How Continuous Testing Enhances Banking Applications
Banking these days is expected to be online, digital, and reliable. Customers demand an authentic banking experience, and banks are expected to deliver. However, creating a hyper-personalised banking application requires closer attention to detail during testing. Many FinTech companies integrate CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery) to ensure they become the market leader by providing faster update releases and reliable and seamless experiences on the application. One of the best ways to integrate CI/CD is to leverage continuous testing.
More than 50% of global financial institutions see digital transformation as their primary goal. They need applications that are customer-focused, digital-first, and fast to market. Continuous testing is an integral step in software implementation. It ensures the detection of bugs/errors before releases, and a seamless and safe user experience, from onboarding to payments.
How To Integrate CI/CD In Financial Companies
For FinTech and financial institutions, continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) provides access to quicker, more reliable, and more predictable code deployments. CI/CD ensures that the final product is user-focused and checks all the quality checkpoints.
One of the first companies in the banking industry to adopt DevOps was Capital One, which built its software pipelines according to the “16 Gates” principle. With this approach, they cut the time required to construct new application infrastructure by over 99%. However, one can also leverage continuous testing to introduce automated testing at different stages of the software development lifecycle to enhance end-product quality.
Continuous testing promotes integrating testing activities into your development process rather than delaying most of them until the very end, ensuring that all produced code is tested end-to-end from the beginning to deployment.
Multiple objectives are met simultaneously through continuous testing:
- Risk coverage – Recognise which releases are not yet prepared to enter the delivery pipeline and which code is ready for production.
- Quality Assurance – Prevent defective products from getting released and undermining the user experience.
- Ensures comprehensive coverage – Test cases and data are prepared in advance and always available for quick runs. Additionally, CT includes everything from “shift left” (such as unit and component testing to avoid expensive debugging later on) to “shift right” (such as load testing, application performance monitoring, production testing, etc.) to guarantee stable product performance, high failure tolerance, and excellent customer experience.
- Augments product quality – Mature teams execute software tests at the appropriate time and level of the SDLC (without blocking other processes) and use the test results to enhance the quality of their code.
What are the potential benefits of using CI/CD in FinTech?
a) Quality
From the beginning of the CI/CD pipeline, the product’s quality is essential and should always be prioritised. The product’s effectiveness improves as a result of ongoing testing and construction. This assists in accumulating any potential flaws in the future. The primary reason for conducting so much testing is the unpredictability of emerging technology. Prepare for the worst when performing tests.
b) Faster feedback loops
Having a CI/CD pipeline gives you real-time feedback to check the functionalities and rectify errors moving forward. This way, you can be assured that the end product will meet your expectations. When a test fails, feedback is given to the relevant team, instructing them to investigate the failure. After that, an enhanced product is released that can withstand challenging circumstances.
c) Automated process
Application releases in the FinTech sector have achieved a new pace because of continuous testing in DevOps.Using continuous deployment, the DevOps Assembly Line, or other tools, it is now simple to execute multiple deployments or updates to the application. Due to DevOps’ emphasis on automation in most areas, FinTech organisations no longer rely on manual testing. The time to market is shortened by cloud functionality, which is a great advantage. Productions used to take months to finish but now take just a few days.
Hitting Home Run With Better CI/CD Integration In Fintech
Rapid release cycles and CI/CD pipelines are becoming more popular as businesses race to update and release digital features to market continuously. While they prioritise digital transformation, seeking protection from cyber-attacks, loss of customers, and poor scalability should also be the goal. Any interruption to banking services can be devastating to both businesses and citizens. As a result, banks and FinTechs must meet legal requirements and client expectations.
Valuable data is consistently exchanged over the wire in the FinTech industry, and a well-equipped CI/CD pipeline vets every code change to ensure it complies with regulations. Providing the best CI/CD pipeline depends on a lot of factors. Be it code validation and compilation or production deployment, the smooth functioning of the pipeline is made primarily possible by continuous testing. This is why it becomes imperative that Fintechs leverage continuous testing in this competitive environment.