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The digital era has generated changes in everything, how we think, how we socialize, how we live and almost all other aspects that touch our daily life. It’s all about being connected, with the right information, the right access at the right time. The monthly payments are executed without human intervention, and with the IoT scheme, the need to adopt CNP accelerates; all you have to do is decide where to spend. Payment systems are revolutionized to capture the moment and ensure a purchase easily, quickly and painlessly. Behind every successful payment and shopping experience, there is a complex life cycle of the payment system; a complexity that inexorably grows next to the constant changes that come with new rules and regulations, innovation, maintenance or simply normal application. Ensuring that your payment system is tested is very important in the future of your organization.
How can organizations ensure that the changes made to their payment systems are correct? How can they accelerate the time to market and reduce the costs of testing? How can you ensure that your payment system is compatible with the appropriate levels of transaction processing? If you are involved with proof of payment transactions, I am sure you ask these questions every day. The payment system life cycle is complex and requires knowledge along with the right experience, and if you are considering better ways to test your payment system, there are options. If you have your test system manually with internal resources or through specialized third-party services or adopted an automated software solution or a mixture of test capabilities and resources, the test solution has to provide the agility and the ability to continually increase the quality of your payment system while reducing costs and time to market. But, what are the most important considerations?
Always keep in mind that you are the one who understands your payment scheme and the test objectives, so be sure to choose a path that fits your strategic objectives.
Below we suggest a list that you can take into account to improve your tests:
The diversity of channels: POS, ATMs, CNP, XML, mobile, and any ISO8583: Whatever the starting point for a transaction of a purchase payment, deposit, investment of a transaction, transfer or a simple query of balance, all operations have different format and different paths to follow during the payment life cycle. A key consideration is to have a test strategy without hardware dependence and the ability to quickly change existing message formats or add new channel message formats.
Transaction testing data: Reusable Construction data, are extremely important to ensure quality and efficiency, especially if you are in an agile development environment. Be sure to create your transaction test data with clear objectives. For example, if you know that a credit card has a specific balance limit, a data point in a test case could only execute a simple purchase within limits while another may exceed. In the first case, your purchase must be authorized, while the second must be denied. The same would happen with a credit card number, two different expected results. Make sure you have control of the test data throughout the life cycle of the transaction.
Dependencies: No matter where you are in the authorization life cycle of a payment transaction, some dependencies can affect your test, causing unnecessary delays. If you are a processor, you may have a dependency on the card network and the issuing bank. If the sender is not available, there is not much you can do. Look for alternatives to minimize dependence by creating your own complete payment life cycle of the payment.
Agility: adding agility to your payment application development environment can be a difficult task, but not impossible. To begin with, you need to understand all the pieces that move within your case development environment, to perform your automated tests, frequency tools, methodology, and development. While agility could be directly related to the way you deal with dependencies as described above, some options can certainly speed up the duration of your test cycle.
Performance and scalability: How do you test performance and check the scalability of your payment system today? When you wonder if your payment system can survive the next transaction increase or transactional load, do you feel comfortable? Many have not put their payment systems to the test, and others will depend on the scripts created in the company or the manual generation of transactions. Third-party solutions can constantly stress your payment system and continuously monitor the health of it. Be proactive so you can save millions to your organization, or even generate more income.
Predictive: Changes in regulations and new types of messages, to name a few, are a constant, and making sure that your payment system can adopt those changes quickly is a must. Verify how your system reacts to new demands before changes are made. Get ahead of the game and know what kinds of problems and changes are coming.
Security and encryption: To secure transaction data, encryption is widely adopted to ensure that digital data traveling can not be accessed or altered. The ability to create and manage encrypted data is crucial to ensure the integrity of your testing environment.
Automation: If the execution of payment transaction messages is not automated, we recommend automating as much as possible the generation of test data, the execution of transactions and the verification of results.
These are just starting points. Keeping up with the new rules and regulations while making sure that your system keeps up with innovation is a huge task. While your company maintains the knowledge of the payment business scheme, the services and software companies have specialized in the testing of payment systems. Look for the right software for your organization and partner with them, this could simply be the best option for your payment system testing strategy and the optimization of transaction attention in your business.