We recently talked with friends from a fintech company…
and the chaos they described around their environments was next level.
If you work in fintech, this will sound painfully familiar.
They had eight environments:
dev, dev2, qa, staging, uat, preprod, perf, prod.
And somehow… they all behaved differently.
Each one was like a separate universe.
“Which environment is correct?”
→ Depends who you ask. 😂
Here’s the killer:
They ran tons of tests, but none of them were connected to a real SUT
(Subject Under Test — build, version, commit, image, etc.)
So the test results basically said:
“Something passed somewhere at some point.”
Useless.
The team had test results scattered across:
- Slack
- Jenkins
- PDFs
- Someone’s laptop
- Confluence
- Grafana
- Random folders
Finding test results took longer than fixing the bugs.
This created the classic fintech failure pattern:
Dev passes
Staging fails
“Ignore staging, it’s broken”
Release to prod
Prod fails
Panic meeting
Everyone shocked
Nobody knows what happened
Why?
Because dev, staging, and prod were not aligned.
Different configs.
Different data.
Different feature flags.
Different dependencies.
Different versions of microservices.
A pipeline?
More like three separate ecosystems.
One engineer literally told us:
“We test the product… but we never know which version we tested.”
That’s the root of the chaos.
If you don’t know the SUT, test results don’t mean anything.
Fintech doesn’t need more tests.
Fintech needs visibility.
Clear mapping of:
- Environment
- Version
- Config
- Test results
- Changes
- Failures
- What moved where
Without visibility, every environment is a lottery.
If your environments feel like different planets…
If staging is “always broken”…
If prod surprises you…
You’re not alone.
This is the norm in large fintech systems.
But it’s fixable.
We’re working on solving exactly this with OpenQuality —
real visibility across environments and test results tied to actual versions.
Not more dashboards.
Not more reports.
Just clarity and trust.
If your fintech is drowning in environment chaos, stay tuned. 🚀
From Test To Trust