Ensuring Excellence: Comprehensive Testing Tools for Robust Mobile Banking Apps

By Srirang Srikantha

In the rapidly evolving landscape of mobile technology, the global user base is projected to reach 1.78 billion by 2028, according to the Compound Annual Growth Rate. The surge in mobile device demand has prompted developers and testers to diligently address consumer needs. Ensuring stable network connections, seamless app operation after updates, and other crucial functionalities have become paramount. This isn’t just about meeting individual user requirements but also generating economic returns for organizations. In this dynamic technological context, the use of appropriate testing tools is imperative. Particularly for mobile banking apps, which serve as constant companions for a majority of internet banking customers, handling tasks such as money transfers, account balance checks, and stock trading. Given the sensitive nature of the information they handle, robust testing during the development cycle is crucial to avoid omissions or gaps that could compromise security.

The testing process is vital for protecting financial apps, ensuring device compatibility, and validating critical functionalities to provide a consistent and secure user experience, especially when dealing with sensitive financial data.

Key Features to Look for in Mobile Banking App Testing Tools:

Cross-browser/ cross-platform compatibility: A robust testing solution should support multiple operating systems (iOS, Android), browsers, and device types to ensure seamless functionality across various platforms, devices, and browsers.

Real device testing: The ability to perform tests on real devices, rather than relying solely on emulators or simulators, is essential for detecting issues that may arise in real-world scenarios due to hardware limitations or specific device configurations.

Security testing capabilities: Given the sensitive nature of financial transactions, a reliable testing solution should incorporate comprehensive security testing measures to identify vulnerabilities and protect against potential breaches.

Performance and load testing: Mobile banking apps must handle large volumes of users simultaneously while maintaining optimal performance. Testing solutions with performance and load testing capabilities can simulate real-world scenarios and assess the app’s responsiveness under heavy traffic.

Usability and accessibility assessment: Ensuring a smooth user experience is vital for mobile banking apps. Look for a solution that includes usability and accessibility testing features, allowing you to evaluate navigation, ease of use, compliance with accessibility guidelines, and overall user satisfaction.

Functional testing: Ensuring that all the functionalities of an app work without any defect or error is important to deliver quality results. It involves acceptance testing (testing the readiness), integration testing (testing integrations across platforms), and regression testing (verifying changes).

Organizing test cases: The critical part of organizing the tests cases include understanding the types of tests (functional and non-functional), planning the key metrics such as type of defects, coverage area, etc. Additionally, they should also consider the test scenarios – applications may face issues such as network problems, traffic, device configuration and much more.

Understanding the type of application to be tested: Understanding the type of application being tested is important to yield accurate results. Whether the application is native, having deep interactions with the APIs, web application running in mobile browsers, or hybrid application showing the aspects of both. A thorough analysis of each type of application should be conducted, as each has its unique set of requirements. Depending on the type of application, a better understanding of the test execution is gained which will help to reduce cost, enhance test coverage, while optimizing automated testing.

Highlighting a few notable applications within the domain of Mobile Banking App Testing Solutions

Tenjin Online– Tenjin Online specializes in web app, mobile app, API, and database testing, offering a comprehensive testing solution. It is the world’s most advanced Cloud-native testing suite covering a wide gamut of capabilities – test life cycle management, codeless automation, DevOps integration, device farm integration, defect management integration and many more exciting capabilities. Features like self-healing technology, bot-based test execution, and reusability of bots across multiple test cases make test execution efficient.

Appium – Appium is known for its cross-platform capability, allowing banks to conduct mobile app testing seamlessly across both Android and iOS. It is an open-source mobile testing tool favored by developers and testers, supporting Android versions from 2.3 onwards. Appium executes test cases using the WebDriver interface, enabling mobile app testing into existing CI/CD pipelines. Appium Inspector allows visual debugging of automated tests and is particularly helpful for beginners.

XCUITest  – XCUITest is Apple’s native testing framework for automating testing of iOS applications. It offers a range of features to ensure top-notch quality and reliability, supporting testing on both real iOS devices and simulators. It can be integrated into CI/CD pipelines using Xcode Server or other CI tools, enabling automated testing.

Perfecto – Perfecto is a comprehensive platform for live, automated, and continuous testing for web and mobile applications. It uses ML-based noise filtering to eliminate redundant data and specializes in end-to-end testing, providing real device testing on the Cloud. Perfecto’s focus on automation, parallel testing, and continuous testing aligns well with the dynamic requirements of mobile banking apps.

Firebase Test Lab – Firebase Test Lab, part of Google’s suite, delivers Cloud-based testing specifically for Android apps. Its integration with other Firebase services ensures comprehensive testing, supporting test automation and a wide range of Android devices. Test Lab exercises the apps on devices installed and running in a Google data center, allowing the identification of issues that may only occur on specific devices and configurations.

Testing with these tools ensures that mobile banking apps meet the highest standards of functionality, performance, and security, providing users with a seamless and reliable banking experience.

(The author is Srirang Srikantha, Founder & CEO, Yethi Consulting, and the views expressed in this article his own)