Why is this bank application taking this long to respond? Why is this transaction taking so long? When will the application stop crashing? Well, these and many other million questions will come to your customer’s mind if your banking application is not performing efficiently. While you keep thinking to integrate several capable features and technologies in your banking platform, missing out on testing the reliability of your services, all the enhancements and efforts might go in vain. So, how do you ensure the completeness of your offerings?

Answer: Performance Testing

Why do you need to take Performance Testing seriously?

Millennials and Gen Z’s are the major banking customers in current times and all they expect from financial institutions are instant services. In order to cater to their needs, core technical enhancements like Agile and DevOps assist, has become a mandate. However, tech experts also need to ensure smooth flow of the process. Hence, it is importance to consider performance testing in the early stages.
While functional testing begins as and when a feature is developed, it is equally important to begin the performance testing simultaneously. This way, it becomes easy for IT experts to address the elephant in the room instead of high-level debugging. Here are some advantages of performance testing:

1.Seamless multiple feature integration

Current financial applications are more than just maintaining an account; we can call it more like ‘financial lifestyle.’ From budget management to seamless transactions, we depend on financial applications. With modern enhancements like biometric authentication, digital wallets, audio/video transactions, etc., these features not only enhance customer experience, but also add additional performance load on the banking servers. Hence, it is essential to keep a tab on the load, and work on optimum maintenance of the servers.

2.It’s all about customers

On one side of the banking face, tech experts are looking at different ways to enhance customer experience by leveraging analytics, undergoing digital transformation, etc. On the other side, the aspect that should be considered is the extent with which the financial applications respond to the customers. Higher the efficiency of the response, happier your customers will be. What we mean by efficiency is that the app responds in a faster, smoother, and accurate way.

3.Mobile Banking needs ‘extra care’

Compared to the internet banking, mobile banking undergoes extra stress due to network inconsistency, unreliability of the networks, etc. Extra care is needed to ensure that the application can handle this uncertainty dynamically.

4.Save the Server

It often happens that during unprecedented situations like high load, insecure environment, etc., the servers often crash. The more server crashes, the higher the time infrastructure team takes to debug. This reflects in the banking application’s front-end, hence reducing efficiency drastically. However, by including performance testing at the early stages, testers duplicate such situations in the testing environment, find the capacity, and based on the results, it can be improvised.

5.Consistent behaviour is paramount

Sometimes, banking applications may slightly alter its behaviour from customer to customer. It may also behave unexpectedly if the load is suddenly increased. This is due to core performance discrepancies, and if detected at an early stage, the consistency of the application can be ensured.

Types of Performance Testing

1.Shift Left Testing

Shift Left Testing is performed in the early stages to debug design and coding errors. When performance testing is carried after every sprint, issues can be debugged in the infant stage and thereby, reduce time-to-market.

2.Continuous Performance Testing

Continuous performance testing is done as and when a feature is developed, to ensure the resilience of the feature developed.

3.Capacity Planning

Capacity planning helps in identifying the right hardware capacity for the system to withstand the expected load. Additionally, it considers the future enhancements along with the increase in the number of users and ability to scale accordingly.

4.Performance Benchmarking

This ensures that the current software’s performance is matching the KPI irrespective of the testing environment.

5.Performance Monitoring

Even after the software is deployed, it is continuously monitored to identify and resolve any performance related issues.

A Takeaway

Current banking scenario is all about digital banking, which means testing, becomes an imperative element of banking and financial services. There are several financial institutions that have excelled in functional testing yet failed in customer satisfaction due to performance testing ignorance. In order to ensure holistic application brilliance, it is important to have a strong performance limb for your testing super body. Several software tools are available in the market that help track the performance of your products at each stages of production. The actionable metrics provided by these tools through instant reports help you improve the efficiency of your offerings, thereby promoting a quality product to your customers.

Know more about performance testing here

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