_Global mobile test automation for OneSpan

About OneSpan

OneSpan, one of our key long-term clients. The company focuses its activities on technologies in the field of digital identity, cybersecurity, and counteracting digital fraud. OneSpan is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, with other major offices located in Montreal and Brussels. The company also has sub-offices around the world. It provides a cloud-based solution, offering an open architecture to combat fraud. Our client’s best known products include the implementation of multifactor authentication and also electronic signature software.

Project Background

The collaboration between TT PSC and OneSpan began in the autumn 2017. In 2019, as many as 50 TT PSC experts were involved in the company’s ongoing projects. Our specialists supported the work of the client’s Research and Development (R&D) department. To start working with OneSpan, TT PSC had to prove its willingness to work and competence in several areas. You can read about these activities in the case study Scaling of R&D activities through comprehensive outsourcing of IT services for OneSpan.

Challenges and needs (Business and Technical)

The client’s main challenge and need were to introduce automation testing in the existing assurance quality processes for his mobile portfolio solutions.OneSpan is the owner of many different projects, libraries, and tools used by both internal work teams and external development teams.

The client concluded that a single, standardized test process with automation was needed for better test process management. OneSpan was looking for a new framework that would unify the work of different mobile teams.

The goal was to build something easy to reuse and adapt for different mobile solutions test automation. The company expected a solution that would provide automation for repetitive tasks such as regression testing – an automation tool, which creates visual recordings and logs, and makes it easy to detect why tests fail. The company receives immediate feedback, which speeds up the repair of errors. Re-testing would become a fairly easy process that takes place in the background.

Project Scope – Mobile Test Project

One of the implementations in the scope of the project included several dozen test scenarios implemented as automated end-to-end tests. These tests will increase with the change or addition of features. As the automation tests are not frozen due to several possible changes (scenarios update, tool update, OS version update, new phone support, etc…), TT PSC’s main priority is now to maintain the test automation for mobile applications after it’s delivered.

Specific project goals for the client:

Project Phase

The implemented solution has standardized and optimized the automation testing process. As part of the project, Transition Technologies provided the following products and services:

• Test automation used in the CI/CD process, for this task we used the most popular mobile application testing tool called Appium.
• Together with the DevOps team, we were able to implement the complete process using Jenkins Pipeline scripts. As the project was led by the R&D department, there was a risk of dynamic chan-ges. The first big challenge was therefore the migration of the existing solution from Jenkins to Gitlab-CI. During this process, we created a series of documentation, live presentations and training for team members, mainly for Quality Assurance specialists, Developers, and Product Owners
• We started with Proof Of Concept, which was to confirm the assumptions of our project, creating a physical Test Farm located in one of the offices.
• Once the flow was well-known and stable, we introduced a new test farm powered by Browserstack. The appropriate architecture selected for this task at the beginning facilitated this stage of implementation, as all activities were based on interfaces. The solution is fully used in the CI/CD production process.

Results

Thanks to the cloud-based solution, we were able to test the application on several different devices. Maximizing test coverage in the shortest possible time was key to the success of the mobile application. As our work was well received, we started working with other teams. So far, we have provided the automation of different mobile solutions. The next planned steps are to train more Quality Assurance-Developers to use the provided solution. We will work on growing the team and supporting more and more mobile solutions (ex: SDKs) delivered by OneSpan.

Thanks to the implementation of a global solution for automating tests of mobile applications and standardizing test processes, it has become possible to:

Project shortcut

Products/services used: Quality assurance in the CI/CD process

Project Duration

Start: February 2020 – until now

Delivery Team: Two QA-Developers involved for 40 h/week, Agnieszka and Paweł QA Engineers/Developers

Key Technologies:

Sample application screenshots:

Figure 1:
Test execution pipeline (GitlabCI)

Figure 2:
Multiple devices test diagram

Figure 3:
Slack notification with test summary

Figure 4:
Multi-level pipeline

Figure 5:High-level automation framework architecture

Figure 6:
Test results dashboard (Report Portal)

Test Farm