Testing of Smart Card Software for Public Transport

Summary

A Dutch IT company that provides near-field-communication and transportation solutions was the main provider of software and hardware for a nationwide contactless smart-card public-transport program. It needed a dedicated team to test system modules that would be sequentially implemented into the transport network. INNERLUXES carried out comprehensive testing — manual functional, regression, robustness, performance, and system testing — and helped the Customer significantly improve module and system quality.

About the Customer

The Customer is a Dutch IT company that provides innovative solutions and managed services for the near-field-communication and transportation industries. For many years, it has been successfully developing and implementing e-Ticketing and e-Transaction solutions in the nationwide market.

The Challenge

The Customer was the main provider of software and hardware equipment for a nationwide ticketless-travel program — a contactless smart-card system for public transport. The Customer came to INNERLUXES because it needed a dedicated team to test the system modules that would be sequentially implemented into the transport network. The project goals were:

• Carry out manual functional, regression, robustness, and performance testing of the system modules.
• Perform system testing.
• Convert XML files to the EOD format.

The Solution

INNERLUXES's dedicated team visited the Customer onsite and received the necessary instructions and equipment, such as original smart cards, card readers, and system emulators.

As testing was carried out simultaneously with the Customer's system development, an iterative approach was chosen for communication. The dedicated team received information about changes and updates to the system and its modules, then created and performed a set of tests over the updated versions. Among the tested modules were those handling data processing, data backup and verification, transaction acceptance and processing, sending to servers, and blacklist updates. After each iteration, the dedicated team provided complete bug reports, with conclusions and recommendations stated in a Test Advice Report.

Because the card readers worked with EOD files, there was a need to convert XML blacklist data to the EOD format — for which an appropriate console application was created.

The Results

• INNERLUXES's dedicated team successfully tested the system and its modules and provided several versions of the modules to the Customer.
• Based on the valuable feedback from the testing team, the Customer significantly improved the functionality and performance of both separate modules and the whole system.
• The Customer was satisfied with the custom software development and testing quality, and continued the mutually beneficial cooperation.

Technologies and Tools

File Tool, Card Tool, FTP, Remote Machine, Windows 2008 R2, MS SQL Server 2008.

Languages: C#, Java, C++.