Automated Testing for a Financial Services Provider
How Tavant scaled test coverage to 95% and improved software stability and confidence.
Maximizing the Impact of Test Automation
As we are all aware, software permeates various aspects of our lives, from mobile apps to business-essential systems. As software becomes more complicated, reliability and quality become harder to assure. Test automation proves particularly valuable when this occurs. Time has witnessed the evolution of test automation into an integral aspect of software development, resulting in improved efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Enhancing effectiveness, precision, and feedback cycles through automation, we can achieve higher quality. Common Pitfalls in Test Automation By leveraging test automation, software quality and test execution speed can be significantly improved. Insufficient execution and management of test automation hinder many organizations, resulting in subpar results. ROI’s effectiveness is often threatened by difficulties in ensuring long-term success and precise ROI calculation. The article offers practical guidance on leveraging test automation to generate the greatest possible impact. Effective Test Automation Implementation and Management: To maximize the impact of test automation, a comprehensive approach that includes many areas of testing, development, and collaboration is required. The success of automation testing depends on implementing and managing test automation effectively. Here is a detailed way to achieve this goal: Define Clear Objectives: With the right strategies in place, test automation can yield substantial results. Starting with the goals, detail your test automation objectives. With a clear understanding of the desired outcomes, tailor your automation testing strategy to align with your goals. Choose the Right Tool/Framework: Selecting the appropriate tools and frameworks is necessary. A dependable, adaptable, and user-friendly tool should be chosen by considering tech stack, project requirements, and team proficiency. In the grand scheme of things, this will be a time and effort conserving solution. Solid testing approach: By concentrating on the most important tests, test automation can be accomplished efficiently. Automation’s applicability is limited to certain tests. By focusing on these tests, you can optimize the value and scope they offer. Group tests according to their significance, risk, and execution frequency. Testing should start with the most critical areas to achieve prompt results. Prioritization becomes more manageable when focusing on essential aspects. Maintainable Test Scripts: Create test scripts that are modular, efficient, and maintainable, ensuring scalability. Implement design patterns like Page Object Model (POM), use data-driven testing, and keyword-driven testing, maintain a clear structure, apply coding standards, ensure proper documentation, and leverage best practices for creating reliable automated tests. By combining these methods, one can create well-organized and well-documented automated tests, highlighting the advantages of industry standards. Test Data Management: Consistent test results are achieved by expertly managing test data, allowing for reliable conclusions. By incorporating automated data setup and cleanup, you can improve your testing process. Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD): Implementing test automation in your CI/CD pipeline enables tests to be triggered by code commits, resulting in early issue detection, quick feedback on changes, and prevention of defects in production. Test Environment Management: Emulate the production environment in test environments for optimal results. resemble those in production. By doing this, automation results appropriately mirror real-world situations. Continuous Learning and Training: Offer testing team training and skill enhancement opportunities. Verify that they possess the necessary skills to construct, maintain, and execute automated tests. Stay current on the latest automation methods, instruments, and technology. Investing in training yields returns in the form of improved team skills and industry awareness. Reporting and Monitoring: Create thorough reports that detail test outcomes, coverage data, and defect patterns. Visualizing testing progress, dashboards play a crucial role. By leveraging detailed reporting and analytics, you can monitor the performance of automation and uncover patterns. Get buy-in from stakeholders and Feedback Loop: Early stakeholder involvement is crucial. By involving all individuals from the onset, a unified vision can be fostered. Ensure optimal impact, gather stakeholder feedback, monitor automation efficiency, and adjust iteratively. Conducting reviews and retrospectives at regular intervals helps determine the effectiveness of your test automation. Identifying areas for improvement is crucial to adjusting your strategy. Summary In conclusion, we discussed the pros and cons of test automation and how to overcome any difficulties. In addition, we provide guidance on improving test automation, including selecting the appropriate tools and frameworks, developing a thorough testing approach, and involving key stakeholders early in the process. Effective test automation management is essential for success. Setting clear goals, monitoring progress, and continuously improving the process will ensure that your organization capitalize on the full potential of test automation. By acting and implementing these best practices in your own organizations, your organization can experience enhanced efficiency, accuracy, and faster feedback loops.
Top Metrics & Measures to Determine Test Automation’s True ROI
Test automation is critical in a fast-paced agile development environment for releasing products faster by speeding up the test execution cycle, improving efficiency, and finding regression errors early. However, if we cannot assure the effectiveness of this process, test automation investments may be wasted. Test automation metrics reveal whether your approach is effective. Before diving deep into test automation metrics, let us understand what test coverage and automation coverage are. What is test coverage? Test coverage is defined as “What are we validating and how much are we validating?” It addresses both business and testing requirements. It is frequently confused with Code Coverage. Even though the fundamentals are the same, the points are distinct. Test coverage ensures that all requirements are confirmed and is a QE team pursuit. On the other hand, Code Coverage refers to unit testing procedures that must be directed at all portions of the code at least once and are carried out by developers. What is test automation coverage? In simple words, it shows how much coverage your automation suite is offering vs. how much testing is being done manually. It provides an impartial sense of your QE process that can help you identify and resolve pain points while improving your test automation performance: Test Automation Coverage = Number of tests automated/Number of total tests written Quality Metrics for Test Automation: It is critical to measure what we do and what we measure too. Though there are many metrics that we can collect for measuring how we are doing in terms of test automation, we think the following metrics are worth considering starting, and later you can add more as we make some progress on these ones: Automation Progress This metric refers to the number of automated test cases at any given time. This shows how you’re progressing toward your goal over time and whether there are any significant deviations during the automation testing process. This tells you nothing about the quality of the tests written; therefore, it is essential to ensure that automated tests are as effective as manual tests in catching defects. Automation Progress % = (Number of automated tests / automatable tests) * 100 Automation Stability This indicates how well your test automation suite runs over time. If your tests are failing (flaky failures over time), that is a decent statistic to tell if your tests are not stable. Also, in case there are false failures (false positives and false negatives), it becomes an early warning sign that your test automation suite is not dependable. Automation Stability % = (Number of failed cycles due to flakiness or false failures / Total Number of execution cycles) * 100 Automation Execution Time This indicates how long does the entire automation suite test execution take? Agile software development is all about speed, and the test automation suite should run quickly and not cause any unnecessary delays. This does not tell you anything about the quality of the tests performed. It just has to do with time. Execution Time = End Time of automation run – Start Time of automation run Automatable Test Cases This can assist you in identifying where you are prioritizing automation and what components/features might still necessitate manual validations. It is helpful in preparing the appropriate testing strategy and creating a balance between automated and manual testing. % Automatable = (Number of automatable tests / Number of total tests Written) * 100 Bottom line: Metrics are an important indicator of the health and success of an automated testing effort, but they should not be used as team performance goals. It is used to assess the tests, not the team. Since many companies have set up automation test suites to expedite their test execution cycle, selecting the right tools and contemplating useful test automation metrics are worth considering.
AI is the future of test automation- Are you Ready?
Traditional QE Isn’t Working Anymore Traditional tried-and-tested methods of testing and quality need to catch up in today’s changing environment. A siloed approach: Typical QE teams are separated from development teams. This structure concentrates on optimizing the subcomponents and deviates from the true purpose of enhancing the user experience. Slowing overall engineering velocity: Traditional quality engineering has been chiefly manual, impeding rapid development and operations procedures. Expensive: Traditional QE requires significant engineering resources and costs 30%–40% of the overall expenditure. An afterthought: For decades, the testing strategy has been put off until the end of a product cycle, which is too late and can cause release delays and budget overruns. THE NEW DIGITAL ERA REQUIRES INCREASED SPEED & AGILITY DevOps and intelligent automation, as well as the proliferation of digital applications, have considerably challenged traditional techniques for application testing in recent years. Delivery times have gone from months to weeks, and nowadays, testing has moved to the left and right of the software development lifecycle. Agile and DevOps have combined development and testing into a single, continuous process. Quality engineering has changed from testing to starting with the planning of the first application. It creates a constant feedback loop that lets you plan for the unexpected and act on it. However, to properly comprehend the magnitude of the evolution from testing to quality engineering, we should first recognize how data has impacted software development. Data can do more than just power automation use cases and AI learning datasets for repetitive development and testing processes. The enormous amounts of data users create daily to make it more important for quality engineers to predict risk, find opportunities, increase speed and agility, and reduce technical debt. Quality engineering is changing in tandem with the ever-increasing cyber security concerns. Today’s quality engineering role must enable faster application, product, and service delivery and act as an enabler, not a barrier, to digital transformation. TAKING QE IN THE NEW As these changes in quality, technology, people, and organizations take hold, QE will grow into a role that is more pervasive, real-time, and based on insights. AI-led autonomous frameworks will support this to make sure business continuity and value. Testing will evolve away from traditional ways and toward new ideas and methodologies appropriate for the application engineering world of the future across five dimensions: data, frameworks, process, technology, and organization. FROM APPLICATION-FOCUSED TO PURPOSE-DRIVEN Today’s rapid growth of enterprise application testing environments shows no signs of slowing. As it evolves, QE’s focus on apps will be less defined by its alignment with business objectives. This means testing, monitoring, and making real-time fixes to ensure that the business “works” as well as the code. It also entails creating self-learning, self-adapting systems assisted by machine learning and advanced analytics. Tavant is actively planning for this future. We are propelling QE into the future with breakthroughs in holistic QE strategy, incorporated cognitive and machine learning capabilities, and end-to-end automation. This changes everything, from test planning and test case development to test execution and environment setup, and it helps QE reimagine its role in the future enterprise. Tavant Quality Engineering Services helps organizations engineer quality into their processes by incorporating a whole gamut of services, tools, and techniques to elevate the end-user experience. AI-Powered Next-Gen Test Automation Framework Tavant’s AI-powered next-gen test automation platform, FIRE (Framework for Intelligent and Rapid Execution), is Tavant’s proprietary suite of solution accelerators aimed at optimizing the overall testing effort and delivering a high-quality product. It is a comprehensive tool and technology agnostic-test automation framework. This framework can orchestrate multiple automation tools and technologies, including (but not limited to) Selenium, Appium, Cypress, Protractor, Microfocus and Java, C#, F#, Python, and PHP. The test automation framework ensures speed to market and superior quality software. FIRE 5.0 accelerates the time to market while simultaneously aiding developers to enable a dual shift of the software development lifecycle to gauge the consumer experience and provide continuous feedback into the system. It offers comprehensive test automation coverage and efficiency of more than 90%. Importance of Quality Assurance & Testing in the Finance Industry The financial industry is on the verge of transformation. Mobile banking, investment, insurance, app payments, advances in technologies such as cloud, mobile, AI, agile, and DevOps, and concerns about fraud detection management, data visualization analytics, risk and compliance management, and digital lending require specialized testing. Tavant’s Quality Engineering Services have been designed with the financial industry in mind. Our quality engineering services can help you with an error-free application and accelerate your time to market at a lower cost. Visit here to learn more.
Code-based versus Low-Code/No-Code test automation solutions: Which one to Choose?
Concerns about the quality of software test automation solutions are growing every day, and we face an array of challenges in addressing them. One of the challenges is that we have several test automation solutions to automate our test cases (Web, API, Mobile, etc.). Some test automation solutions in the market require exceptionally good programming knowledge, whereas for a few, intermediate programming knowledge is enough, and we have a few where we can automate things with almost no coding experience. To top it all, there is pressure to deliver faster to the market What is a Code-based Test Automation Solution? Coded solutions, like traditional automation systems, necessitate a very trained workforce with an in-depth understanding of certain tech stacks. A team capable of writing custom code from scratch is required in this case. These solutions are intended to be developed and used by technical users such as SDET, developers, etc. What are Low-Code/No-Code test automation solutions? Low-code test automation solutions allow users to automate tests with some or little coding skill set/experience. Most of the automation testing happens without actual programming. Typically, the most used features/utilities are already built-in through GUI so that users can select the required actions and combine them into a sequence. However, coding expertise is necessary when achieving anything complex to interact. No-code test automation solutions allow users to automate tests in the application with almost no coding knowledge and experience. These solutions are intended to be used by non-technical users such as product owners, business analysts, etc., where we would mostly need to select, click, enter text, scroll, or drag and drop. Difference Between Code-based Vs. Low-Code/No-Code Test Automation solution Category Code-based Solutions Low-Code/No-Code Solutions Coding Need High Low or None Complexity Overly complex Less complex Flexibility Extremely flexible Less flexible Primarily Servers Technical users (Developers and SDET) Anyone who is a part of the project can contribute. Security Concerns Quite Low High Execution Speed Low to Medium (depending on the test case count and test steps). High Automation Design Robust Tightly coupled In today’s world, where new test automation solutions are frequently released, enterprises are looking for ways to expand and accelerate their software delivery processes. Even low-code/no-code solutions now have all the necessary built-in qualities that make them simple to implement with little to no coding knowledge/expertise. The question is if it is winning hearts! Code based Solutions Pros Cons Design and workflow flexibility – Design in accordance with your company’s existing workflows, expertise, and skillset. Ease of Use – Understand your intended users and their skill sets. Create the framework to match up. Need a new feature? – Decide the priority of that feature and implement it, what features your framework should have, and to what extent each feature should go. Something not working? – Find the root cause and go ahead and fix it. Reporting or Dashboard requirement – You have complete access to your execution results and can create whatever report/ dashboard format you want. Pricing – The long-term cost-per-run is much lower than any low-code/no-code test automation solution. Time to build – Creating a stable solution takes time. Depending on the AUT, it could take a lot of time. Need to provide your own DevOps/SecOps ecosystem No Outside assistance – When you develop your own solution, you have only yourself to hold accountable when things go south. Low-Code/No-Code based Solutions Pros Cons Almost no ramp-up time, it is a ready-made solution – no need to build your own. No maintenance for hardware and no need to involve DevOps/SecOps. Outside assistance – You have someone to assist you (based on your support contract) in case you have any queries or need help. Limited scalability- Need a new feature or integration with another tool? – the solution does not yet support a feature. You must wait for a feature and support ticket (you do not have any control over deciding priority) Support wait time – Response time depends on your subscription. It can be anywhere between minutes or hours to days at times. Pricing – it varies, but in the long-term, cost-per-run is significantly higher than using any traditionally built code-based test automation solution. Limited customization- Inflexible reporting/dashboard – Most of these solutions will not give you a choice to have “out-of-the-box” customization. Have any queries? – You are dependent on the solution maker to help you out. Helpless- Waking up after a few months of solution implementation to realize that you cannot increase automation coverage due to the solution’s lack of support. The automation solution company is sunsetting the tool due to any reason.” Since each organization works on different objectives, to deal with the question of which approach to use, here are the top few items to mull over: Who (Tech/Non-Tech/SDET, etc.) will create and maintain these automation test suites? What is getting automated – APIs/Web/Responsive/Desktop/Mobile apps? How complex are the test cases and business situations to be automated? What is the skill set/expertise within the team for creating and maintaining this test automation suite? Is this a new or an existing project where we have already done some automation? Is the test automation suite meant to be integrated with other tools like Test Management, bug tracking, CI/CD, etc.? The test automation suite is meant to be executed at what size? What is the budget and time duration required to complete this project? Final Thoughts It is imperative to realize that there is no silver bullet. As shown above, each choice has its own pros and cons. The key to success is choosing the right solution that balances your team’s skill sets and expertise and simultaneously meets your organization’s objectives. Until then, happy test automation!
CI/CD and Security Testing Integration
Introduction CI and CD = Continuous integration & Continuous delivery OR Continuous deployment. CI/CD is the modern-day software development process in which we can release updates at any time in a sustainable way. The code changes are made frequently and dependably based on customer requests and the sprint life cycle. A CI/CD pipeline, popularly known as the DevOps pipeline, builds up code, executes tests (CI), and wisely deploys an updated application version into the following environment. It also ensures that code changes being merged into the repository are efficient to deploy into the live environment to meet the final goal, i.e., ship software with swiftness and effectiveness. The Pros CICD is a low-risk option – as the process is completely automated. There are no manual interventions for setup or even config changes. Releases can occur in defined frequencies and with the client’s feedback. So, this ought to be a faster & optimum way. Smaller, more recurrent software releases are less disruptive and are easier to troubleshoot or roll back in case of any problem. The process with a structured manner increases productivity; a product will be released independently of other objects, and in the case of multiple series of code- we can release changes independently. This will increase development effort with productivity. A CI/CD pipeline allows teams to analyze builds and test results in detail, leaving little room for last-minute bug surprises. The Cons Team dependencies – Infrastructure, including servers, could be managed by different teams, and when the need arises to access those, it can cause unnecessary delays. Thus, all groups need to be well coordinated with each other all the time. Procedure orientation delay– If defined for any pre-approval process in a project, like no direct access to the infrastructure, it can sometimes delay troubleshooting. New skill sets must be learned – Multiple tools to be used and vendor dependency on those require people with a different skillset in your team. This demands a severe intellectual investment to learn these tools. Why do we need to infuse security validation in our CI/CD pipeline? Continuous integration and Continuous delivery are about speed, repetition, and automation. Development and QA teams are constantly under pressure to deliver releases as fast as possible – provide any new feature(s) or fix the critical bug(s) or an enhancement. But the need for speed repeatedly ignores the importance of security testing, which leaves you at risk of failing to secure your application. Vulnerabilities or flaws found in the live version of an application can cause a breach of confidentiality and expose the software to malicious activity, which costs time, money, and resources to fix and eventually will delay future releases. Integrated security testing makes life simpler for software development teams. That is why DevOps teams habitually embrace the concept known as DevSecOps, which promotes security integration into core DevOps practices. To lessen the chances of vulnerabilities going unobserved during the SDLC, all organizations must add security testing to their existing CI/CD pipeline. Undoubtedly, adding security checks will initially slow down your development cycle. Still, we all need to understand that these steps will improve the security of your organization’s CI/CD pipeline and adds another layer of oversight to ensure security for the end-users. Velocity is the key for every business, where security testing integration is a terrific cream over CI-CD. Thus, it is important to introduce security best practices throughout the build/release pipeline. Conclusion: It is not a secret that security is hard to get right. Still, security is the key in this technologically fast-moving world; therefore, performing security testing is no longer a preference. It should be performed frequently, especially with all critical releases, and should be added to the build/release pipeline for top results. With strong CI/CD security in place, teams can find and fix security issues without notably slowing down the pipeline flow or having to delay/roll back releases. Securing your CI/CD pipelines at every stage and environment that comprise the pipeline should be a priority for any organization that embraces DevOps.
Is It Essential for Lenders and Banks to Embrace Quality Engineering to Achieve Speed and Agility?
Why is good quality engineering important in financial services? Lenders, banks, and insurance companies are increasingly replacing legacy systems and adopting improved technologies across the enterprise, which requires the highest quality engineering and software testing capabilities. Unsurprisingly, their development initiatives are centered on the need to improve efficiencies, add new functionality, and reduce operating costs. It may offer, develop, and bring products to market or incrementally replace existing platforms and solutions while minimizing any business disruption during major or minor release cycles. Quality Engineering must be part of any effective change program to proactively prevent software errors, misfires, malfunctions, and defects that can cause outages, negative client impacts, and regulatory fines. Today’s business demands are numerous and complicated. What do lenders and banks want? A faster time-to-market, including a shorter turnaround time for application rollouts and updates that can keep up with rapidly changing market trends. To reduce costs, as they face increasing pressure to reduce the cost of IT projects and seek intelligent alternatives to reduce project costs. To keep up with technological advancements and the demands of integrated applications that support multiple operating systems and devices. Application stability, which can significantly facilitate an increase in clients and support online exposure demands with zero application downtime. This is where Quality Engineering enters the picture! As stated, “Assurance neither improves nor guarantees quality. It is too late to assure. Quality, good or bad, is already present in the product. To truly meet your customers’ expectations, you must implement a quality engineering approach that instills quality at every stage of the SDLC”. Given the high risk of financial services, quality is a business-critical requirement. As a result, lenders and bankers must adopt a quality-first approach in their software development lifecycle. Quality Engineering entails QE involvement from the start of the SDLC so that quality-related processes run concurrently with development until the final release. This is undoubtedly impossible to accomplish manually, necessitating test automation. The shift-left strategy refers to moving QE to the early stages. However, shifting to the left is no longer sufficient in today’s constantly changing customer demands and volatile financial markets. Quality should be omnipresent, necessitating a shift-everywhere QE strategy. A shift everywhere strategy and a Quality Engineering approach result in an application that scores highly on all key parameters such as functionality, security, reliability, and performance, among others. As businesses look to automate more of their business operations through technology, a well-designed QE plan should include an in-depth and broad-based performance testing plan that identifies trouble spots, recommends solutions that can then be properly implemented, and provides continuous testing. With a shorter time to market, enterprises now have less time to test. What’s next? Tavant – An Absolute Commitment to Quality Engineering Tavant’s QE approach focuses on testing and combines industry best practices with our own methodologies and powerful proprietary tools to guide clients through an ever-changing development environment. Tavant’s Quality Engineering (QE) programs aim to improve the quality of software development and incremental release cycles while avoiding serious technology failures that could have a negative business and brand impact. Our QE experts use a quality management process to ensure that a product/service/platform meets all required specifications as well as all desired operational functionality. Our engineers adhere to a robust process-driven strategy that facilitates and defines specific design goals concerning product/platform/system development roadmaps. Our goal is to track and resolve all bugs, blockers, coding errors, and other issues that may arise and should be addressed before they have a negative business impact. Tavant’s Quality Engineering services are designed to address such challenges throughout the software development and delivery lifecycle. We use the CI/CD approach to ensure faster and higher-quality testing. Rather than relying solely on DevOps for iterative QE, Tavant advises customers on how to establish a dedicated QE strategy and focused action plan that seeks to mitigate and/or eliminate identified risks, enable compliance, and minimize costs. Financial quality engineering services and banks have used QE to test technology deployments for bugs and defects and measure them against internal business and security standards and regulatory mandates through rigorous and thorough performance testing. At the same time, this may satisfy many. Tavant fintech quality engineering services works differently and strives for excellence rather than just meeting minimum standards. We believe speed and accuracy go hand in hand. We appreciate thoroughness, accuracy, and identifying and resolving problems through a well-planned, phased, and executed testing and solution-driven schedule that includes a rigorous back-end testing component. We reimagine software testing for the age of disruption with a ready-to-use test automation platform and a suite of tools and accelerators. Through high-velocity automation, our team helps you spend less time on routine tasks while gaining more insights from data for greater innovation. We elevate testing to the next level by implementing quality engineering throughout the entire lifecycle, from code quality and pipeline quality gates to performance, resiliency, post-production coverage feedback, and everything in between. For more information, visit here or reach out to us at [email protected]. FAQs – Tavant Solutions How does Tavant implement quality engineering for lending institutions?Tavant employs comprehensive quality engineering including automated testing, continuous integration, performance monitoring, and security validation. Their approach ensures rapid deployment while maintaining high reliability and compliance standards. What quality engineering services does Tavant provide to achieve lending agility?Tavant offers test automation frameworks, DevOps implementation, quality assurance consulting, performance optimization, and reliability engineering services that enable faster time-to-market without compromising quality. What is quality engineering in financial services?Quality engineering in financial services encompasses automated testing, continuous quality monitoring, risk-based testing, performance optimization, and security validation to ensure reliable, compliant, and high-performing financial applications. Why do banks need to focus on speed and agility?Banks need speed and agility to compete with fintech companies, meet changing customer expectations, respond to market opportunities quickly, and adapt to regulatory changes in the rapidly evolving financial landscape. How can traditional banks become more agile?Banks can become more agile through cloud adoption, automation, DevOps practices, API-first architectures, continuous integration, and cultural transformation toward iterative development and customer-centric innovation.
Revamping Security Paradigm in the Evolving Technology Landscape
The COVID-19 pandemic forced governments around the world to impose strict travel restrictions and encourage employees to work from home. Technology and connectivity suddenly became more important as companies worldwide scrambled to keep functioning under difficult working conditions. But the IT infrastructure of many companies wasn’t prepared for the rise in cyberattacks. While businesses were grappling with keeping their doors open, studies found that only 38% of companies had a cybersecurity policy in place. Before the pandemic, 20% of cyber-attacks used previously unseen malware or methods. After the pandemic, that number rose to 35%, with large companies such as Honda and Canon succumbing to malicious attacks. Why Cyberthreats Increased During the Pandemic With nearly half the U.S. labor force is working from home, employees are sharing more data remotely through apps, increasing the risks for their employers. Last year the FBI reported that the cyberattack complaints to their Cyber Division rose by 400%, reaching as many as 4000 complaints every day. Let’s look at some of the key causes: Employees work from home in environments with limited or absent security IT infrastructure of businesses are not technologically prepared IT security teams is dispersed, and learning how to minimize threats remotely Hybrid Workforces and the Future of Security One of the critical questions raised is whether businesses will go back to centralized offices or continue to leverage remote workers. The answer appears to be both, as CIOs globally gear up to manage a hybrid workforce. A Gartner survey found that 80% plan to allow employees to work at least part of the time remotely after the pandemic. 47% will allow employees to work from home full-time. As a result, many CIOs and IT leaders seek ways to manage their remote workforce’s security to be better prepared against future attacks. The Importance of Security Testing Today’s new work scenario has raised the importance of improved security and a planned approach to managing security. Breaches can impact brands, customers and even bring in legal repercussions. Companies, therefore, need to focus greater attention and resources on cybersecurity awareness training. Security teams need to be involved during software development to safeguard applications. Security testing can help manage issues related to confidentiality, authorization, authentication, availability, and integrity at every stage of the development process. The New Normal of Cybersecurity To keep themselves and their products secure, enterprises have begun working with security testing services and ethical hackers. Both internal programs and software development can be positively impacted by applying advanced security testing services, including test automation, performance, quality engineering, and digital assurance testing. Cloud Security Testing Cloud-based security testing involves testing newly developed applications for performance, assessing the security of current operating systems and applications on the cloud, vulnerability testing and security assessments via the cloud. Application Security Testing By using a combination of testing tools and techniques, businesses can avail application security testing to ensure their software products are resistant to threats. Application security testing also helps software developers by identifying the applications’ security weaknesses and exposing vulnerabilities in the source code. These can then be rectified before they become a bigger problem. Web Security Testing Security testing for web applications looks for holes and vulnerabilities which hackers could exploit. The web security testing method uses advanced tools and techniques to explore weaknesses, technical flaws and ensure data protection. Mobile Security Testing Mobile phone usage has resulted in increasing attacks through mobile applications. Mobile Security testing exposes vulnerabilities in mobile applications by testing for activities such as data flow and leakage, storage capabilities, authentications, encryption, and regulatory compliance. Security Compliance Testing Compliance is essential to protect against threats to your products and protect your company against legal issues related to attacks on your software. Security compliance testing will focus on ensuring specific industry-based legal compliance are maintained. Network Security Testing In a hybrid work environment, network security testing is critical. Network security testing identifies and vulnerabilities across any type of electronic data network. It also helps businesses shore their defenses and eliminate any security weaknesses within the company network. Penetration Testing By simulating a threatening attack, security testing experts can help identify vulnerabilities in your applications and products over networks, cloud, and web. Penetration testing helps measure and identify system health and any compromises being made both internally and externally. According to Cybercrime Magazine, digital attacks are predicted to inflict damages totaling $6 trillion USD globally in 2021. By seeking improved security testing services, businesses can manage their cybersecurity with greater effectiveness. Companies that wish to protect their business while ensuring employee productivity will find the time to implement security testing and prevent losses due to cyber-attacks.
Quality Engineering Trends in 2021
The new consumer demands nothing less than instant gratification. Need a cab? It’ll reach your location in 5 minutes. Hungry? Give the food tech app 24 minutes. Maybe less. Besides, digital services are seeing a large-scale adoption from consumers around the world, and COVID-19 has further accelerated this pace of adoption. These trends leave no room for error or software failure anymore. Volume and accuracy drive business. Naturally, organizations commit to quality at scale and are therefore rendering software testing and engineering an essential enabler of their operations. This has ensured that quality engineering becomes an even more critical part of the development process, going from a standalone vertical to a horizontal enabler. In this blog post, we discuss the trends that will further drive the rise of quality engineering in 2021. 1. The need for speed will be the key driver for quality Test automation has become a major area of focus in QA in recent years. Automation enables high speeds in the testing process, thus powering lower time to market. This calls for higher agility and DevOps across organizations. Software changes fast now. New feature enablement, enhanced user experience demand this. DevTestOps will drive the faster deployment of these changes in software, once again reducing the time to market for enhanced features and UX improvements. 2. Connected devices will call for higher instances of IoT testing Connected, smart appliances are on the rise and will continue to be so in the coming years. In fact, by 2025, it is expected that there will be more than 30 billion IoT connections, averaging almost four IoT devices per person. The proliferation of connected devices is driving the rise of IoT testing, with its cutting-edge technologies that test software in-built IoT devices. Beyond hardware challenges, IoT testing will also include compliance requirements, access management, hardware issues, among others, to test the seamless performance of connected devices. 3. New AI, ML RPA led testing skills will need to be acquired With saving time, enhanced collaboration high on organizational agendas, AI, ML, RPA will no longer be good-to-have in testing processes. They will become mainstream and will be used to build entire QA environments and help enterprises scale with sustainability and stability. New skills will have to be acquired for these new standards of testing. 4. Testing for UX across devices 90% of consumers around the world use more than one device – from smartphones to smart TV, tablets to laptops. Naturally, apps and services will need to be tested across devices for performance. Interoperability will become a must-have, and organizations will further scale their multi-device, interoperability testing rapidly in 2021. 5. More cybersecurity testing in the face of increasing cyber threats Cyber-attacks are costing organizations and consumers significant amounts of money. 68% of business leaders globally feel that their cybersecurity risks are increasing. Naturally, cybersecurity testing is gaining momentum in the quality engineering space in order to ensure minimal costs and downtime in the occurrence of a threat event. Cybersecurity testing includes penetration testing and provides an in-depth understanding of an organization’s security posture. It identifies points of weakness that could invite threats into the system. Therefore, in the face of increasing cybersecurity incidents around the world, cybersecurity testing will gain even more prominence in 2021. 6. Performance Engineering will become part of organizational cultures Performance engineering enables continuous, proactive testing of application performance. With loads increasing and UX demands on an all-time high, organizations will have no choice but to take on performance engineering head-on. Performance engineering enables QE teams to build accurate and effective performance metrics. In 2021, we foresee performance engineering becoming a matter of corporate culture. It will allow checking every section of systems and software and delivering business value through quality. Which trends do you foresee driving QE in your organization? Reach out to us at [email protected] or visit here to learn more.
Three Step Process to Automate Software Testing
Large software organizations have long been patronizing software testing. However, small and medium (SMBs) sized companies find manual testing time consuming and expensive. For such companies, automation can prove to be the right alternative. Given below is a three step process to automate your software testing requirements: STEP ONE Any software which requires functional tests, if supported by automation testing, must follow a Q&A process. To explain, if a user has ten acceptance test cases, assuming all these can be automated, the following questions need to be answered: Are these test cases within the scope of future releases? Are they a part of the regression suite? Will this particular functionality be used in a majority of flows? Are these tests of high complexity? Are they critical? Thumb rule is to not automate all scenarios, fields on pages etc. unless specified by the client. STEP TWO Understand the application architecture Synchronization process between third party vendors (if applicable) Database design UI design frameworks (e.g. JQuery, Knockout, Wicket, Vaadin, HTML5, etc.) Before finalizing the automation process, these factors also need to be considered: Customer expectations Costs involved (Closed loop or Open Loop) What is the type of application (AUT)? Application’s complexity System configuration support (OS, browser, 32/64-Bit etc.) Ease-of-use for maintenance Forecast on break-event point (ROI) STEP THREE Finally, the framework should have the following parameters: It should provide feasibility to users as per project requirements and also enable all (including non-technical personnel) to participate by writing and maintaining test scripts. The test design approach (E2E, Module wise etc.) The integration process with third party tools (need based) The framework’s flexibility in script enhancements. Automation ensures that testing can be undertaken by any company at any time. While automation has its advantages, it is not 100 percent foolproof and manual intervention is recommended at least at the final stages of product release.