Load Testing for Banking Apps: A Guide

What connects the companies financially in today's landscape where the global economy is vividly connected? BANKING!! Yes, banking plays a foundational role in financially connecting companies regardless of location.  

However, catering to the complex nature of finances and the risk of fraud, security, and privacy, the development of banking applications has become complex. Specifically talking about the feature of enabling transactions!! Perhaps it has become more complicated than most enterprise software.  

The use of mobile banking apps has skyrocketed. Also, not overlooking the security concerns, even a single account in the banking application holds several records at a time. With insights from Fortune Business Insights, the total value of mobile device payments amounted to $503 billion in 2021. Thus, reliability and scalability are essential, banking applications must undergo extensive load testing.    

In this blog, we will highlight load testing for banking apps, why it is essential, and how it must be implemented.    

Let's begin!!    

Defining Banking Application Testing

A banking application is usually believed to have a complex structure. This is why the development or testing team has to manage a wide range of features and ensure its security, functionality, and performance for its users, all while offering an enjoyable and smooth experience overall customer experience.   

Disseminating an app full of code errors and performance issues will likely act as a boost and catalyst to the company's reputation. That's why monitoring, assessing, and optimizing the tool's performance based on real-world ideologies and scenarios is essential.    

There are several pointers QA specialists and banking app testing services consider or prioritize for mobile banking application testing:

• Functionality: It truly implies making sure modules work as expected when considering them on both a joint and separate basis. 
• UX or usability: Banking specialists are not always proficient PC users. When it comes to branch clients, it is not necessary that everyone has a good command of the web either. That's why application developers have to build clean, nonchaotic user-friendly interfaces. Testers must ensure that the product's graphic attributes don't require much time and that all the primary services are a few clicks away from the home page.   
• Performance: no user would stay when a webpage or the app is slow. Slow page loading and low responsivity on mobile devices are some of the severe issues that can negatively influence user retention rates. A tester must ensure the product is fast and works consistently on various operating systems and browsers.   
• Security: The mere objective of security testing is to ensure the application meets standard security guidelines and has additional protection means to be clear in the event of hacker attacks. Most developed countries are tightening their grip on web security. And that's why companies risk ignoring basic forms of protection principles. By not being compliant with security directives, company owners can put themselves at risk of penalties or criminal prosecution.   

Want to know why QA is essential for banking systems?  

Read our blog: why is quality assurance essential for banking systems? 

What is load testing for banking apps?   

Load testing, as the name suggests, allows testers to evaluate the actual load capacity of banking applications and ensure that the application keeps working optimally even during peak hours.    

It is a subset of performance testing.   

Why is load testing for banking apps required?   

Digital banking involves various services, such as bill payments, marketing, financial management, analytics, and more. These emerging applications in finance force software developers to incorporate other emerging technologies and develop new features to meet ever-changing customer demands.  

• More or maximum number of users cannot be supported by banking software or application while also allowing commercial transactions. All in all, banking applications at the same time are also less trustworthy and responsive, which slows down transaction processing. It is important to load test these applications to obtain the best testing assistance.   
• At the same time, the load testing procedure can expose significant issues in an application, like bandwidth limitation and load balancing problems. 
• The architecture of older banking business systems and their transactions is incompatible with the most advanced performance testing tools. These programs occasionally make mistakes when processing company operations for the first time.   
• Every business process must be covered in legacy apps. This means that these programs could forget to capture crucial commercial interactions. The software may fail to accurately reflect the actual business strain on the server even if only one process is lost during scenario recording, leading to meaningless testing.  
• Load testing helps software or the developing teams test any application's efficiency. It involves various tests that assist testing teams in gauging the performance of different technologies. App load testing helps units measure the speed and scalability of the application and its consistency and resilience.  
• Load testing becomes even more essential as the quality of any software system entirely depends on how well underlying vulnerabilities are identified. Unless load testing is being performed, there's no way of knowing how an application will behave in a real-world environment. Furthermore, not overlooking the risk of the application crashing will be significantly higher in the absence of load performance testing services.   

How To Do Load Testing For Banking Apps?   

• Requirement Gathering and Analysis  

In this step, the testing team tries to evaluate the testing requirements and outline which of the given conditions they can test.  The specifications of any given system can be either functional or non-functional, totally dependable. The testers must check useful business features and metrics such as speed, reliability, availability, and security.  

• Test Case Development  

The Test Case Development phase creates test cases and their corresponding scripts. The test team needs to make, verify, and remake specific test cases based on given features and their requirements.    

• Environment Setup  

The test environment usually comprises testing conditions such as hardware and software specifications used during the testing procedure.  

• Execution  

In the Test Execution phase, testers conduct testing according to the team's test plans and test cases.    

During the concluding steps, the entire testing team will meet, exchange information, and further analyse testing documents to optimize the testing strategies.   

Wrapping Up!!      

The reasons mentioned above are enough to realize how vital load testing is for banking applications. This is why, many testers rely on load performance testing to detect significant load and performance-related issues such as buffer overflow, memory leaks, and memory mismanagement.     

At BugRaptors, we provide ultimate solutions and testing services for your applications, and banking and finance are no exception. At the same time, our testing procedure can expose significant issues in an application like bandwidth limitation and load balancing problems.    

For more information, contact us at info@bugraptors.com