Old School vs. New School Testing: Tradition’s Comfort or Continuity’s Speed?
A Comprehensive Guide to Testing Strategies for Building and Maintaining Payments Apps
Creating and maintaining a payments app—or any other app with similar functionality—requires careful planning, rigorous testing, and a deep understanding of the local market dynamics, where solutions like M-PESA have set high standards for convenience, security, and reliability.
Effective testing is not just a technical necessity but a strategic differentiator that can drive user adoption and maintain trust over time.
This guide delves into traditional and continuous testing approaches, highlighting their features, differences, and actionable insights for developers building or maintaining payment apps or similar financial solutions.
Quick numbers:
To compete and remain relevant, the application must be dependable, secure, and user-friendly.
Thus testing methodologies are critical in ensuring that the app consistently meets these standards, minimizes downtime, and enhances the overall user experience.
Traditional Testing
Traditional testing is often seen as a sequential, stage-by-stage process similar to a relay race, where each phase must be completed before moving on to the next. This approach flows with the Waterfall model, ensuring that development, testing, and integration proceed in a linear fashion, from initial requirements to final deployment.
Key Features
Unit Testing: Focuses on individual components like registration forms and authentication mechanisms, ensuring they function correctly in isolation.
Integration Testing: Ensures that user registration integrates seamlessly with backend systems, including databases, APIs, and authentication services.
System Testing: Evaluates the complete transaction process, verifying that all components interact as intended and comply with business rules and requirements.
Acceptance Testing: Involves stakeholders and end-users to validate that transaction processing meets expected performance, security, and usability standards.
Pros
Cons
Best Use Case: Traditional testing works well for projects with stable requirements and fewer changes. It’s especially suitable for regulatory-heavy environments where detailed documentation and validation against compliance standards.
If maintaining an existing app, traditional testing is valuable when introducing large standalone updates that need thorough verification, this also ensures the app remains compliant as it grows.
Continuous Testing
Continuous testing represents a modern, agile approach similar to an assembly line in an autonomous factory. Testing is embedded throughout the development and maintenance processes, allowing for real-time feedback and quick adjustments.
Key Features
Automated Testing: Employs test scripts to validate registration and login functions, detecting issues early and ensuring robustness against various input scenarios.
Continuous Integration: Integrates testing into the CI pipeline, allowing immediate feedback on code changes and ensuring each build is stable.
Performance Testing: Continuously assesses the app’s performance under different conditions, ensuring scalability and responsiveness, especially during peak transaction volumes.
Security Testing: Regularly scans for vulnerabilities, protecting user data and preventing unauthorized access, crucial for maintaining a secure payment environment.
Pros
Cons
Best Use Case: Continuous testing is ideal for projects needing frequent updates, rapid iteration, and high adaptability. Particularly effective for maintaining an app in a competitive market, where quick rollouts of bug fixes and new features are essential.
The Choosing
Deciding between traditional and continuous testing depends on various factors, including project timelines, resources, and team expertise.
Project Timeline: For new app development with tight deadlines, continuous testing offers the agility to adjust quickly, reducing development and maintenance cycles.
Traditional testing, while thorough, may slow down the process due to its sequential nature but remains reliable for compliance checks.
Budget and Resources: Continuous testing requires an initial investment but offers long-term savings through faster bug/defect detection and reduced downtime. Traditional testing might be more cost-effective initially but could lead to higher maintenance costs if bugs are identified late.
Team Expertise: Continuous testing demands knowledge of CI/CD pipelines, automation, and scripting, making it essential to have skilled personnel or be willing to invest in upskilling. Traditional testing relies on established processes, making it easier to manage for teams less familiar with modern automation tools.
Both traditional and continuous testing play critical roles in developing and maintaining a reliable applications. Traditional testing provides a structured approach ideal for regulated environments, while continuous testing introduces speed, flexibility, and ongoing improvement.
For developers and maintainers, combining these methods into a hybrid approach—leveraging traditional testing for critical components and continuous testing for ongoing updates—can ensure comprehensive coverage, balancing thoroughness with responsiveness.
Ultimately, the goal is to deliver and maintain a high-quality, user-friendly payments app that resonates with Kenyan users, ensuring it remains reliable, secure, and competitive in the evolving digital payments landscape.
So, are you for tradition’s Comfort or Continuity’s Speed?