FACTS: Automated Black-Box Testing of FinTech Systems

FinTech, short for "financial technology," has advanced the process of transforming financial business from a traditional manual process-driven to an automation-driven model by providing various software platforms. However, the current FinTech-industry still heavily depends on manual testing, which becomes the bottleneck of FinTech industry development. To automate the testing process, we propose an approach of black-box testing for a Fin Tech system with effective tool support for both test generation and test oracles. For test generation, we first extract input categories from business-logic specifications, and then mutate real data collected from system logs with values randomly picked from each extracted input category. For test oracles, we propose a new technique of priority differential testing where we evaluate execution results of system-test inputs on the system's head (i.e., latest) version in the version repository (1) against the last legacy version in the version repository (only when the executed test inputs are on new, not-yet-deployed services) and (2) against both the currently-deployed version and the last legacy version (only when the test inputs are on existing, deployed services). When we rank the behavior-inconsistency results for developers to inspect, for the latter case, we give the currently-deployed version as a higher-priority source of behavior to check. We apply our approach to the CSTP subsystem, one of the largest data processing and forwarding modules of the China Foreign Exchange Trade System (CFETS) platform, whose annual total transaction volume reaches 150 trillion US dollars. Extensive experimental results show that our approach can substantially boost the branch coverage by approximately 40%, and is also efficient to identify common faults in the FinTech system.