Financial Services Software Testing with LISA

The entire financial services industry is moving forward with new business offerings, as a means of being more progressive in attracting and retaining customers. To support the changes in core business processes, the applications supporting a financial institution must change as well. The days in which banks could use batch processing to build general ledgers is gone. Customers want real time access to account balances, proactive notifications to fraudulent account activity, and for it to all happen 24x7. "Banker's hours" have changed.

Progressive financial institutions are not only updating their image and customer service but they are updating the operational systems that make the institutions run better. For example, real time business processes for payments processing and SWIFT transactions along with true straight through processing (STP). These new architectures being engineered are taking contemporary SOA and composites applications to the forefront. Wrapping complex business transactions behind web services and high speed enterprise message bus is the architecture of the new institution.

Understanding how new business processes are being created and then helping ensure quality in new systems is at the heart of LISA. Whether you are looking to test your new architectures to ensure they are compliant with business requirements, or stress them with a high user load, LISA can handle it from one platform.

Challenges

Since financial management systems are the core capital of financial institutions, improving the quality of software is key at both the IT management and executive level.

Some common IT goals of these institutions include:

• Move from legacy batch processing to STP
• Increasing and extending visibility of accounts to customers
• Streamline business process inside FI to increase margins
• Automating business processes and managing by exception
• Improving compliance and control levels for fiduciary banking standards and corporate regulatory requirements (Sarbanes-Oxley)

Despite these goals, companies face significant challenges in moving to a modern software architecture.

• Momentum. Since financial institutions were among the earliest adopters of transaction systems (by necessity), some of these systems may have been in place for more than 20+ years. Implementing new technologies on top of or as replacement of existing functioning systems is hard. Companies are afraid mess with systems that are not yet broken.
• Attrition. Since many of the existing databases and systems are so old, the analysts and developers who wrote legacy systems aren't around to explain how they work.
• Mindset. Finance has traditionally adopted a store and foreword to batch processing mindset, which worked well enough before the Internet changed business. Moving to STP requires new architectures and new hardware, the value of which may be hard to justify.
• Opacity. Moving to a SOA architecture will create black boxes between systems that have not existed in the past. How can the bank or FI rely on those business partners or systems that are not under its direct control?

Benefits of iTKO LISA 4

Moving to new architectures brings new challenges in testing and validating the performance of applications. A past lack of ability of testing solutions to thoroughly test and monitor new systems, where the business logic resides in the middle tiers, inhibits this overdue change. The inherent distributed natures of payments, SWIFT, and credit card calls for a better testing tool.

iTKO's LISA has been designed from the ground up to support SOA and composite applications. LISA provides the ability to create a multi-step business transaction, validate responses from service requests, and simulate back end data.

• LISA is a contemporary architecture built from the ground up to support SOA protocols and multi-tier financial applications
• Business analysts and QA work together to validate business transactions before application and UI coding is complete
• LISA tests are used for functional, regression, and load testing. Load and performance testing can be done at a system or component level during development, instead of after deployment
• The declarative method of testing in LISA enables test cases to survive over time and add value to the business as tests are reused and overall test coverage increases quality and service levels.

High Transaction Volume Load Testing

Once application functionality has been verified, load testing becomes more critical than ever. With greater web, WAP, and telephony access to banking information, the middle-tier applications supporting a SOA have to be able to perform and scale. The ability for LISA Load/Performance Server to simulate thousands of users and transaction for mission critical 24x7 applications is moved from the nice to have list to must-have list.

LISA functional and business transaction tests to be utilized and run as high volume performance and soak tests, creating the assurance that customer service will stay high over time, as the business grows. In addition, LISA attains higher load test performance levels with less system overhead and no "per target server" additional licensing, so your entire team has the incentive to continuously test.