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Hi Robin, until recently I would have agreed, one of the reasons my old company developed ASSET 20 years ago, which makes me feel very old as it was the month my son was born ! was because we wanted a quick and cheap way to address the immediate testing needs of individual projects. 

Over the years an increasing amount of "Tier-1" organisations have definitley "bought into" the test infrastructure concept, for example we are currently helping a "brand" change the way hundreds of testers approach the testing of its core systems globally as a whole.

I see the industry challenge being to remove the commercial barriers to this kind of technology to allow all payments "participants" to have access to this platform approach. I do however share your view that the testing approach to payments can be, understandably but to its detriment, very project driven, and I think that this is a real problem.

As testing resources are stretched further, and even redeployed to meet the needs of further regulation, then striving for testing automation becomes more important. Getting more assurance and compliance for your testing buck has never been more important... 

Good point, clearly Banks have the greatest responsibility to secure data, and as recently highlighted how that data may be “re-purposed”.  The minimum they can do is enforce robust certification procedures to make sure external agencies only have access to that information they should have. Luckily the technology now exists to deploy such certifications in a greatly more controlled, timely and cost-effective manner.   I do agree however that anyone in the “food chain” is going to be understandably under more and more scrutiny

Thanks for the correction Andre.

You are always in good company saying NO :)

Nokia CEO ended his speech saying this “we didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost”

January 19, 2012: Kodak filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection.[13][14][88] The company's stock was delisted from NYSE and moved to OTC exchange.

In March 1998, JTS sold the Atari name and assets to Hasbro Interactive for $5 million

Competition from Netflix, Redbox, and other video on demand services were major factors that led to the company's eventual demise. Blockbuster began to lose significant revenue in the mid-to-late 2000s, and in 2010, the company filed for bankruptcy protection.

I'm not personally convinced that the Payments Industry can't be disrupted, I was a "happy" customer of all of the four above.  They didn't do a whole lot wrong, the world just moved on.

I’m glad you liked the article Ketharaman. Payment innovation, and speed to market, is solely reliant on a test process which can handle the growing complexity in payment technology. For me, it's not 'innovation' if a new development is sat in a bottleneck to be tested for months or if it fails on launch. The fear of failure is actually stifling innovation, that's why trust through new ways of testing is so important. 

It’s almost the perfect storm for introducing bugs into Payments Systems.

A clash of old and new technology

The increasing adoption of “Services” , often external

Agile and DevOps redefining what a delivery is, and how long you have to test it

The need to prototype, on-board and deliver more and more quicker and quicker.

It’s great to automate but this requires vendors to provide genuine end-to-end coverage, and not in 5 tools that don’t allow you to make changes yourself.

Yep, and people will never enter a PIN into a POS device, and you will never stop people smoking in bars....

Some very valid points made here.  Production data in my view can be a great starting point for defining things like transaction mixes, peak transaction times and loads etc.  But for good test coverage you need well defined tests that you can actually control. 

Like most testers, production data doesn't age well.  More time seems to be spent jumping through hoops maintaining some level of PCI compliance, changing dates/times and recalculating encrypted fields than would have been needed to define the test properly in the first place.