End-to-End Agile Testing of an Investment and Portfolio Management Application Enhances its Security and Performance

Finance

Trigent team understood our application very quickly which was quite impressive and was able to deliver exactly what was asked of them.

About the Client

A French multinational financial services firm with a specialized focus on wealth and asset management, investment and corporate banking, digital payments, and insurance. With its presence in 36 countries, the firm addresses the specialized investment needs of private and institutional clients. The company also offers multiple insurance services and products to the customers of Banque Populaire and Caisse d’Epargne banking networks.

About the Application: Wealth Management Application for portfolio construction

The firm’s wealth management application designs financial solutions tailored to meet the investment goals across private equity, credit, structured products, financial management, wealth management advisory, life insurance, real estate, and corporate advisory. The product enabled the firm to maintain and manage well-diversified investment portfolios of several accounts based on individual financial goals and risk profiles.

The application has several complex functionalities such as portfolio models, accounts, investment strategies, benchmarks, and restrictions that could be viewed, managed, and analyzed. Each aspect of the portfolio has third-party dependencies and integrations for market data. Every user profile had access rights to the modules depending on the responsibilities aligned with the profile.

Business Challenge

The global wealth management industry is expected to reach $3 Trillion by 2030. The industry constantly innovates with different product mixes that are launched to outperform the market and deliver superior returns for investors.

To differentiate itself in the fiercely competitive market and to meet the growing customer expectations, the firm aspired to launch a next-gen version of its wealth management application.

In addition to functional CX enhancements, the new version needed to:

Enhance application security

Ensure compliance with the identity access management rules

Optimize performance during concurrent logins and cross-browser compatibility

Incorporate Continuous Testing in Your DevOps Process for Assured CX Quality

Trigent Solution

To augment its QA capabilities with regard to agile testing and reduce the application’s time-to-market without compromising on the product quality, the firm partnered with Trigent. It wanted to ensure that all the application features are comprehensively tested and devoid of regression issues. Trigent undertook functional exploratory testing services to design automated checks across the new application.

Quality Strategy for Digital First Experience

Based on the client’s specific requirements, Trigent’s testing team defined the overall test strategy, the core elements of agile testing were:

Shift-left testing approach to identify errors or missing business rules early in the workflows

Build continuous testing capability to ensure errors in periodic builds are trapped early

Ensure a strong focus on consistency of the CX across all stages of the process

Test Automation Framework to suit the organization’s requirement of the agile methodology of testing

The Trigent team designed and developed a bespoke automation hybrid test framework leveraging Selenium WebDriver, Maven, TestNG, Java, and MySQL.

The framework:

Accelerated script development and reduced the overall automation maintenance costs

Enabled dynamic selection of tests that could run for various checks (Smoke/Regression/Release Verification, among others)

Anonymized, reusable test data sets across different test environments

Ran the tests in parallel across multiple test environments for faster feedback

Leveraging the customized test automation framework, security access permission tests were completely configurable on the test framework database. The tests picked up the access rights and ran the required security test automatically. Scenarios to automate were chosen to maximize coverage in risk areas. The framework was also leveraged for automating the functional and regression tests. The tests were executed using the Azure DevOps CI/ CD pipeline.

End-to-End Testing ensuring accurate functioning of the application

Functional testing was done to ensure compliance with identity access management. Extensive combinations & edge/hand-off scenarios were designed to ensure maximum coverage of the application features. The team’s domain expertise and understanding of the application functionality enabled strategies to test several modules with diverse data sets, investment strategies, and allocation ratios. Moreover, the team ensured that apt restrictions were applied to the investment accounts as defined by the user.

To curtail vulnerabilities, the Trigent team conducted a comprehensive threat assessment, and user accounts were created to ensure that the security aspects worked correctly. Cross-browser/compatibility testing was performed using BrowserStack.

To ensure a seamless user experience, the application needed to be tested for impacts due to load fluctuations. Performance testing was strategically planned and implemented to ensure that the application was stable and capable of handling vast volumes of users. Performance testing of the application also enabled the team to understand the application’s responsiveness under different user loads as the modules had third-party integrations. The load tests identified and removed bottlenecks in the application. Leveraging JMeter, the team developed performance test scripts and generated the required user load.