Enhancing Software Quality Validation at SafeBoda: Challenges and Solutions

By Akram Mukasa, Senior Software Quality Assurance Engineer — SafeBoda

At SafeBoda, a leading technology platform offering ride-hailing and financial services in Uganda and Kenya, we place a strong emphasis on delivering high-quality software products to our diverse user base.

In this blog post, we’ll delve into the challenges we face at SafeBoda in validating the quality of our software products and explore how we can leverage different testing strategies and the different automation testing tools to overcome these challenges.

Challenges

• Diverse User Base: SafeBoda serves a diverse user base with varying preferences and needs. Ensuring that the software meets the expectations of users across different demographics and regions poses a significant challenge in quality validation.
• Scalability: With a rapidly expanding user base and operations in multiple cities, scalability becomes crucial. Validating software quality under increased traffic and transaction volumes while maintaining optimal performance presents challenges.
• Cross-Platform Compatibility: Our applications (passenger, driver, partner) are available on various platforms, including Android and iOS(Passenger). Ensuring consistent functionality and user experience across different platforms while adhering to platform-specific guidelines adds complexity to quality validation.
• Regulatory Compliance: Operating in multiple countries requires compliance with diverse regulatory frameworks and standards. Ensuring that the software complies with local regulations, data protection laws, and industry standards poses compliance challenges.
• Financial Service Quality: Our SafeBoda financial services, including mobile money integration, bill payments, and airtime top-ups, require meticulous validation to ensure accuracy, security, and reliability. Any errors or glitches in financial transactions could have serious repercussions for users.
• Incomplete Test Coverage: Ensuring comprehensive test coverage can be daunting. Some areas may be overlooked, leading to undiscovered defects.
• Continuous Integration and Deployment: At SafeBoda, We follow agile development practices with frequent releases. Implementing continuous integration and deployment pipelines while ensuring the quality of each release is crucial for maintaining a seamless user experience.
• Regression Testing Bottlenecks: Frequent code changes require extensive regression testing, consuming time and resources.

Solutions

• User-Centric Testing: Conducting thorough user acceptance testing (UAT) involving representatives from diverse user groups to gather feedback and identify usability issues. Implement beta testing programs to engage users and collect valuable insights.
• Performance Testing: Invest in robust performance testing tools to simulate real-world load conditions and identify performance bottlenecks. Implement scalability testing to ensure the software can handle increased traffic.
• Cross-Platform Testing: Adopt automated testing frameworks that support cross-platform testing to validate functionality and user interface consistency across different platforms. Tools like Appium , selenium webdriver, App center Test, katalon studio, Test complete for and SuperTest which can be used for API automation testing to ensure backend functionality is consistent across platforms.

Sample of supertest automation tool

• Regression Testing Automation: Implement automated regression testing suites to cover critical paths and frequently modified areas. Utilize tools like Selenium, Cypress, Appium, JUnit to automate regression tests. For example, when adding a new payment gateway, ensure that existing payment gateways still function correctly.
• Compliance Management: Establish a dedicated compliance team to stay updated with regulatory requirements. Conduct regular audits to ensure the software meets compliance requirements.
• Financial Service Quality Testing: Implement rigorous testing processes specific to financial services, including transaction testing, security testing, and compliance testing. Perform thorough validation of mobile money transactions and ensure adherence to financial regulations.
• Security Testing: Conduct comprehensive security testing to identify and mitigate potential vulnerabilities, such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and authentication flaws. Implement measures to safeguard user data and protect against cyber threats.
• Test Coverage Optimization: Create a test matrix that maps requirements to test cases. Prioritize critical and high-risk areas. Use techniques like boundary value analysis, equivalence partitioning, and pairwise testing to optimize coverage. Automate repetitive tests to improve efficiency.
• DevOps Practices: Implement DevOps practices to automate the build, test, and deployment processes. Adding our automation tests to the pipeline to run before deployment helps to utilize CI/CD pipelines to accelerate delivery while maintaining rigorous testing standards.

Conclusion

By addressing challenges related to user needs, scalability, cross-platform compatibility, regulatory compliance, and continuous integration, At SafeBoda we work every other day to enhance software quality validation processes.

Leveraging automation testing with several tools like SuperTest, Appium, selenium, Cypress, improves backend functionality validation, quality of all the applications hence ensuring a seamless user experience across platforms.

Through a combination of user-centric testing, performance testing, cross-platform testing, compliance management, and DevOps practices, here at SafeBoda, we are aimed to continue to deliver high-quality software products and maintain our position as a trusted technology platform in Africa’s ride-hailing and financial services market.