Reducing Third Party Test Transaction Costs

If you have never heard about stubbing or service virtualization, this article should be a good basic introduction for you on how to reduce test transaction costs. If you already know about stubbing and service virtualization have a look at Traffic Parrot introduction or browse other posts on our blog instead.

Test transaction costs in banking and insurance

Many banking and insurance systems connect to third party services that charge for usage on a per-transaction basis. This will often include but is not limited to accessing market data or detecting fraud.

Testing and test transaction costs

When software is tested together with a third party service, you have to pay for the requests your systems make. In many cases, those costs become significant reaching more than $1k per test suite run. This results in unhealthy decision dynamics, like reducing the amount of testing done or decreasing the frequency of test cycles which later increases the technical debt accumulation.

Reducing the costs

There is a simple solution to that problem. Instead of testing the system always connected to the third party service you can introduce a new testing phase and test with a test double pretending to be the real system. After the system has been tested in isolation, you can proceed integration testing but do only a minimal amount of it. This should reduce the third party test transaction costs to the absolute minimum. We have seen a reduction in third party transaction of up to 93%.

Other benefits

Service virtualization is a popular practice across the industry. Implementing it will not only reduce third party test transaction costs. It has other advantages as well, for example resolving test data setup and environments uptime issues. For more details have a look at our introduction to service virtualization video.

Next steps

Contact us for a free 20-minute consultation call to help you get started with service virtualization or have a look at our introduction to service virtualization video.