ORIGINS Platform Testing

Hari Mahesh

eCU Technology is a financial service technology company and a Credit Union Service Organization (CUSO) that provides online account and lending technology to credit unions. Their flagship product is the ORIGINS Platform, a comprehensive, vendor-agnostic financial services solution that streamlines credit unions’ application, origination, and underwriting operations.

eCU Technology’s ORIGINS Platform helps credit unions in several ways, including:

• Increasing account opening and loan origination: The platform provides members a user-friendly and efficient experience, which can help increase the number of new accounts and loans.
• Streamlining processes and creating efficiencies: The platform automates many tasks, such as document verification and decision-making, which can help to save credit unions time and money.
• Delivering a powerful, flexible, and personalized user experience: The platform can be customized to meet each credit union’s and member’s needs.

ORIGINS’ customers are credit unions of all sizes. They have a large and diverse customer base, with clients in all 50 states. There are many benefits of using the product, including:

• Increased efficiency and productivity: Automating tasks and streamlining processes can help credit unions save time and money.
• Improved member experience: Provides a user-friendly and efficient experience for members, which can help to improve satisfaction and loyalty.
• Increased loan volume and deposit growth: This helps credit unions originate more loans and open more accounts, increasing revenue.

Testing ORIGINS

When it comes to testing eCU Technology’s ORIGINS, we can cover three major testing strategies, that is:

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

Unit Testing

Since ORIGINS is a proprietary tool, the customers won’t be able to create any new scripts. So, the chance of doing unit testing from the customer side is scarce. However, based on general industry practices and the platforms they offer, here are some possibilities for web applications:

• JavaScript-based frameworks: Popular choices include Jest, Mocha, and Jasmine, with tools like Enzyme for React testing.
• Back-end languages: Frameworks like JUnit (Java), pytest (Python), and PHPUnit (PHP) are commonly used for unit testing.

Integration Testing

Due to the proprietary nature of eCU Technology’s development process, it is challenging to identify the exact integration testing tools they use. However, if you are integrating the platform with your software, then you can use the following:

For APIs and Integrations:

• API testing tools: Postman, SoapUI, and Pact can be used for API testing and contract verification.
• Integration testing frameworks: Tools like Arquillian (Java) and Robot Framework can be used to test interactions between different components.

End-to-End Testing

It takes a user’s perspective to ensure an entire application functions seamlessly from start to finish. End-to-end testing is like testing every step of a real-world scenario, not just individual components. This holistic approach helps identify issues that might arise when different application parts interact, ensuring a smooth and bug-free user experience.

Beyond basic functionality, E2E testing can also verify performance, security, and even user interface design. Simulating real-world user flows helps catch issues that might not be apparent in isolated testing, leading to a more robust and user-friendly application.

For eCU technology’s ORIGINS, we can use many tools like Selenium, Cypress, etc., for E2E testing. However, these tools are challenging to set up and have disadvantages in creating test scripts and execution. You can read here about the disadvantages of Selenium and Cypress. Hence, using intelligent automation tools and reducing the extra effort and time taken by legacy test automation tools is always better.

testRigor

testRigor stands out from the rest of the codeless automation tools because of the intelligent and advanced features it provides compared to others. Let’s review a few features of this feature-packed automation tool.

When we compare these features with legacy automation tools or many self-claimed codeless automation tools, we find that they heavily depend on programming languages. But testRigor helps to create test scripts in parsed plain English.

Hence, the advantage is that anyone from the stakeholders can create test scripts. You don’t have to be a programmer to write test scripts in testRigor. A common question arises: BDD also provides the same pattern; what is the difference? In BDD, once you create test scenarios in Gherkins, you must convert the scenario to the script. This requires hardcore and expert programmer skills. Here is a guide to learning Gherkins.

testRigor supports web testing on desktop and mobile across 3,000+ combinations of browsers and devices. Not just that, testRigor helps to run tests in multiple browsers and devices in parallel for different sessions.

We can say testRigor is a testing powerhouse, as it supports different types of testing:

• Web and Mobile Browser Testing
• Mobile App Testing
• Desktop App Testing
• Visual Testing
• API Testing
• Accessibility Testing

Using testRigor’s generative AI, we can quickly create test cases and test data by just providing the description or requirement.

ORIGINS, being a banking application, it is critical to avoid false positive bugs. The legacy tools, like Selenium or Cypress, still rely on DOM element properties, which are so flaky that removing or changing any property of a particular element can make the test case fail.

But testRigor is different; it uses its own element locator strategy. You can just mention the text you see on the screen for the element, and the rest will be done by testRigor’s AI algorithms. testRigor has inbuilt integration with most market-leading tools in areas like test management, CI/CD, infra management, ERP, CRM, etc.

login as customer
click "Accounts"
click "Manage Accounts"
click "Enable International Transactions"
enter stored value "daily limit value" into "Daily Limit"
click "Save"
click "Account Balance" roughly to the left of "Debit Cards"
Check the page contains "Account Balance"

If you see the test script creation here, it’s effortless. Anyone can create test scripts efficiently, irrespective of technical expertise. If you notice carefully, we can use re-usable functions like “login as customer” so that we don’t have to pass the login flow with multiple steps every time.

You can read more features of testRigor here.

Conclusion

Banking applications have a lot of security restrictions, and they should be bug-free and high-performing. So, we must ensure the application’s quality as it deals with finances. Also, the user should have an easy, intuitive, seamless workflow from login to logout. For that, automation testing tools play a crucial role.

Make a good choice in selecting automation tools for each testing area that supports your testing activities to the maximum extent. The reason is simple: no stakeholder wants to lose time and effort fixing errors, exceptions, and CSS/XPaths in the testing scripts. If you have better alternatives to achieve excellent quality faster, use them to minimize the maintenance and test creation costs.

“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