Walking The Payments Testing Tightrope

Putting any type of payment system or solution out into the market without adequate testing may sound like an unrealistic scenario, but a surprising number of institutions fall short.

In the specialist area of payments testing, things have become increasingly more challenging. Ever-evolving standards, proprietary interfaces and formats, cryptography, the evolution of new messages and tokens and the constant external forces of crime and fraud all add immeasurable layers of complexity, which need to be managed and controlled. Add to this an increasing move towards Agile development, and it’s easy to see why testing payments is not quite as simple as it used to be.

Though it may be hard to keep up in the payments testing space, not keeping up can cost banks or payments processors big time.

“When financial institutions get things wrong, high-profile exposure in the press and social media damages corporate reputation and share prices,” Anthony Walton, CEO of Iliad Solutions, stated.

Unfortunately, for many of those institutions, payments testing continues to receive insufficient attention until it’s too late. The root of this mistake, Walton explained, lies in the whole process of testing payments, which is often facilitated by a maze of standalone simulators, in-house tools, stubs and ‘mocks’ (ad hoc pieces of code developed by the organization).

These are historic ways of working and are now, largely, out of date. Iliad has identified that organizations need to be able to develop new technology faster and to be first to market given the challenge posed by new, nimbler entrants and the increase in customer expectations.

Rising To The Payments Testing Challenge

According to Iliad’s research and analysis, there are very specific ways organizations can overcome the pain points of setting up a test plan and reducing the risk and cost of their projects.

The first is through virtualization. Virtualization delivers great benefits through the removal of resource constraints, the consolidation of skills and a testing approach that creates a standardized environment.

“Virtualization enables the simulation of a real-world environment, without the impossible costs of operating for testing purposes multiple mirror images set up end to end,” Iliad explained. “In the payments space, though, lacking support for the relevant standards, message flows and cryptography means that standard generic platforms can only hope to scratch the surface of what is possible.”

Being able to virtualize an environment is, in most cases, sufficient to produce greater efficiencies. Creating multiple virtual images of the system under test enables entire testing streams to be run in parallel.

“It is no longer sufficient to test elements of the payment process flow individually and in silos. The payments cycle incorporates all aspects of the payment process, from initiation all the way through to settlement and reconciliation, and the test environment should have the capacity and capability to test this as if in the real world,” Anthony explained.

Another thing to look at is the benefits of automation. To many people, the benefits of automation are obvious. Tests are consistent, can be run faster and run over and over again with fewer overheads. As more automated tests are added to the test environment, more can be run each time. Manual testing never entirely goes away, but efforts can now be focused on more rigorous and consistent tests.

Succeeding In The Age of Agile

For years, the creation and deployment of software has revolved around waterfall development patterns, where each element in the sequence largely depends upon the completion of the one before. But as computing power and the demands on development departments have increased over the years, organizations have evolved to using a more iterative, progressive approach to development.

However, in an Agile environment, where iterative processes focus on reducing the size of cycles and creating a fluid program through which software elements can be created rapidly, Iliad stated that testing can ensure success.

“The principles of Agile demand that testing is a core part of the whole process, not simply a random addition or something that merely checks a  piece of code is working,” Walton explained. This requires more than just making sure software can work in the development environment. Proper testing means that the payments system can operate in a real deployment throughout the entire Agile process.

This means putting a well-executed test strategy in place, one that focuses on the collaborative and simultaneous learning about the software. In an environment that is designed to expose learning, share intelligence and support real-world deployments, continuous integration and testing automation are key.

“Service virtualization enables the end-to-end modeling of a complete environment for testing purposes by simulating the behavior of software components and removing dependencies and constraints on development and testing teams,” Walton said.