Mifos X Testing

Anushree Chatterjee

Mifos X is an open-source financial services platform designed to provide a comprehensive solution for financial institutions, particularly those focusing on microfinance and financial inclusion. It offers many financial services like client management, loan and saving portfolio management, accounting and financial reporting, and product configuration to fit different business needs.

Mifos X is primarily developed in Java. It uses the Java platform for its backend services, leveraging frameworks like Spring and Hibernate for various application development and data management aspects. The front end of Mifos X is built using modern web technologies.

You can test custom logic written for Mifos X through

• Unit Testing
• Integration Testing
• End-to-end Testing

Mifos X Unit Testing

This form of testing is your way of checking every single unit of code. The tests you write need to be small and verify a single outcome at a time. Through unit tests, you need to target all kinds of test outcomes possible for that single unit of code while keeping it lightweight.

Mifos X, being a comprehensive and robust financial platform, utilizes various tools and frameworks to ensure the quality and reliability of its code through unit testing.

The primary tools and frameworks used for unit testing in Mifos X include:

JUnit

This is a widely used unit testing framework for Java applications. Mifos X utilizes JUnit for writing and executing test cases. JUnit provides annotations and assertions to help define test methods and verify test results.

Mockito

Mockito is a popular mocking framework for Java. In unit testing, isolating the component being tested by replacing its dependencies with mock objects is often important. Mockito allows to create and configure mock objects, making it easier to test components in isolation.

Spring Test

Given that Mifos X uses the Spring Framework extensively, the Spring Test module is a natural fit for its testing needs. Spring Test provides support for writing integration tests with Spring components. It offers features such as loading Spring ApplicationContexts and caching them between tests, which helps write tests that involve Spring-managed objects.

RestAssured

RestAssured is commonly used for testing RESTful APIs. It simplifies the process of sending HTTP requests to the server and verifying the responses, making it suitable for testing Mifos X’s RESTful interfaces.

Mifos X Integration Testing

Integration testing in Mifos X is needed so that you can ensure the different modules and components of the system work together seamlessly. Integration tests check the interactions between layers and services in the application, verifying that the system behaves as expected when its separate parts are combined.

You can use the tools and frameworks you used for unit testing to create integration tests. Using JUnit, Mockito, TestNG, or Spring Test, which provides support for loading the Spring ApplicationContext and injecting test fixtures. The only difference will be what you test, that is, integrations in this case.

Mifos X End-to-end Testing

End-to-end testing in Mifos X involves testing the application’s workflow from start to finish to ensure the system behaves as expected when it’s used in a real-world scenario. This type of testing is crucial because Mifos X is a complex system with numerous integrated components and functionalities. End-to-end testing helps ensure that all system parts work together correctly to provide the desired services. Here is an article about integration vs. end-to-end testing.

There are many end-to-end testing frameworks available, like:

Cucumber

For applications like Mifos X, where testing user scenarios is impertinent, a tool that facilitates behavior-driven development (BDD) like Cucumber is helpful. This way, you can develop test cases in a natural language format that all stakeholders, including technical staff and non-technical business participants, can understand. This is helpful as these stakeholders will have the maximum amount of valuable input about end-to-end test scenarios.

Feature: Client account management
  Scenario: Create a new client
    Given the user is logged in with proper credentials
    When the user creates a new client with valid details
    Then the new client should be registered in the system
  Scenario: Client loan application
    Given an existing client
    And the client applies for a loan
    When the loan application is processed
    Then the loan should be approved or rejected based on the client's credit score

Although this simplifies the testing process, it incurs many more steps, like linking these English steps to code, which still involves coding. Read here an article about how Cucumber is dead in the current testing scenario.

Luckily, there are better Cucumber alternatives available that overcome these issues.

testRigor

Here’s a tool that gives you the benefits of using BDD tools like Cucumber without any hidden terms and conditions, like having to write code for English commands. There’s no beating testRigor if you’re looking for a no-code alternative that allows you to focus your efforts on creating meaningful test cases instead of getting tangled in the technicalities of the testing tool.

Using this generative AI-powered tool, you can write both simple and complex end-to-end test cases easily in plain English. The tests you write here are simple to understand, run speedily, and require the bare minimum maintenance effort on your end.

Unlike the tools that use Selenium under the hood, you need not worry about XPaths or CSS identifiers for your UI web elements over here. All you have to do is tell testRigor what text you see for the UI element on the screen and leave the rest to testRigor. Read here for a step-by-step guide on how to do end-to-end testing with testRigor.

login as employee
apply for personal loan
login as manager
approve the loan as the manager
switch to tab “1”
click on “Dashboard”
check that table at row containing stored value "loanID" and column "Status" contains "Approved"

Besides the pre-defined commands, you can create your own custom rule (subroutine) to house a set of steps. You can keep referring to this single-lined English command throughout your tests to get a complex set of actions done.

With testRigor, you can test your system across browsers and platforms and even integrate it with various other tools to expand your testing ecosystem.

Here’s more on what testRigor’s top features are.

Conclusion

Mifos X is designed to be highly configurable and extendable, making it suitable for a wide range of financial institutions, from small microfinance groups to larger banks.

When choosing a tool for testing Mifos X, consider factors like the complexity of the application, the team’s familiarity with the tool, the tool’s support for the technologies used in Mifos X, and the project’s specific requirements. It’s also common to use a combination of these testing tools to leverage the strengths of each in different testing scenarios.

The idea is to use the tools that ease your testing journey and not over-complicate it. A good choice of intelligent and simple tools takes you much farther quickly, with minimum time, effort, and cost.

“We spent so much time on maintenance when using Selenium, and we spend nearly zero time with maintenance using testRigor.”

Keith Powe VP Of Engineering - IDT