QA Automation Services for a Mobile Banking App

The banking domain in the Middle East is highly dynamic and competitive. The cost of user acquisition is high, so any bank institution pointing toward success needs to be prompt, flexible, and able to offer unique solutions.

The client's stakeholders realized that manual testing was taking too much time, increasing time to market. Specifically, they needed:

• Automated tests split per feature for targeted execution.
• The ability for all team members to trigger tests at any time.
• Tests executable per platform (iOS and Android).
• The ability to run smoke or full regression tests depending on the phase, speeding up pre-release testing.

Scope of work

The team introduced the QA automation process for a platform-agnostic mobile app development distributed for iOS and Android platforms.

QA automation activities on the project were introduced from scratch: from the initial architectural design to the test execution itself.

1. Architectural design for existing application's test automation;
2. Automated testing integration into the existing CI/CD development process
3. Test results reporting to Jira using XRay and integration with Slack for notifications
4. Configuring automated tests execution by a trigger and on schedule;
5. Implementation of QA automated tests, both UI and API

Solution

Initially, our team resorted to manual testing, but as the number of functionalities increased, so did the number of tests. This way, our team needed to find appropriate software testing tools to make manual testing easier and more effective. Ultimately, the goal was to increase the speed, efficiency, accuracy, and toughness of the testing process.

Our team chose an iterative approach to solve this problem.

1. The QA team evaluated the application's current state.
2. Team members designed preliminary architecture for the test automation solution.
3. Finally, our specialists started building up tests and CI processes in collaboration with developers.

Appium, an open-source tool, was selected as a basis to keep costs down. Akveo's engineers built an automation framework from scratch to run tests against iOS and Android application versions on real and virtual devices using the SauceLabs platform. One of the benefits of the solution was the ability to run automated tests easily and frequently, thus, checking out the quality level of the application more often.

The team used Bitrise to schedule script execution and run tests against newly just-built applications or exact application versions stored on AWS to improve the CI process.

Understanding the crucial role of reporting and alerting, the team integrated the automation framework with the existing test management and bug tracking tool JIRA (using Xray plugin) and Slack for instant notifications and alerts.

Automated tests were built for various application layers, e.g., API, UI.

Our specialists built a custom UI solution using the UI Bakery tool to provide easy access and test execution. Using the solution, the team members can run tests at any time. The custom UI form allows selecting test coverage for a specific feature and running tests against a particular application version.

As a result, the solution allows finding regression bugs early at a low cost. Plus, it reduces the number of routine tasks for QA engineers, increases the speed of product delivery, and enlarges test coverage.