The ATM remains the most frequent touchpoint between a bank and its customers, who rely on the channel to access their accounts. At the same time, banks themselves use ATMs as an important channel to communicate new services and initiatives to customers. To ensure an ATM network is exploited to its fullest potential, it must provide an uninterrupted service with little or no downtime and also be supported by the bank to ensure it can effectively be integrated with new product cycles.
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| Martin Macmillan |
As such, the first step toward an effective testing strategy is to understand the full scope of what is to be tested. At its most basic level, the process involves the testing of the ATM application against the host system. However, this is only a subset of the overall testing universe, and it is crucial to view the testing problem as a whole. Especially when it comes to deploying automated testing tools, the business benefits are only realized if a bank is able to meet the requirements from a single system. Typically, end-to-end testing must encompass the ATM, all relevant card types, the host that drives the ATM and the external switching and authorization networks (e.g. card schemes) that are involved in the transaction chain.
As an illustration of the impact on testing, when a customer uses a credit or debit card in the ATM of a bank, the message will travel over a different number of these elements, depending on whether they are a customer of that bank. A bank-issued debit card is routed through to an internal authorization system (on-us transaction), whereas a foreign-bank-issued credit card transaction is routed through the relevant international card scheme (such as Visa or MasterCard).
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The key areas impacting the overall test strategy include:
Operating systems — Most banks have now migrated their ATMs to Windows, with XP being the clear current favorite. While Windows has advantages over OS/2, risks are introduced by a more complex operating system, as well as the need for security updates and bug fixes issued by Microsoft — which occur on a far more frequent basis than OS/2. A change to the operating system requires a complete retest of the system. However, most banks are not in a position to spend the time and money on a full system regression test and will take a risk-based view with their supplier on what, if any, testing is carried out. This is a suboptimal situation based on the reality of the fact that updates occur frequently, but a regression test cycle would take potentially several man-months using a manual testing regime.
Other applications — It used to be the case that the ATM software was issued by the same provider as the hardware before it left the factory. In today's multivendor environment, this is often not the case. Third parties install software onto ATM hardware. A typical ATM application stack may include the Windows operating system, the ATM application, a monitoring agent, anti-virus and firewall software, software distribution client, etc. With the challenge of misaligned release cycles for each of these applications, banks need to be able to conduct frequent and rapid re-testing of the network if they are to avoid introducing unnecessary risk into their systems.
New devices — New XFS devices such as those to support check, coin and note deposits are being introduced into ATM networks, making systems increasingly complex. As the scale of the overall functionality increases, so does the potential for device and software errors in processing these critical transactions — and the test requirements increase significantly. Additionally, it is worth noting that it is difficult to recreate fault conditions without physically damaging expensive hardware, making it less likely that a bank will test a full range of hardware fault scenarios — unless a test automation package is used that can represent these faults through simulation.
Card testing — With the widespread adoption of smart-card technology, banks need to test and certify each card type in their ATM systems to ensure the correct transaction routing and service presentation. To test a typical EMV card requires hundreds of different test scripts, which, when multiplied by the number of different card types, results in an extensive testing universe.
Card scheme certification testing — One of the larger overheads involved in testing systems is planning and executing the certification of the ATM system against the host systems of the major card schemes, both domestic and international. Certification time generally has to be booked well in advance, and it causes deployers problems if not all the requisite parts of the ATM system are ready and aligned for this testing. The increased use of card scheme simulators, plus an effective method of automation of the ATM transactions, can simplify the certification process for all parties and reduce third-party dependencies.
Host message testing — Host message testing encompasses the link between the bank and the terminal driving system routing and authorizing the financial messages. As outlined above, there are several points along the transmission of messages within the ATM network that must be isolated and tested accordingly.
To develop a successful ATM test strategy, banks need to deploy a top-down approach, addressing the overall business drivers first and ensuring the necessary technology and resources are in place across the organization to effectively implement and manage it going forward. Greater automation of the test process is key, ensuring banks can meet tight project timelines and rapidly conduct regression tests to ensure the successful rollout of new services, products and applications at the ATM.
Martin Macmillan is the business development director of Level Four Software in the U.K. To submit a comment, please e-mail the editor, Tracy Kitten.
