The imperative of continuous quality in the financial services industry

The Financial Services industry has a highly dynamic nature. The emergence of newer technologies, introduction of legislative and regulatory updates, and the implications of economic impact are some of the reasons why the industry needs a process and practice that help them move faster in a better way.

The business risk factors in the financial domain have much serious consequences than any other industry. Therefore, the industry requires a transformation in the culture and outlook toward how it offers services and delivers value. By embracing DevOps, the financial services sector can channel a culture of collaboration while improving efficiency and qualitative value of their service offerings. As per a recent report, the users now are not only looking for quality at speed. In fact, they demand both quality and value at high speed.

DevOps in Financial services promotes a sense of shared responsibility and end-to-end transparency in the processes. To minimize waste, ease the delivery process, and optimize costs and speed, DevOps fosters the practice of continuous improvement. This allows financial services firms to mitigate their business risks through the delivery of continuous quality. For doing so, they need to leverage the right mix of tools, technologies, people, and processes. Let us dive further in to understand how exactly the financial services sector can drive continuous quality:

Achieve continuous with automation

DevOps allows organizations to demolish the traditional silos that exist as a major barrier to achieve faster development and release cycles, flexibility regarding the introduction of feature changes, and possibility for incorporating feedback before final releases. In theory, DevOps promotes all this but in practice, automation is necessary to realize these benefits.

A continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous testing pipeline cannot exist successfully without automation. Having them done manually is out of the picture completely. An automated CI/CD/CT pipeline offers the scope for the developers and operations to accommodate the changes at later stages, acknowledge the continuous feedback loop, and utilize it to deliver high-quality code at the end of each cycle.

Further, automation also takes care of the test environment provisioning, infrastructure versioning, and related time-consuming and laborious tasks. This saves up significant time for the resources to dedicate their efforts to improving the code’s overall quality.

Automated test executions and an active, automated, alert-based monitoring system empower the teams to catch and resolve any defects in time. This practice gives way for proactive intervention and improvement in the code design. Keeping track of the key metrics also helps the teams understand and uncover the areas for improvement and take them into consideration in the next release.

Test automation and continuous quality

From coding and version control, to packaging and release management, to testing and deployment, and to production and monitoring of the outcomes – everything can be automated with DevOps.

Test automation in DevOps eliminates regression defects early in the cycle, which enables the releases to take place at a faster pace. DevOps and automation eliminates the need to compromise on either of the components of speed or quality as they help achieve both.

Test Automation helps leading financial services provider reduce test life cycle time by 50%

A leading provider of business automation solutions for the financial services and brokerage industry built an automation platform that offers a revolutionary approach for allowing business users to automate and maintain complex process challenges in demanding business environments. Given the intricate complexities, the platform provider was looking for test automation services for the UI and workflow applications. Not only did they require the development of a comprehensive regression test suite but also a scalable test automation framework that can take care of all their future test automation needs.

Cigniti’s test automation and DevOps testing experts customized test automation framework to support the financial services firm’s complex application architecture. The team developed and executed over 80 automated functional test cases of workflow application. All the developed scripts were interlinked to form a regression test suite.

With the help of the implemented regression testing and test automation solutions, the firm was able to achieve a 50% reduction in their overall test life cycle time. As our experts took a robust and reusable approach while developing the test automation framework, the test suite maintenance costs were reduced by 90%.

Read the complete success story.

Enterprise Transformation in Financial Industry: Role of DevOps & Continuous Testing

In this webinar, Gerold Rajesh, SVP & Global Head of Quality Management at Brown Brothers Harriman, will take you through the essentials of leading a DevOps-led enterprise transformation, empowered by continuous testing. Watch the session here.

At Cigniti, we standardize efforts and ensure accelerated time-to-market with DevOps testing solutions. We focus on delivering improved deployment quality with greater operational efficiency. Our DevOps testing specialists with their deep experience in Continuous Integration (CI) testing & Continuous Deployment (CD) help configure & execute popular CI/CD tools supporting your DevOps transformation & application testing efforts. Schedule a discussion to connect with our experts today!