ElasTest “ An elastic platform to ease end to end testing” is an exciting new digital partnership designed to create an open platform for testing and validating distributed software systems. ElasTest will bring benefits to nearly everyone, but in particular, FinTech applications will see much needed improvements in security and reliability. Relational is honored to play a part in developing ElasTest. However, no single group has the ability to build ElasTest alone. Some of the most innovative companies, universities, and research institutions in Europe are coming together with the support of the European Commission to make ElasTest a reality. ElasTest has many different applications, and all the participants will do what they do best.
Software testing has become too costly and time consuming for any one organization to handle. Traditional software only had to work with a single operating system, while today’s online APPs usually have to work on multiple browsers installed on several different operating systems. Then there is the matter of hardware compatibility. The question “Does it work on mobile?” now appears more than 300,000 times on Google, while “Does it work on Apple?” appears almost 200,000 times.
Despite this need, Sauce Lab’s 2017 survey of software professionals found that only 32% of software testing is mostly or fully automated. ElasTest is clearly arriving just in time to help automate testing and move us toward a future where everything just works seamlessly for testers and for the end user. The universal compatibility that we can only be achieved through the efforts of leading experts in software testing and validation. King Juan Carlos University, the Fraunhofer Institute, and the Italian National Research Council are leading the way for improved testing in ElasTest.
Traditional financial institutions are more concerned with security than any other threat to FinTech, with 58% citing IT security as a challenge for FinTech according to PwC’s 2017 survey. Something clearly needs to be done, so ElasTest will offer Security Check as a Service. At Relational, we take security seriously. The IMDEA Software Institute, the Technical University of Berlin, and Atos will be our most important digital partners in helping to secure the future of FinTech through the ElasTest project.
If security is the greatest fear about FinTech, then big data analytics is the greatest hope. PwC found that 74% of financial institutions considered data analytics to be one of the most relevant technologies for 2017, while only 32% said the same about cyber-security. Given this level of commercial interest, it should come as no surprise that corporations like Relational and IBM shine when it comes to data analytics. At Relational, we bring an enormous amount of expertise to managing log data and analyzing that data to draw useful conclusions. Equally important, IBM’s Ireland operation has significant experience developing cognitive computing systems to answer natural language questions about test results. Relational is proud to be working with IBM on big data analytics for the ElasTest project.
ElasTest is about more than just FinTech, as many of our digital partners are focused on other applications. Naevatec is the leader in streaming multimedia over the Internet. Another one of our digital partners is Zurich University of Applied Sciences, which specializes in Cloud Computing research. Finally, ElasTest is being developed as Free Open Source Software (FOSS) so that everyone will be able to share the benefits of ElasTest and contribute to the project.
The evolution of FinTech is dependent on stable, usable, and secure software. ElasTest is a digital partnership that will help make that possible, but there is so much more to ElasTest than what I have been able to describe here. I do hope that I have been able to convey my enthusiasm for ElasTest and what it means for the future of FinTech.
The project is funded within the European Commission funds under Grant Agreement…..
For more information contact the project coordinator or visit http://elastest.eu/
Stay tuned for more information!
