As the pace of technological innovation has increased immensely over the years, the application needs to be delivered at the same pace to be in the race. Organizations have found ways for continuous integration, continuous deployment and continuous monitoring. However, in order to achieve continuous delivery, the problem of continuous testing still remains intact especially in the mission critical applications and domains such as financial technologies. Most of the organizations have developed quality gates in their automated delivery pipeline but they become fruitless when continuous testing faces challenges like shorter lifecycle of test scripts, limited domain understanding of automation engineers, lack of automation skills from testers, limitations of automation tools etc. As a result, release managers, project managers and product owners often have to trade-off between quality and timelines.

The problem of continuous testing is haunting the organizations working on financial applications where each code change introduces risks of financial or business loss which need to be mitigated right away. Automation has strived to resolve the problem but is still more of a philosophy than the reality with most of the organizations struggling to automate testing as much as expected by the decision makers. This calls for intelligent and pragmatic automation strategy and approach making it easy to decide whether to take the code live or not. Our successful experience in a large scale and complex financial switch development and delivery has boosted our confidence to replicate the model internally as well as inspire industry to adopt continuous testing in a way that works to catchup with the speed of innovation.