At a Glance: The banking industry as a whole is striving to offer more modern and user-friendly digital services to provide a better customer experience and ensure customer loyalty in an increasingly competitive market. This guide covers: How to test banking apps and websites, Using automated and manual testing, Expanding mobile test coverage, and Testing accessibility.
The banking sector as a whole is striving to offer more modern and user-friendly digital services to provide a better customer experience and ensure customer loyalty in an increasingly competitive industry.
Whether it's redesigning a mobile banking app or launching a new website, developing banking software solutions is particularly challenging.
Quality assurance (QA) testing plays a critical role in helping banks succeed in these efforts by enabling them to successfully deliver new and improved features that provide a seamless, bug-free user experience.
In this article, we will outline the key tests to perform and the areas that quality assurance teams should focus on to ensure the overall quality of banking applications and websites before they go live.
How to Test Banking Apps and Websites
As a general rule, it is best to test banking apps and websites early and often to find bugs and fix them before they affect end users.
Throughout the software development lifecycle, it is crucial to perform a variety of tests depending on the project phase and requirements:
Testing new and existing features – functional testing
As banks strive to develop apps and websites with innovative features, functional testing plays a key role in validating the features that power these solutions.
More specifically, this type of test verifies whether or not a feature works as expected. Functional testing is necessary whenever new features are added to an existing application or website.
Identifying bugs caused by new features – regression testing
At the same time, regression testing is also important for identifying bugs caused by the introduction of new features.
Although testing every feature is best practice, special attention should be paid to the key features.
This allows quality assurance teams to identify bugs or issues that could have a significant impact on most users and lead to a frustrating user experience.
Use automated and manual testing
In any digital project, success often depends on two factors:
- Time to market
- Quality of Service
In the banking sector, the ability to create and launch high-quality banking applications or websites on time is essential.
In these digital projects, test automation using a SaaS platform is a major advantage because it speeds up the quality assurance process by completing test cases much more quickly than manual testers.
Consistent and reliable execution of test cases also allows automated testing to improve the quality of actual tests, which might otherwise be compromised by human error.
Whether updating existing services or developing new ones, test automation is well-suited to a variety of test cases, including:
- Performed repeatedly
- Data-driven
- Difficult to perform manually and time-consuming
Despite the benefits of test automation, it is important to keep in mind that not all test cases need to be automated.
In fact, manual testing should be used to supplement automated test suites by running tests.
- Usability
- Exploratory Tests
- Ad hoc tests
Manual testing is a way for quality assurance teams to expand test coverage.
Overall, using both approaches can greatly help improve time to market and the overall quality of banking services.
Expand mobile testing coverage
Today, millions of people use mobile banking services through an app or a mobile website.
Providing the best possible user experience requires testing across a diverse range of configurations:
- Operating System Types and Versions
- Potentially Customized OS
- Hardware Resources (memory, processing power, etc.)
- Screen Sizes
- Screen Resolutions
- Storage with varying available capacity for each
- Wi-Fi vs. Mobile Data (from different carriers)
This type of extensive test coverage will enable quality assurance teams to find as many bugs as possible, particularly those associated with a specific version of an operating system, screen size, browser, and so on.
Test Accessibility
Today, most people use and rely on banking apps and websites to access their accounts, including the millions of people who live with some form of mental, physical, or sensory disability.
With aging populations in Europe and North America, accessibility is a major concern for banks.
In many countries, having a website that complies with specific accessibility guidelines is a legal requirement.
Therefore, it is quite important for banks to test the accessibility of their digital services. Accessibility testing provides significant value by highlighting issues that pose barriers for people with disabilities.
As a general rule, websites must be tested to ensure they comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, Level AA.
Although the WCAG guidelines do not address smartphones or mobile apps, it is not uncommon for banks to develop their own accessibility features or to ensure that their apps and websites are compatible with the many accessibility features built into Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating system.
For applications and websites that offer these accessibility features, functional tests must be performed to validate them.
Find vulnerabilities with security testing
As sophisticated cyberattacks become increasingly common, all companies—especially banks—must invest in cybersecurity to protect their assets and their customers' data and information.
Security tests are designed to detect vulnerabilities that could compromise banking applications and websites.
This type of test verifies that customer data is secure and that only authorized and authenticated users have access to the correct application or pages and to their own data.
Creating unexpected situations and stress tests on an application, for example, can be a good way to uncover vulnerabilities or bugs that a potential hacker could exploit. It is not uncommon for banking applications to use APIs to offer additional services and an enhanced user experience.
However, API vulnerabilities can serve as an entry point for hackers and must therefore also be tested.
The login portal is also an important aspect of security testing. Testing the login portal can reveal bugs that could prevent customers from accessing their accounts or, worse, allow them to access other people’s accounts.
The tests must also validate essential features such as two-factor authentication and other settings designed to prevent customers from creating weak and predictable passwords.
To take security testing a step further, banks may even consider conducting a penetration test.
In this test, a bank subjects its online or mobile banking app to an external team of ethical hackers who aim to find exploitable vulnerabilities.
Penetration tests provide significant value by enabling banks to identify and fix all vulnerabilities before they can be exploited by real hackers.
Performance and Load Testing
The main appeal of banking apps and websites is the ability to access your account 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and perform a variety of tasks. To deliver these services consistently, banks must conduct performance and load testing.
These tests provide crucial information by measuring the performance of an application or website under heavy load or stress.
Preventing customers from being affected by traffic or usage spikes goes a long way toward creating a reliable user experience.
Usability Testing
Banking apps and websites serve large segments of the population, each with varying levels of experience using digital services.
Therefore, special attention must be paid to the design of intuitive banking applications and websites.
In usability testing, testers explore an app or website to uncover flaws or issues that contribute to a frustrating user experience.
This can include clunky navigation, a convoluted user interface, slow-loading pages, blurry text or images, confusing icons, and so on.
Using these test results along with feedback from end users can help teams deliver an improved user experience.
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Further Reading
- The 5 Best Tracking Tools for Testing and Monitoring Your Web and Mobile Applications
- Production Monitoring & Web Performance: Ensuring Availability, Speed, and Reliability
- Software Quality & Business Performance: The Guide to Boosting Productivity
- Mobile Testing
- Automated Testing for Insurance and Health Insurance
To see the solution in action, check out our tests for the banking and finance sectors.
FAQ
Why test banking apps specifically?
Because the stakes in terms of reliability, security, and compliance are the highest here. An error in a banking service directly affects customers’ money and trust, posing a significant regulatory risk.
What types of tests are needed for a banking application?
Functional testing of new and existing features, regression testing to detect bugs introduced by changes, and automated testing to continuously cover critical user flows.
How can we secure sensitive processes such as payment or login?
By automating tests of these user flows and continuously monitoring them to detect any anomalies before users do. Consistency is key: a banking user flow must be continuously verified.
Are automated tests suitable for the banking sector?
Yes, provided that a reliable and traceable tool is used. No-code solutions enable business teams to contribute while maintaining the level of rigor expected in the industry.
How does Mr Suricate banking professionals?
By automating testing and monitoring of critical workflows, using a solution tailored to both business teams and major clients in the financial sector: multi-application support, real-time alerts, and reversibility.
