Comprehensive testing is of high importance to ensure the reliability of software systems, especially for systems with high stakes such as FinTech systems. In this paper, we share our observations of the Ant Group’s status quo in testing their financial services, specifically on the importance of properly transforming relevant external environment settings and prioritizing input object fields for mutation during automated fuzzing. Based on these observations, we propose FinFuzzer, an automated fuzz testing framework that detects and transforms relevant environmental settings into system inputs, prioritizes input object fields, and mutates system inputs on both environment settings and high-priority object fields. Our evaluation of FinFuzzer against four FinTech systems developed by the Ant Group shows that FinFuzzer can outperform a state-of-the-art approach in terms of line coverage in much shorter time.

Nowadays, the application of data mining and machine learning techniques continues to be common in many fields. There are many imbalanced datasets with much less significant samples than unimportance ones in real-life because it is hard to collect representative positive examples. Under these circumstances, the conventional aim of reducing overall classification accuracy and most of the standard machine learning methods may not be suitable for the imbalanced problem. In this work, we compare the performance of random forest and logistic regression on the prediction of an imbalanced dataset. We propose several ways to enhance two models based on cost-sensitive learning to provide more accurate predictions when dealing with imbalanced datasets.

To assure high quality of software systems, the comprehensiveness of the created test suite and efficiency of the adopted testing process are highly crucial, especially in the FinTech industry, due to a FinTech system’s complicated system logic, mission-critical nature, and large test suite. However, the state of the testing practice in the FinTech industry still heavily relies on manual efforts. Our recent research efforts contributed our previous approach as the first attempt to automate the testing process in China Foreign Exchange Trade System (CFETS) Information Technology Co. Ltd., a subsidiary of China’s Central Bank that provides China’s foreign exchange transactions, and revealed that automating test generation for such complex trading platform could help alleviate some of these manual efforts. In this paper, we investigate further the dilemmas faced in testing the CFETS trading platform, identify the importance of domain knowledge in its testing process, and propose a new approach of domain-specific test generation to further improve the effectiveness and efficiency of our previous approach in industrial settings. We also present findings of our empirical studies of conducting domain-specific testing on subsystems of the CFETS Trading Platform.

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 FinTech 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.