by Vaios Vaitsis, Founder & CEO at Validata Group   To win, serve and retain customers, testing activities are becoming more pivotal as business process quality is deemed more important than time to market. Beginning with the business-driven change request, through to project scoping and on to DevOps adoption, the infrastructure for technical and regression testing must be present and aligned to every phase.

Economic conditions and pressure to improve time-to-value are placing increased emphasis on productivity and moving away from the shadow of shrink-wrapped software and towards the future of Cloud & SaaS models.

It is a fact that test automation shortens development cycles, avoids cumbersome repetitive tasks and create repeatable, reusable test scenarios that can be executed as often as needed to improve software quality. The first step is to identify the right test automation tool that fits your overall requirements from a variety of options available in the market, both commercial and open source.

SWIFT operates a messaging service for financial messages, such as letters of credit, payments, and securities transactions, between member banks and financial services institutions worldwide. Although such formats have proven to be extremely efficient for electronic data exchange, they are typically difficult for humans to understand, manipulate, and validate.

When testing end-to-end transactions that leverage such message formats, sending a single inbound transaction and validating the result can be both difficult and error-prone, and involves complex test suites that leverage large data sets and perform multilayer validation on the outbound transactions.