Portfolio
a1qa helps an international association accelerate time to market with DevOps and test automation
a1qa was to ensure the quality of the top-notch product intended to rock the market and speed up its release.
Overview
a1qa has become our trusted technology partner with their ability to add value to areas of quality assurance and functional enhancement. Their contributions have become essential to our overall programme success that can be seen in numbers — so far we serve more than 60 mobile operators with the listed services. We are nothing but happy with the level of services delivered within the scope of the current partnership and would be pleased to recommend a1qa to the companies seeking unprecedented quality of their complex software solutions.
Senior Director Platforms & Operations
The client is the leading trade body in representing the interests of mobile network operators (MNO) worldwide.
The client was launching a secure universal authentication platform.
Third-party mobile operators develop user’s identity APIs and, along with the service provider’s application, use this solution as a log-in option.
End users choose it to authenticate to websites and services without the need to remember passwords and usernames. System accessibility from multiple devices eases user experience as well.
The platform is composed of several modules and a set of SDKs to enable integration into third-party applications: client-side SDKs (iOS, Android, web) for client applications and server-side SDKs (Java, PHP, .Net) for service providers.
The customer wanted to improve the quality of the product and invited the a1qa team who had a proven track record of delivering independent QA services to the telecom industry.
The number of mobile operators eager to connect to the solution dramatically increased. In this context, the client decided to develop a tool to speed up the testing of versions of new apps and accelerate the time to market.
The creation of the tool was to be in accordance with the best DevOps practices. a1qa was to assure its high quality and support functioning.
Services offered
Functional testing
Test automation
SDK testing
DevOps in testing
Documentation services
Project scope
The a1qa engineers started with client-side SDK testing. In order to carry it out, they performed the following steps:
- Created test documentation and test strategy (test cases, acceptance sheet)
- Set up the environment for iOS, Android, and HTML5 SDK versions
- Performed functional tests (positive and negative test scenarios)
- Developed and supported a custom MNOs APIs testing portal
- Developed real-time monitoring and analytics for the platform.
The engineers assessed the code quality using code analyzers, developed a set of the automated tests emulating invocation of the SDK methods (including unit and integration tests). They also built automated testing scripts to check API of the client’s software, which went through a rigorous manual UI testing process.
To enhance solution security and guarantee isolation of the client’s part from any interaction with APIs, the engineers split the SDKs into server-side SDKs and client-side libraries. The QA team implemented a novel mechanism for interaction between client/server solutions, ensured their compatibility, and established the process of updating solutions as well as creating documentation.
On top of all that, a1qa provided support to end users and introduced test automation, end-to-end, unit, integration tests for server-side SDKs. Software architecture allowed for speedy updates of API version support policy.
As a result, core specifics of SDKs incorporated the following hallmarks:
- Automatic API version detection mechanism
- A caching tool to minimize API transactions
- Standardized interaction with the client’s solution
- Support of any flows.
Portal testing
QA engineers took advantage of the below-mentioned tools to introduce test automation and implement best DevOps practices:
- Java — to develop a back-end that included automated tests for end-user’s API testing and create unit tests to minimize the time for portal testing
- Docker — to enhance the setup and deployment speed of the environment allowing to separate the work of each engineer
- AWS toolkit — to monitor current conditions of the environment and create new ones.
The process of setting up the environment was complex and consisted of 30 very complicated steps, which could’ve resulted in a much higher risk of errors.
To carry out a build correctly, the a1qa team applied Docker containers to simplify the process of downloading and launching only one container. This approach helped to eliminate human mistakes.
After the implementation of test automation:
- The new app testing time was reduced from 40h to 2h
- The launch time of a new app was decreased from 2h to 15m
- New environment deployment and configuration time was scaled down from 36h to 30m.
Let’s compare the availability of the solution before test automation implementation to what it is now. As you can see, it went from being only available 120 hours a week to the now 24/7/365 availability.
The testing process greatly influenced the customer’s attitude to automation and DevOps practices, which turned out to pay off very quickly.
Time on launching automated test scripts was reduced, streamlining the process into being clearer and more understandable for the end users — mobile operator’s developers.
Portal development
Initially, a1qa was tasked to measure the latency of queries for certain APIs. For that, the engineers developed a script running from different machines in various locations which was generating a file with the required results. However, later the number of scripts and test data variability increased drastically.
To overcome this hurdle, a1qa proceeded with developing a portal for tracing queries with standardized end-users’ flow (UI activities, API interaction). The solution was to tackle 3 core issues:
- Constant and hourly checking of round-the-clock availability of basic flows
- Gathering data about the results of sending queries
- Sending cross-regional queries.
The QA team harnessed a .NET (C#) programming toolkit and based the application on ASP.NET according to an MVC template. AWS allowed the portal deployment in 6 regions.
Therefore, the portal enabled the client to:
- Monitor incidents 24/7 in order to stem end-user’s errors
- Instantly obtain notifications of the incidents
- Analyze system throughput
- Test APIs 40 times faster.
Integration with an analytical Internet service for working with business information
To provide the client with real-time access to metrics covering APIs’ status, the engineers integrated a portal with a cloud-based service.
Developed JS scripts gathered data from the portal, converted it into the appropriate format for the service, and sent it to a dashboard. Later, the engineers augmented the number of scripts and automatic transfer of data about the number of transactions for multiple conditions was applied.
In such a way, test automation reduced the amount of effort required for transmitting and analyzing data as well as allowed for supervising the system status in real time.
Based on the highly competent and timely performance of a1qa, the client entrusted the team to implement automation on a brand-new project in a banking sphere.
Technologies & tools
- Java
- Spring (Java)
- CircleCI
- AWS Elastic Beanstalk
- NGINX
- Docker
- MS SQL
- Ruby on Rails
- RabbitMQ
- SonarQube
- AWS CloudWatch
- Jenkins
- MySQL
- PostgreSQL
Results
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Time to market reduction due to the a1qa’s QA strategy and implementation of test automation.
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Successful rollout of a highly flexible and sustainable to ongoing updates solution which is currently leveraged by dozens of mobile operators.
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The portal development for easing the tracing of API queries and round-the-clock monitoring of incidents.
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The establishment of integration with a cloud-based service to fast-track data collection and analysis.
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MNOs were capable of testing their APIs without any dependencies or limitations.
In numbers
5+
years of the project’s duration
50+
mobile operators using the solution on a full-time basis
20X
faster testing time with test automation
8X
faster launch time of a new app
72X
faster new environment deployment and configuration
40X
faster MNO API testing