When deploying changes to your pricing or business rules, pre- and post-live testing acts as the final check and guarantee that the changes will deliver the expected result.

Although critically necessary to protect the interest of your business and ensure the correct outcomes for your customers, we often see this checking being carried out manually rather than using automated methods.

This greatly reduces the amount of testing that can be done, increasing the business risk of changes and simultaneously prevents the use of agile changes like those practiced by the strongest companies.

When deploying changes through the Quill Systems Portfolio Management Engine (PME), the deployment pipeline will automatically include a pass through our automated testing environment. This environment is fully integrated with the PME and is capable of performing all four critical steps of testing:

Accuracy - does your proposed change provide the correct response to each input?

Business Logic/Compliance - when provided with changes to a given input, does the proposed change respond in a way that is both logical and compliant. Examples of this include testing the proposed change for gender or ethnicity bias (compliance) or testing that more premium offerings are always priced higher than budget alternatives (logic)

Speed - how quickly can the system return a response to a given input? This is particularly important if working in a large-volume mass-market industry, or when trading directly with customers where a real-time response is likely to be required

Error Handling - whilst the data quality of inputs is typically very high, there is nevertheless the risk that erroneous or even malicious inputs could be received. This type of testing determines how robust the system and the proposed change would be to these types of inputs

We believe that incorporating automated testing within your change pipeline can deliver a number of substantial benefits to your business, including:

- Greater confidence that the changes you propose will have the effects that you expect

- Faster completion of testing, enabling a more agile approach to managing your business and the ability to compete faster and more effectively than your competition

- Automatic creation of testing documentation, allowing easy review and evidence of testing for your internal Compliance team or (where required) external regulatory bodies

If automated testing sounds like it could be of benefit to your company, or if you just like to have a chat and learn more, we would love to hear from you.