Enhancing Retail Payment Testing Efficiency Through Continuous Integration: IntelliQA's Guide
The primary objective of Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD) is to facilitate development teams in delivering operational software to end-users on a frequent basis, which not only adds value but also enables them to gather valuable feedback on how their product is being utilised in the real world. As a result, numerous enterprises have adopted the DevOps methodology to stay competitive.
In the context of the waterfall model, the manual testing or quality assurance stage was conducted after the code was developed and integrated. Its primary objective was to verify whether the application functioned according to the specified requirements.
The sequential nature of this method hinders the pace of the release process, and it implies that developers are unable to verify the functionality of their work until much later in the development cycle after a considerable amount of additional work has been completed. Conversely, a CI/CD process enables an agile methodology of short, iterative cycles that produce prompt feedback and permit frequent updates to be released. In these brief iterations, testing plays a crucial role in automatically validating the new code to ensure that it functions correctly and does not disrupt any other aspects of the system.
Continuous Integration (CI) encompasses the following activities:
Regularly committing code changes to the master or trunk.
Initiating a build if applicable.
Conducting software testing each time to verify its functionality.
To fully leverage the advantages of Continuous Integration (CI), team members should strive to commit changes on a daily basis. However, manually conducting CI/CD automation testing at this level, even for a small team, would impose a significant burden on testers and entail monotonous tasks. This is where automated testing plays a crucial role.
Automating tests for the retail POS system has been consistently challenging because it involves interfacing with hardware components, a payment device, and various cards. This restricts the capability of test automation tools to handle payment-related test cases, resulting in a manual effort being necessary to verify payment tests before the next stage of the CI/CD process is executed. This manual step ultimately disrupts the CI/CD workflow.
A potential solution is to utilise a robot and mechanism to control the hardware components and present various cards to the payment device, which will be affixed to the Robot. IntelliQA has Robots that can support various types of payment devices, as well as multiple Payment methods, including contact, contactless, and swipe. These Robots can be managed through a straightforward REST API call that can be integrated into your test automation tool.
IntelliQA has successfully introduced the robotic payment automation solution to numerous prominent retail clients, facilitating faster product shipments with improved quality by integrating retail POS payment automation testing into their CI/CD process.
Contact us
Please get in touch if you need support with automated payment testing solutions, and our sales team would be happy to discuss this with you. Contact us on:
+44 1707 906177 or sales@intelliqa.com
To keep up to date with our news and insights, please keep checking our website, or follow us on social media LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
Comments