Payments Testing - March 19, 2024
On March 11, 2020, “The World Health Organization declared the rapidly spreading coronavirus outbreak a pandemic, acknowledging what has seemed clear for some time — the virus will likely spread to all countries on the globe. Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the situation will worsen.”
Though it may seem like a lifetime ago to many, the WHO’s announcement was made less than 6 months ago. And, despite the early warning signs, little did we realize what an indelible impact the virus would have on the entire global population.
After all that has transpired since we first started tracking COVID-19 earlier this year, the only safe thing to say is that we should hope for the best and plan for the worst. So while we are all hopeful that an end to the crises will come soon, a safe and effective vaccine will be made available, businesses and economies will recover, and lost jobs will come back, we are still somewhere in the middle of a catastrophic event and need to plan for the worst.
A Long Road Ahead
When it comes to your organization’s payment testing capabilities, consider what it means if the current situation continues until the rest of this year, or another year, or even longer. What has your organization done to ensure that you can continue to operate effectively?
Below are 4 concepts you, your team, and your organization need to consider in order to survive what is yet to come:
- Remote Workforce Support
Do you have a testing infrastructure in place that fully supports a remote workforce? Can you effectively sustain and maintain your remote developers and QA teams and testers indefinitely? Some experts predict that we may never go back to a traditional work from the corporate office scenario. What about another shut down. Are you prepared if your testing facilities are subject to another shelter in place order?
- Productive Collaboration
If you can provide access to your testing resources, are they able to engage and collaborate effectively? Despite the damage that COVID-19 has done to certain business segments, others are thriving. Are your teams able to work together to address rapidly changing consumer behavior, dynamic swings in transaction volumes, increased fraud, as well as pending legal and regulatory mandates?
- Increase Automation
Are you taking full advantage of automation when it comes to testing your payment channels? There is little doubt that automation will help keep your projects on track and help you deliver higher quality products and services that provide the best experience possible for your clients. Automation will also help free up your resources so that they can focus on higher value activities, like helping your organizations navigate through the current crises.
- Tools and Process Integration
Are your payment testing tools and processes fully integrated within the enterprise? We are long past the days when the payment channels can operate as silos outside of the corporate mainstream. The payment channels can and should integrate with your CI/CD pipeline and DevOps framework. Open APIs make it easier to connect disparate systems, facilitating even more remote control and automation capabilities.
Assessing Your Organization
If you already have these payment testing capabilities in place, congratulations. Your organization stands a good chance of weathering whatever is left of the COVID-19 crises and is likely to emerge with a competitive head start over other companies who have not planned so well.
If you have not these moves yet, why not? It’s safe to assume that every organization aspires to deliver the highest quality products and services to its customers, complete projects on time, increase productivity, reduce costs, and improve profitability. Not only are enhanced testing capabilities good for business during “normal” times, they also make it much easier for an organization to deal with unavoidable disruption, no matter where it comes from.
What's Next?
There is no way to tell how things are going to play out over the several months and years. COVID-19 is a reality that has already had a long-term impact on the entire global population and it is not done with us yet. The pandemic also complicates our ability to respond to any other issues or emergencies that may arise – in business or otherwise. Hurricanes, floods, other natural disasters are more difficult to deal with because of the virus. The technology and solutions to help build your best organization are readily available and could mean the difference between long term success or catastrophic failure. It’s OK to hope for an early end to our current situation, but don’t let that stop you from planning for the worst.
