Testing trends in the Financial Sector

Soon to be published, The European Software Testing Summit Report, contains findings derived from four years’ worth of project-based entries into The European Software Testing Awards, written by The European Software Testing Awards judging panel.

Testing Trends in the Finance Sector Chapter

A sneak preview of the Finance Sector Chapter is shared below:

Finance is an exciting area within testing and quality assurance, which is partly due to the many changes occurring across the sector. Examples of these changes include shifts in the way customers now interact with their banking, insurance and financial providers, the mass adoption of contactless payment and regulatory changes aimed at ensuring a competitive environment. This context creates a unique range of challenges and opportunities for testing teams and vendor partners. Whilst quality remains imperative in such a tightly regulated industry sector, the approach to testing has to be adapted to respond to the industry changes.

It is evident from the entries received this year for Best Overall Testing Project – Finance, that many testing teams across the finance sector are being impacted by the industry changes mentioned above. As organisations respond to the macro environment, downstream challenges are created for test teams as they are engaged on projects to deliver what can be frequently classed as innovative solutions. In addition, numerous submissions outlined testing endeavours at a level of size, scale and complexity of design that in itself deserves a level of recognition. Whilst test teams are being challenged to deliver in this context, they are also asked to deliver testing more cost effectively than may have been the case in previous years. All of this has resulted in new and different ways of working emerging in the testing domain within financial services.

A key feature of many of the projects put forward this year was agile testing. Whilst agile has featured in submissions to some extent over the past few years, the move towards agile appears to be gaining significant momentum with a large number of the submissions mentioning agile in some form.

In addition to organisations within the financial services sector looking to adopt and deploy agile test delivery on a more widespread basis, it is also evident that they are now looking to apply agile in a global context. Financial services organisations are increasingly operating within a global setting, with multiple locations across different countries and continents. As such many organisations now have global capabilities, expertise and partnerships that have now been established over several years. This year’s submissions suggest that it is now much more common for financial services organisations to leverage these offshore and geographically dispersed test teams to deliver agile projects. This approach could be referred to as distributed agile. Whilst over years gone by it may have proved difficult to link multiple dispersed teams into a collaborative agile process, many of the barriers to distributed agile have now been overcome by technological advances in communication. With fewer obstacles and potentially higher rewards in terms of efficiency and pace, the trend identified within the 2016 projects around a potential increase in agile testing across the financial services industry is understandable…

The European Software Testing Summit

The full chapter, along with more insights from different Awards categories, will be available in The European Software Testing Summit Report, which will be distributed at The European Software Testing Summit.

The European Software Testing Summit is a one-day event that will take place on 16th November in central London. To find out more information and register please click here.

 

Written by Cecilia Rehn.

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