This week the QA Financial and E-commerce Forum Singapore 2024 took place in the Southeast Asian business hub.
The Forum focused on the latest technologies for AI automation, DevOps and data management in software quality management, with expert speakers from major financial institutions and E-commerce firms, alongside leading technology companies.
One of this week’s event’s key speakers at the Tanglin Club in Singapore, the venue for our QA Financial and E-commerce Forum, was Amit Rawat, engineering manager at financial services firm audax as well as SC Ventures.
Following the conference, QA Financial sat down with Rawat to get his take on test engineering challenges, API testing and other timely issues that are on the minds of many within the industry.
You are a big believer in chaos testing. Why?
I’m a strong advocate for chaos testing, particularly for our microservices-based Nexus project. In today’s world of complex applications, resilience is paramount. Our Nexus project, built on a network of microservices running in Kubernetes, has numerous moving parts and potential points of failure. Chaos testing allows us to proactively identify these weaknesses before they impact our users. We know that in a distributed environment like ours, failures are inevitable. Network outages, hardware issues, and unexpected traffic spikes can occur at any time.
By simulating these disruptions in a controlled environment, chaos testing helps us prepare for the unpredictable and ensures our system can gracefully degrade, minimising disruptions for our users. Ultimately, chaos testing builds confidence in our system’s resilience. By proactively identifying and addressing weaknesses, we reduce the risk of unexpected outages and ensure a more reliable user experience for everyone who relies on Nexus.
You have made quite journey of app and API testing for Asia’s burgeoning open banking sector, can you highlight how your team leveraged lean engineering principles?
My team applied several lean engineering principles to efficiently test the Nexus mobile apps and APIs, such as test pyramid. Focused on more API-level testing for faster, less flaky results while still covering critical user flows with mobile automation. Also, automation at scale. We invested in mobile automation to test apps across various OS versions, screen sizes, and OEMs efficiently. Then there is mocking and isolation: we used mocking for ephemeral, isolated test environments to improve test predictability and reduce external dependencies.
“A lean approach contributes to faster development cycles and more reliable releases.”
– Amit Rawat
Moreover, performance testing, conducting extensive API performance testing to ensure scalability for large South Asian user bases. Also, a shift-left approach, integrating quality assurance early in the SDLC to embed quality from day one. These practices allowed my team to balance thoroughness with efficiency, ensuring comprehensive coverage of both the modern digital front-end and the integration with legacy core banking systems. This lean approach likely contributed to faster development cycles and more reliable releases for the Nexus platform.
As you just mentioned, during this process, you and your team took a proactive “shift left” strategy to deliver Nexus. Tell us more.
To deliver Nexus, my team and I adopted a proactive “shift left” strategy, prioritizing testing earlier in the software development lifecycle (SDLC). This approach aimed to identify and address bugs sooner, reducing the cost and effort associated with fixing them later in the development process.
Key initiatives we undertook are education and collaboration. We conducted workshops and sessions to emphasize the benefits of shift left testing, highlighting the increased costs and complexities of fixing bugs discovered late in the SDLC. We collaborated closely with development teams, providing guidance on effective unit and integration testing techniques.
Also, tooling and automation, so to enhance developer productivity, we developed in-house libraries for tasks like generating fake test data, mocking external interfaces, and automating test reporting. We also integrated tools like Docker Compose into our build pipeline to create ephemeral integration testing environments, enabling early and frequent testing.
“I believe this is just the beginning of how GenAI can revolutionise testing.”
– Amit Rawat
Then also non-functional testing: we extended the shift left approach to non-functional testing, utilizing tools like ZAP proxy and Gatling for security and performance testing of APIs during the build process. This shortened the feedback loop, allowing us to identify and address critical bugs much earlier. Moreover, robust reporting and traceability. To recognise the importance of comprehensive tracking in a shift left environment, we invested in developing an in-house test traceability and reporting tool. This tool aggregates data from various testing phases, including unit, integration, module, and end-to-end tests, providing a unified view of testing activities and coverage across the SDLC.
So tell us about the results.
Well, by implementing these practical steps, we implemented shift left testing, resulting in early bug detection, such as identifying and resolving bugs earlier in the development cycle, reduced costs, mainly lowering the expenses associated with late-stage bug fixes, improved code quality, such as enhancing the overall quality and reliability of the Nexus software. Also faster delivery, accelerating the delivery of Nexus by streamlining the testing process. Finally, increased efficiency: optimising developer productivity through automation and improved tooling.
As you mentioned, you have led the test engineering for Standard Chartered Nexus. Can you tell us a bit more about this solution.
Standard Chartered Nexus is a Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) solution developed by Standard Chartered Bank. It’s designed to empower digital ecosystems and platforms by allowing them to embed financial services into their operations without having to obtain a banking licence or build banking infrastructure from scratch.
So what are some of its key aspects?
Firstly, purpose. It enables partners like e-commerce platforms, traditional retailers, fintechs, and other digital platforms to offer banking and financial services to their customers under their own brand.
Then there is functionality. Partners can leverage Standard Chartered’s banking licences, expertise, and infrastructure to offer financial products such as current and savings accounts, debit cards, credit facilities, revolving credit, instalment purchases, and personal loans. Also, technology. It provides a banking framework that streamlines core banking capabilities into an elastic system of engagement, as well as customization, as the solution creates tailored banking products that fit their specific ecosystem needs.
It also includes cybersecurity and fraud risk management capabilities to ensure secure operations, and Standard Chartered works to ensure compliance in offering these financial products.
Anything else you would like to share with us ahead of the event in Singapore?
I’m excited to share some recent advancements my team has made in applying Generative AI to software testing. Since submitting my talk proposal, we’ve been heavily invested in exploring the potential of GenAI in the testing domain. We’ve iterated on several chatbot ideas and have already developed a functional chatbot that’s actively being used by our internal teams. This chatbot serves as a “co-pilot” for testers, providing detailed answers to questions about product features and requirements. This has proven invaluable during test case planning, as it allows testers to quickly and easily gain a deeper understanding of the functionalities they are testing.
I believe this is just the beginning of how GenAI can revolutionise testing. We’re continuing to explore other use cases and I’m eager to discuss these explorations and share our early findings with the audience in Singapore.
QA FINANCIAL FORUM LONDON: RECAP
Last month, on September 11, QA Financial held the London conference of the QA Financial Forum, a global series of conference and networking meetings for software risk managers.
The agenda was designed to meet the needs of software testers working for banks and other financial firms working in regulated, complex markets.
Please check our special post-conference flipbook by clicking here.
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