Software Testing – Bank Domain Application Testing

Banking domain application testing (BDAT) refers to testing an application that is developed especially for banks for performing all required functionalities like transactions, loan approval, managing different types of bank cards, and much more, the functionality depends on the size and type of bank. 

The banking industry is one of the largest users of the IT industry and involves lots of testing and maintenance along with application development. The bank always needs an application with smooth functioning and secure environment, which can control the high traffic on special days, highly confidential data management and security, responsibly maintain the deposited amount by users, correct data entry with no calculation mistakes, and much more. Thus, testing of bank applications is very important and the chances of the defect must be near zero as the bank is working on money that no one efforts to lose at any point.

The following topics of bank domain application testing will be discussed here:

1. What is Domain in Testing?
2. Importance of Domain Knowledge.
3. Introduction to Banking Domain.
4. Why we need Banking Application.
5. Characteristics of a Banking Application.
6. Stages of Testing Banking Application.
7. Sample Test Cases for Net Banking Login Application.
8. Challenges in Testing Banking Domain and their Mitigation.
9. Importance of Testing Banking Applications.

What is Domain in Testing?

Domain specifies a particular type of industry to which a software belongs and this can be finance domain, retail, banking, etc. To work for any domain, we need its complete knowledge so that we can easily and effectively expertise in making respective domain applications. 

Domain in Testing is defined as testing software that is specific to a particular industry or field, like testing school applications, it is an education domain-specific application. For working with domain-specific applications there are domain experts who teach the testers and developers team. To test any domain-specific application, testers need to have an acute knowledge of that field so that they can perform better during testing.

Importance of Domain knowledge

Domain knowledge plays a very important role in testing domain-specific applications. Some of its benefits are:

• Reduces testing time: It reduces the testing time as testers know what and how they want to test the application.
• Effective writing test cases: It helps in effectively writing test cases and test scenarios.
• Quick bug tracking: Easy bug tracking during testing, testers know how a system behaves.
• Helps to decide the testing stage: It helps testers in deciding the testing stages to test software.
• Provides a complete picture of application: It gives a complete picture of how applications work, their interconnection, and their primary functions.

Introduction to Banking Domain

The banking Domain refers to all the segments or components needed to provide financial services to customers. It includes everything a Bank needs to complete its definition like transactions, customer interaction, bank interaction, and much more. The various segments of the bank which are needed for its functioning include:

• Customer: It is the one among the organization or an individual who uses the bank services according to their needs.
• Services and facilities: It defines the type of services a bank provides to its users like account management, transaction, etc.
• Process and workflow: It deals with the working of the bank, and how the customer requirements go through various procedures and rules.
• Modes of Dealing: Bank operates both physically and online. It defines various ways of using banking services.

The banking domain is a wide area where banks are divided into the following categories:

• Saving Bank: These banks provide facilities like deposits of money and paying interest to customers.
• Industrial Bank: These banks provide loans to industries for their growth and work.
• Commercial Bank: These are the basic banking providing functions like deposits, providing loans, transactions, and saving accounts to customers and small businesses.
• Central Bank: These are the capital banks that regulate the working of other banks, they manage the currency of the country and the flow of money.
• Agricultural Bank: these banks are for providing help to the agricultural sector like to farmers for cropping and giving loans on their fields.

Why do we need Bank Application?

In the older days, Banks provide many facilities to its customer only by the means of their physical branches from where customer can easily access their bank account. But, today as the world is going digital and peoples want to use bank features through their mobiles, laptops, and with just one click, instead of going to a physical branch as it saves them valuable time. Below are some of the reasons why a bank application is required:

• To save time: To serve customers’ online needs banks are going online and for this, they require bank applications. This helps to save customers time as they don’t have to visit the physical branch for small tasks like checking the account balance.
• Accessing bank 24×7: Mobile banking applications provide 24×7 access to banks and thus save customer’s time. 
• Ready access to banking functions: Almost all banking functions are available to customers with just one click. For example, customers can check their savings account balance, transfer funds, request a new cheque book, etc.
• Track spending: Customers can track their spending using the banking application. Customers can also avail of automatic payment services where customers can sign up for auto payment of utility bills like electricity bills, EMIs, etc.
• Locate the nearest ATM: Customers can use the mobile banking application to locate the nearest ATM as well as locate the nearest branch of the bank.

With the development of banking applications, their testing is also crucial and its testing does not stop at simply testing functions of the application but also includes database testing, security testing, integration testing, and multiple users concurrently executing the transaction at a time that needs balancing customer load.

Characteristics of Banking Application

• Support multiple functions: It supports multiple functions from fetching money to lending money, loans to customers, give interest on their deposited money.
• Secure and Real-Time transactions: Banking applications supports secure and real-time transactions where customers can transfer funds using NEFT, RTGS, etc.
• Multi-lingual support: It supports multi-lingual functionality where the customer can select the language from the supported languages in which the customer is comfortable.
• Multi-Platform support: It works on different platforms like Mac, Linux, and Windows.
• Multiple transaction support: Supports multiple transactions at a time and even supports lots of traffic on special days and random days.
• Support range of devices: It supports multiple working devices like mobile banking and system application.
• Support cards: It supports card system money transactions and the cards can be like credit cards, debit cards, Master cards, or Visa cards.
• Multiple UPI payment support: It supports multiple UPI payment methods with correct audits and safe money transfers.
• Support changes in taxes: It supports and regulates all changes in taxes, and interest rates fixed by the government.

Stages of Testing Banking Application

The banking Domain Application is designed to serve the purpose of banks which include two types of banks one is commercial banks and another is central banks. The testing of bank applications uses end-to-end testing and testing starts with the requirement gathering of software and finishes at its release.

The process used to perform testing of this application includes the following listed steps:

• Requirement collection and analysis: To start working initially all requirements are collected by the business analysts. Like in agile model testers activate with a collection of requirements. The testers test, analyse and review the collected requirements from business analysts and gain as much possible domain knowledge to carry out fruitful testing. Domain knowledge is important for the type of application you are working on, as it helps in understanding the requirements of the application and its working. Testers gain knowledge from research and other resources.  After collecting all requirements they are documented by business analysts for further use.
• Documentation: The business analyst after collecting all requirements converts them to technical documents called BRS for further study which are used by high-level teams including the tester. The tester studies the documented requirements to understand the needs of the application.
• Design and Development: After reviewing of requirements and their documentation, the document is collected by designers to make an initial design of the system, and the development team starts developing the application.
  Testing: On the developed module testers start testing by preparing test plans and test scenarios which cover all the information required to carry out the test cases. The test scenario can be like testing the new user account, transaction page, or login page. It includes various types of testing like as:
• Functional Testing: Testers start with testing the functionalities of the developed modules and write test cases for all possible conditions of particular functionality. This testing tests the behaviour of various functions of the application one of the major functions of a bank application is to withdraw money, here tester checks whether after withdrawing money it is deducted from the original balance or not.
• Database Testing: In a banking application, there is a huge database that contains very important and confidential information, its testing is important and to carry out database testing testers must have database knowledge. This testing is defined as testing the database which contains tables, schema, triggers, etc., it tests the flow of data and data consistency by creating SQL queries.
• Integration testing: In this testing, all developed and tested modules are combined together and the whole system is tested at a time, it checks the flow among modules and their dependencies. 
• Usability Testing: The banking application needs to be user-friendly as it will be operated by various users belonging to different platforms from tech-savvy users to technically weak users. Usability testing is used to check the ease of software and the user experience while using it. It is done by a targeted group of people, who use the application and give their feedback. Their feedback is useful in making the application more effective and in learning from the behaviour of people who are operating them for the first time.
• Security Testing: The most important demand of a Banking Application is its security as it is most vulnerable to theft and hackers are always attempting to hack the application or user account. Its security includes protection from unauthorized access, hacking of user accounts, and unknown money transfer. Security testing means testing the application for finding loopholes in its security which provide a path for leakage of data information and unauthorized access, here tester covers all positive and negative scenarios for how an application can break. If some loophole is found then multiple-layer security is used to safeguard the application like one-time password generation, the confirmation message to the user asking, “you log in to your account?” and much more.
• User Acceptance Testing: Before releasing the software to the real world, it is sent for User Acceptance Testing, which is a type of testing in which the client tests the application to validate the application requirements. This testing is the last testing and it is a kind of black box testing that is executed before releasing the application to the client it is done after system, function, and integration testing,

Sample Test Case for Net Banking Login Application

Consider one test case of a banking application when a user login to their account using net banking. Below are the test cases for the login page:

Functionality	Test Cases
For Customer	Check customer login with valid input data which includes valid email id and password. Check customer login with invalid data.
For Login	Check the password field is following all instructions to create a password. Check all tick fields on the login page. Check the flow of the login page after pressing submit button. Check the login with a valid password and an invalid username. Check login with an invalid password and valid username. Check user cannot insert an invalid password more than 3 times or as per rules decided by the application. In case the user enters an invalid password after the upper limit, check system is blocking the user’s account or not.
For New Users	Check whether it is possible to create new user without data. Check whether it is possible to create new user with valid and invalid details. Check whether it is possible to create new user with existing branch. Verify the deletion of user. Verify the cancel option.
For Admin	Check whether admin can login with valid and invalid data. Check whether admin can login without data. Check whether admin can change password with valid and invalid data. Check whether admin can change password without data.
For New Branch	Check if it is possible to create new branch with valid and invalid data. Check if it is possible to create a new branch without data. Check if it is possible to update branch with valid and invalid data. Check if it is possible to update branch without data.

Banking Domain Application Testing Challenges and Their Mitigation

S No.	Challenges	Mitigation
1.	The biggest challenge and requirement of banking applications is providing a secure environment to its customer so that their confidential information regarding money can be secure from thefts, hackers	Testers should implement security testing very effectively and pay special attention to creating and checking different security layers.
2.	When the functioning of the old branch bank shifts to a new branch and whole data is tightly shifted along with the need for whether new functionalities of the new branch.	Testers need to do data mitigation testing and regression testing to check whether everything is balanced or not.
3.	Bank application has a large pool of database which demand high security and upgradation with time and every transaction.	Testers ensure Database testing and apply automation tools to check the flow of data.
4.	The bank works on different types of devices like mobile banking, net banking, and physical bank, and all need to be synchronized.	Testers ensure the working of banking does not interrupt the type of device and its application resolution also remains perfect. Testers confirm whether performance testing is properly carried out or not.
5.	Less documentation of the application. As sometimes there is no full documentation of all the requirements of the banking application.	Testers ensure they acquired needed domain knowledge and are active from the time of requirement collection.

Importance of Testing Banking Applications

The banking Application needs testing at each and every step, and the reasons are:

• Operations are safe: Security is the foremost requirement of the Banking sector, during testing, it is kept in mind and testers check the application during security testing and try to find all possible loopholes to break the application.
• Helps maintain company standards: Banking Applications should follow all rules and regulations decided by the finance department, this is checked during testing. So, the company need not worry about government rules and testing helps in maintaining the company standards.
• Helps understand user experience: Testing helps applications in knowing how customers feel while using it as it goes through user acceptance testing.
• Helps to understand application behavior on multiple devices: Testing helps in knowing the behavior of applications while dealing with mobile and laptop, as application needs to perform the same along with their visibility.
• Collaborates stakeholders: Testing collaborates all stakeholders from starting of the application testing by which, they know the working and efficiency of the application.