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QUALITY ASSURANCE Testing times
Kate O’Flaherty talks to major industry players about the key tenets of Quality Assurance
transform over recent years. What was once a rigid, five step process is increasingly automated and dealt with at the start of the product lifecycle. This area, known as Quality Assurance (QA), is of growing importance to financial firms. It is compounded by the growth of technology, which itself fuels consumer expectations. Banks are realising customers expect services to perform first time, and this has had a profound impact on the way products are developed and tested.
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The idea of QA is simple: it’s about ensuring the best customer service and satisfaction, according to Manish Malhotra, Head of QA Practice at Infosys. “It’s about being able to ensure there has been a mindset of quality built into the process and the product that’s being delivered.”
Firms that specialise in the area say the more quickly errors are detected, the better the quality of the finished product. While some see QA as a process-based approach, Capgemini views the area as an end-to-end function, says Govindarajan Muthukrishnan, Senior VP at Capgemini Financial Services. “After the requirements are drawn up, testing begins.”
It makes sense that it is used to prevent defects, says Anjali Chhabra, Global Head of Testing Presales, Tech Mahindra. “For us it means how do you prevent a defect from happening in the first place? How do I reduce the cost – as every time there is a defect there is a cost. And we look at the delivery cycle: so how do I increase the speed of delivery?”
By their very nature, banking systems are of critical importance. This makes getting things right first time crucial to the financial sector. As recently as three years ago, quality management was a five step process.
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he digital era has seen the nature of testing
According to Malhotra, these steps comprised unit testing, system testing, system integration testing, and user acceptance testing (UAT), followed by performance management and testing.
However, technology has had a profound impact on the industry and, specifically, QA. This is because the area changes how banks interact with customers, employees and shareholders, Malhotra says. The time to test has gone down dramatically, maybe by 10 times in some cases due to agile. But at the same time: “The importance to test has gone up significantly.”
This is partly driven by the fact that emerging technology is incompatible with most financial firms’ core systems. Malhotra points out: “If you have a swanky app responding to the customer but your core system sucks, it isn’t going to work.”
The move to digital also means consumers want to be able to access banking apps in varying locations, making connectivity key. “If an app keeps crashing, the customer forms a perception. We really need to test for this,” Malhotra says.
Financial organisations are dependent on technology, yet they find it difficult to reap the area’s benefits, notes Haribabu Thulluri, Vice President, Business Development at Maveric Systems. “Financial firms know the necessity of technology, but they are often frustrated by it.” Adding to complexity, the vast amounts of information known as Big Data is impacting heavily on the financial sector. “At any given point we handle a huge volume of structured and unstructured data such as email and text files: how do you identify and test that?” Malhotra asks. It has led to increasing use of cloud, but this can also be a challenge to manage. “In the older days when performance testing,
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