality. 

Technical requirements for a project are likely to change during coding. So, a developer can end up writing test cases for specifications that already are not relevant. That’s never going to happen if you have a QA engineer on the project. A QA team works only with up-to-date documentation and writes test cases using the latest technical requirements.

Another case is when a developer and a manager remember to check new features or parts of code but forget or are unaware of the particularities of a product’s interaction with the new code. So, the new functionality can work as expected when tested isolated and cause the failure of other features.

###6. Domain Knowledge Is a Key to Quality Improvement

One more benefit of using a professional QA team for fintech apps is the recommendations on product design and functionality you can get in the process. 

Stakeholders often ask to do something that:

- is already implemented, but a bit differently;
- won’t work due to the existing add-ons;
- doesn’t make sense due to some previous implementations.

With high probability, a manager cannot understand the problem since it requires knowledge of the technical side of the product implementation.

###7. Professional QA Comes with Time & Cost Efficiency

Firstly, as we mentioned before, banking app testing is not the job of developers and managers. They have their own responsibilities and KPIs. Secondly, even if they start manual testing of an app or a website, the same task for a manager would take much longer time than for a QA specialist. Thirdly, bearing in mind the tight schedule, there won’t be a possibility to test carefully and scrupulously. 

As a result, we get less efficient inspection with higher probability of serious bugs on production. And as you already know, such mistakes can be pricey. Finally, developers usually have higher hourly rates. It means the expenses for testing are also higher, while the outcome is far from perfect. 

###8. Cooperation with a QA Provider Results in a Streamlined Process

A QA company knows how to deal with a mess in the testing or development processes that inevitably occurs in teams that lack QA resources. For example, creating tickets is one thing but providing accurate STR and expected results is totally different. And it all affects the quality of testing and an end-product.

When you are done with the mess in a QA process, you notice enhanced productivity shortly. There is a real case to support this claim. A company had a plan for six software products. While only developers and managers covered testing, the team was able to work on only two of these projects. After adding QA specialists, the team got to proceed with the rest of the initiatives in a few months. 

##Final Thoughts

As you can see, there is a difference between professional and amateur QA engineers. While developers and managers focus on checking how a banking app should work, the experience and ingenuity of QA engineers allow even going beyond the expected features and user’s behavior. QA specialists know the whole project in detail, see the whole picture, and can consult the clients, conduct onboarding of new employees, etc.

Engaging QA engineers at the planning and design stages allows creating good documentation that will include testing artifacts and guidelines for clients. Software testers check each task and each new feature more meticulously and efficiently. And while they are busy with what they do best, developers and managers can proceed with their own tasks.