Redefining Functional Testing Automation with Watermelon Software's AI based Testing platform

Gartner 's research report on Improving Software Quality by Building Digital Immunity calls out the need for enterprises to automate testing as a step to ensure application reliability.

Functional testing automation has traditionally presented significant challenges within the Financial Services Industry (FSI), where the ecosystem is dominated by highly complex and critical applications such as core banking systems, trading platforms, and risk management tools.

These applications, often built on a mix of modern and legacy technologies, require rigorous testing to ensure reliability, security, and compliance with stringent regulatory standards.

For instance, automating the functional testing of a core banking application involves navigating through intricate transaction workflows, integrating with external systems like SWIFT for international payments, and ensuring compliance with financial regulations such as GDPR or SOX. Similarly, testing a trading platform demands precision in real-time data processing, execution of complex trade algorithms, and seamless connectivity with stock exchanges and clearinghouses.

Watermelon Software Inc 's innovative zero-code, AI-driven approach revolutionizes this landscape by simplifying the automation of such complex functional journeys. It enables testers to automate scenarios spanning from customer onboarding processes in core banking systems, which may involve KYC (Know Your Customer) validations and multi-tier account setup procedures, to high-frequency trading algorithms in capital market solutions that require millisecond-level accuracy in execution and monitoring.

By abstracting the underlying technical complexities and offering a user-friendly interface, Watermelon allows organizations to efficiently automate their testing processes across a wide range of applications, from legacy green-screen applications like AS400 or Mainframe -based systems to modern cloud-native microservices architectures, without the need for deep coding expertise or extensive maintenance efforts.

This breakthrough significantly accelerates the testing cycles, enhances coverage and accuracy, and ultimately contributes to the faster delivery of high-quality financial services solutions to the market.

Here are descriptions of some very real challenges enterprises face to automate their functional testing, and how Watermelon solves for them.

1. Complex Application Landscapes

The complexity of application ecosystems in industries like financial systems and insurance is unparalleled, encompassing a wide array of functionalities and integrations that pose significant challenges for functional testing automation.

For instance, typical workflows might involve intricate operations such as comparing financial data across Excel sheets and PDF reports, a common requirement for compliance and audit trails.

These workflows often extend to reading and validating data from various sources, including online forms, offline documents, databases, and Excel files, each with its unique format and integration challenges.

Moreover, FSI applications frequently interact with email servers (SMTP validations) for notifications and communications, necessitating robust testing mechanisms to verify these interactions accurately.

Handling wait times for asynchronous operations, adding custom codes for specific validation rules, and managing deprecated elements in legacy systems further complicate the automation process.

The automation framework must also adeptly handle test data handoffs between test cases, ensuring data integrity and consistency across the testing lifecycle.

Other technical nuances include iFrame testing, which is crucial for applications embedding third-party services or content within web pages.

Testing data presented in tables, asserting element locators accurately despite dynamic content changes, and performing coded Document Object Model (DOM) checks to verify complex interactions or layouts are essential for ensuring the application's functionality and user experience meet the high standards expected in the financial sector. In a few cases, application could be using a Shadow DOM wherein traditional automation always struggles.

Impact:

The technical complexity leads to elongated test cycle times, increased costs, and a higher likelihood of errors slipping through, directly impacting the time-to-market and reliability of financial applications critical to business operations.

Watermelon's Solution:

By leveraging a no-code interface, Watermelon's Autonomous Functional Testing module drastically simplifies the automation process across varied applications. It enables testers to automate complex workflows without needing deep coding expertise, thereby accelerating the testing process and enhancing test coverage.        

2. Coding Skill Dependence

Traditional automation frameworks necessitate a high level of programming knowledge, restricting the task of automation to a small pool of skilled testers and creating a bottleneck in the testing process.

Impact:

This dependence on coding skills not only limits the scalability of testing efforts but also hinders collaboration between technical and non-technical team members, ultimately affecting the agility and efficiency of the testing process.

Watermelon's Solution:

Watermelon democratizes the automation process with its no-code platform, enabling testers, business analysts, and other stakeholders to contribute to testing efforts, thereby expanding testing capabilities and fostering a more collaborative testing environment.        

3. Script Maintenance

Automation scripts are fragile and often break with even minor changes in the application's UI, requiring constant updates and maintenance to keep the automation framework aligned with the application.

Impact:

The high maintenance overhead significantly increases the total cost of ownership (TCO) for automation tools and can lead to delays in the release cycle, impacting the organization's ability to respond quickly to market changes. One of Watermelon's customer's (in the insurance space) had a 534 step claims process, which used to take 3 weeks to re-automate each time a change was made to it !!

Watermelon's Solution:

With dynamic adaptation capabilities using machine learning, Watermelon reduces the need for manual script updates, ensuring that automated tests remain robust against changes in the application's interface, thus lowering maintenance costs and improving release velocity.        

4. Integration with the SDLC Ecosystem

Effective test automation needs to integrate seamlessly with other tools in the software development lifecycle, such as requirements management and defect tracking systems. This integration is often cumbersome and poorly supported by traditional testing tools.

Impact:

The lack of integration leads to siloed operations, data discrepancies, and inefficiencies in tracking and resolving issues, hampering the overall quality assurance process and delaying product delivery. For instance, a requirement changed by the business, may never show up to testers, resulting in outdated test cases.

Watermelon's Solution:

Watermelon offers robust integration capabilities, ensuring a seamless flow of information between testing workflows and other SDLC tools, which enhances collaboration, improves traceability, and accelerates the testing and development process.        

5. Coexistence with Manual Testing

A few things have to remain Manual. As an example, its recommended that scenarios involving CAPTCHAs should always be manually tested and not automated. In scenarios such as this, there is a need for manual and automation testing to leverage common tools and platforms avoiding the need to run, manage and audit them separately.

Impact:

The inability to automate every aspect of testing can lead to gaps in coverage and necessitates a hybrid approach, blending manual and automated testing. However, managing this blend efficiently without the right tools can complicate the testing process.

Watermelon's Solution:

Watermelon supports a hybrid testing methodology that intelligently integrates manual testing where necessary, ensuring comprehensive test coverage while maintaining the efficiency and speed of automation for other test cases.        

6. Asset Reusability

In many testing environments, creating and maintaining test assets for reuse across different testing scenarios is fraught with difficulties, leading to redundancy and inefficiencies.

Impact:

The lack of asset reusability not only inflates the effort and time required for test preparation but also leads to inconsistencies in testing, affecting the quality and reliability of the software being delivered.

Watermelon's Solution:

Through its modular and reusable test components, Watermelon enhances the efficiency of the testing process, enabling testers to leverage existing assets across multiple scenarios and reducing the time and effort required for test creation.        

7. Going beyond Pass/Fail

Traditional testing tools often provide limited insight beyond the binary outcome of pass or fail, leaving performance bottlenecks and optimisation opportunities unaddressed.

Impact:

This limitation prevents teams from gaining deep insights into application performance, hindering their ability to proactively optimize and ensure the software meets the desired performance standards, affecting user satisfaction and retention.

Watermelon's Solution:

Watermelon extends its capabilities beyond mere pass/fail outcomes, offering in-depth performance analytics that negates the need for expensive APM tools, thereby enabling a more comprehensive understanding of the application's behavior under test.        

8. Legacy Application Support

The scant support for legacy systems in most automation tools complicates the automation of end-to-end business processes that involve such systems, presenting a significant barrier to comprehensive automation.

Impact:

This gap in support can leave critical business processes untested or force reliance on manual testing, increasing risk and potentially leading to business disruptions or failures in critical systems.

Watermelon's Solution:

Watermelon's platform uniquely caters to the automation needs of legacy systems, including those based on AS400, ensuring that businesses can automate end-to-end processes seamlessly and without compromise.        

9. Licensing and Accessibility

The common practice of licensing automation tools per tester poses a significant financial burden on enterprises, making it challenging to scale automation efforts across the organization.

Impact:

This licensing model can restrict the accessibility of automation tools to a limited number of users, stifling the growth of automation initiatives and hindering the organization's ability to achieve widespread testing efficiency.

Watermelon's Solution:

By offering flexible and scalable application based SKU options, Watermelon makes it economically feasible for enterprises to adopt and expand their automation capabilities, ensuring that your automation software doesn't end up being shelf-ware !        

Watermelon's zero code AI driven approach to functional testing automation addresses the technical and business challenges that have long made automation a formidable task.

By simplifying complex processes, fostering collaboration, and providing deep integration and insights, Watermelon is paving the way for a new era of efficient, effective, and comprehensive software testing.

Have a look at a quick demo of the Functional Testing Module :

Ping us ( Rajeev Vasisht , Harpreet Singh , Krishna Padave , Ervin Sequeira , Priyanka M or Soham Pablo ?? ) to book a detailed demo !

The team at Watermelon have been SRE and Quality practitioners for over 2 decades, and have built the world's first reliability platform to solve problems that they faced in their years of work.