A Brief Guide to QA Automation for Taxi and Delivery Apps

Logistics is often mentioned on the list of industries greatly affected by the pandemic, finding its place among businesses that are the most resilient or even flourishing. The reason lies in the segmentation and diversity of the logistics market. Along with the global supply chain and freight forwarding, it encompasses local transportation and delivery service that have been on the rise lately.

Lockdown, however, isn’t the only factor that increased the demand for food delivery and taxi services. E-commerce and last-mile delivery trends are driving the development of digital logistics. Moreover, restaurant operators admit that off-premises business has become a strategic priority before the lockdown.

Restaurants that invest in delivery apps or join delivery providers invest in increased visibility, better user experience, and customer feedback. Taxi services that have applications get better monitoring tools and enhanced user service.

In 2020 digital capabilities helped local logistic businesses to survive. When the situation stabilized a bit, the competition in the segment started to get harsh, and high product quality turned into a competitive advantage. It means that your app needs a thorough quality checkup, and automation testing services for a mobile app can play a significant role in it.

Benefits of QA Automation for Taxi and Delivery Apps

Automated mobile app testing services are surrounded by many myths that tend to exaggerate either their benefits or downsides. Well, automation does require more initial investment compared to hiring a manual QA engineer. Also, creating an automated test suite isn’t a one-time activity. Only with proper maintenance, it will remain relevant and efficient.

The truth is, only when it is relevant for the project automation will come with a list of benefits.

• By automating regression testing, you can cover the full functionality instead of prioritizing features for manual tests.
• The ability to schedule tests and run them without supervision and in parallel significantly reduces software delivery time.
• Automation of repeated time-consuming scenarios leaves more time for exploratory testing, ensuring broader test coverage in general.
• There is no need to enter complex data every time, and that helps to reduce human error (in addition to being a time-saver).
• Reports are generated automatically after every run, and a QA team can provide valuable feedback with minimum effort.
• Automation is more cost-efficient in the long run since new features require new tests and more people to cover the testing.

Simply put, automation helps to meet the primary business tasks — timely releases and close-to-flawless functionality. And that’s what adds up to brand credibility.

When to Go for Automation?

Stable functionality and manual test suite are the background for automated testing. Before you have a stable software build, automation is useless. As for the test suite, it becomes the basis for future scripts.

So the two things mentioned above make test automation possible, but they don’t make it essential. It is rational to engage automation testing services in your project in the following cases:

• There are sets of tests that are repeated during each testing session.
• The software has a complex architecture with many features.
• Tests execute the same workflow but use different data for inputs.
• QA engineers frequently have to enter complex data manually.
• The functionality isn’t large, but you need to test it across numerous environments.

These are the main reasons to go for automation, though there might be additional arguments for specific cases. A software testing company/team can answer whether there’s a need for automated testing after they learn more about your product.

What to Automate in Taxi and Delivery Apps?

In general, you should automate any tests performed repeatedly, like the regression testing suite. Core functionality and business-critical paths should be automated in the first place. But let’s back up the theory with some examples.

Our team has a wealth of experience in testing taxi and delivery apps. We’ve learned that each project comes with its particularities, so the automation strategy for each has some nuances. Stills, there are some basic things you can automate probably for each app in this category.

Smoke and regression tests for user interface and API. Depending on the stage of development, the mechanics may differ. For example:

• Developers release a feature or a build on a sandbox environment, and we run smoke tests to verify that new functionality hasn’t broken anything.
• Then, this new feature proceeds to regression — that’s the time for broader automated UI testing, also in a test environment.
• Working functionality in a sandbox environment doesn’t equal working functionality on prod. Thus, after the release, we run smoke API tests once more to make sure all the systems communicate as supposed on production.

Integration tests covering all the business-critical features, including:

• Order placement.
• Payment flow.
• Adding payment methods.
• Tariffication and price calculation.
• Sign-up & sign-in features for clients and drivers.
• Driver’s balance.

If a client plans scaling their business, performance testing becomes one more area of high priority. Automation makes it easier to check how the system responds to different kinds of loads. By measuring response and wait times, error rate, requests per second, CPU utilization, etc. we can detect the areas that require improvements. Depending on the company’s business goals, a product may require some or all of the following checkups:

• Load tests.
• Stress tests.
• Spike tests.
• Endurance tests.
• Scalability tests.

Usually, a QA team focuses on the ‘client’s’ part of an application, that is frontend components end-users are going to interact with. In some cases, however, we need to go beyond that and test some backend functionality as well. It happens when developers add many custom solutions that require inspection on the component level.

Bottom Line

The benefits of automation for logistic apps are evident: it is a way to spend less time, money, and effort on routine tasks prone to human error. Besides, you may be able to cover even broader functionality than we’ve just described. For example, functional, acceptance, and accessibility testing can also be automated — the need differs for every project.

In one of the earlier posts, we talked about how to build a test automation strategy. It may be helpful if your in-house specialists don’t have much experience with automation. Another option is to outsource this scope of software testing tasks to a QA company. If you need someone to set up the process, QA Madness provides automation testing services, and you can always reach out to discuss the details.