Quality Assurance for a Financial Services Company

Challenge

By the time the client contacted us for the project, the application had already successfully operated in its home country for several years. However, this year, the company started planning to expand its presence to a new location in the region and decided to update and enhance the original application to better serve customers in the new market. Moreover, the updated application had to fit advanced security requirements, as well as usability and legal regulations, so there was a considerable chunk of work being done by the development team. 

During the initial discussions, the client pointed out the most important aspects of the upcoming testing project. Specifically, they needed an application that had an appealing user interface, delivered spotless functionality and performance, and complied with all security requirements and industry standards of the target market. The client also emphasized how important it was to release the product on time so that user adoption would go over smoothly.

The key challenge of the project was the fact that by nature, financial and banking applications deal with a lot of sensitive information. This is why, in order to protect the integrity of the software, the client designed a complex access control system for the testing team. Another challenge was that the mobile application was still in the active development phase, which meant we often had to test various modules separately without yet knowing how they affected each other’s operation.

Solutions

After getting a clear understanding of the client’s needs and project requirements, and after taking a few days to familiarize ourselves with the product, we immediately set out to work. To shorten the introduction period and start delivering the results faster, we originally engaged a larger team and then gradually scaled it down to better fit the needs of the project.

Given that the mobile application was not yet fully developed, we had to use a dynamic approach to testing: first, we tested everything that was already available to us, and then, as new modules were added to the application, we also tested them individually and together with the whole system. The client did not previously use a bug tracking system, so we suggested our own template and it perfectly fit every party’s needs. The types of testing we used on this project included:

• Functional testing
• Cross-platform testing
• UI/UX testing
• Exploratory testing
• Ad hoc testing
• Confirmation testing
• Regression testing

As is always the case with our testing projects, we made sure to test the solution on physical devices: specifically, we used four different iOS and Android smartphones to see how the app would perform on devices with different hardware characteristics and display sizes.

We communicated with the client through bi-weekly team calls and regular messaging and reporting. Our team also built close cooperation with the client’s development team, which is why we could promptly retest the application after the developers introduced any changes. The QA team on this project consisted of:

• 3 to 5 QA Engineers (at different project stages)
• 1 QA Lead