SafeBoda

The Customer

SafeBoda is starting a new service transforming the motorcycle industry in Africa. Started in Uganda in 2015, SafeBoda has expanded across Nairobi and Nigeria to offer a variety of new services powered by industry leading technology. Their core offering of “bodabodas” is a motorbike based ride sharing service that provides a seamless experience to their customers. They have also expanded their services to include selling airtime as well as providing deliveries through their motorbike network.

The Environment

SafeBoda has a large, distributed user base spread across various regions of Africa. They support tens of thousands of users on both Android and iOS, connecting on a variety of different phone types across various different networks of differing speeds. Adding to the complexity is the fact that they must provide an experience both for their riders as well as their drivers. As the use cases expand to cover things like rides and delivery, there are also new internal web applications being built which must be integrated, supported, and tested.

The Vision

For SafeBoda, they must provide a quality service that is dependable and reliable for all of their users. For those that rely on SafeBoda for transportation, they must be able to count on the app to work when they need it. Even more importantly, SafeBoda’s drivers must rely on the app to provide income and make sure that they are paid on time. With the complexity of the application and the infrastructure constantly growing, SafeBoda needed one comprehensive platform which could be used to automate their entire application and ensure the success and safety of riders, drivers, and employees.

The Challenge

Though SafeBoda has tens of thousands of users on their applications, they are still early in their journey of building and testing this increasingly popular service. Because the application was expanding so rapidly, it was critical to drive high rates of automated test coverage from the beginning. Many of SafeBoda’s employees were new to the organization due to this rapid growth, so finding a platform that was easy to ramp up on and highly collaborative was a requirement.  

The Process

Derrick Matheka, Head of QA at SafeBoda, conducted a search of the market and available tools that would meet the challenges of their rapidly growing environment. He focused his search on tools in the market which would provide ease of use as well as robust functionality. They mostly considered affordable, free and/or open source tools which would fit better within their tooling budget and build on top of some of their early learnings using pure Appium. TestProject was one of the first free tools that SafeBoda came across. Derrick had also researched Katalon as a potential solution. 

The Requirements

After collecting the learnings from several months of experimenting with Appium, the team was ready to evaluate TestProject and Katalon. Some of the main requirements of the new tool included: 

• Easy to learn and adopt, even for those new to test automation
• Support for advanced scripting approaches and ability to import tests via SDK
• Ability to support Web applications, Mobile applications, and even API’s
• Extensible, and easy to customize for unique use cases
• Easy to configure job scheduling and test execution
• Straightforward mobile device configuration and integration to Sauce Labs/BrowserStack
• Affordable, so the cost was feasible within their broader testing budget

With a comprehensive list of features created, Derrick would be able to validate if TestProject or Katalon was the right test automation tool to fit the needs of SafeBoda for years to come.

The Search

Derrick’s search was fairly quick, with a comprehensive set of requirements that was only met by a handful of tools. He came across TestProject through his research on the internet, seeing various mentions of it on google, testing forums, and elsewhere. With TestProject seeming to have most, if not all of the features SafeBoda was looking for, it became a clear contender. After narrowing down the list of tools to TestProject and Katalon, the top reasons for choosing TestProject were:

• TestProject provides an easy onboarding experience for non-technical users or those with limited testing experience
• TestProject has best in class support for web, mobile, and API’s in one interface
• TestProject offers the ability to easily import existing Selenium and Appium tests in multiple languages including Java, Python, and C#
• TestProject has built in job scheduling with support for running tests within TestProject or via trigger from CI/CD tools like Jenkins
• TestProject offers robust support at no cost via live chat, forum, and complete documentation
• TestProject is 100% free, including the platform, hosting, as well as live support

With the team keen to implement TestProject, Derrick was ready to embark on the journey of implementing TestProject within SafeBoda.

The Implementation

The process of getting TestProject fully running at SafeBoda took several weeks, with a large number of scenarios that need to be automated. Due to the strong test recorder, teams were able to create the necessary automated tests quickly with no coding required. The TestProject support team was closely involved in assisting with technical challenges and unusual corner cases that needed automating. After roughly 2 months, the team had been able to create adequate coverage of their web and mobile applications and migrate their testing activity fully to TestProject.  TestProject is now being used across all of the testers within the organization.

The Results

With TestProject fully deployed, Derrick has been able to see tremendous improvements to SafeBoda’s automated testing, including: 

• Increase in test automation coverage, improving their ability to test new features quickly, compared with Appium on its own
• Decrease in tester onboarding time, with almost all resources up to speed in a couple of weeks
• Reduction in test maintenance effort, with a shared element repository and data driven testing approach
• Improved integration and visibility between tools in the pipeline, including mobile device clouds like Sauce Labs and BrowserStack
• Cost savings on tooling infrastructure, with TestProject being free

Overall, the benefits of TestProject have been critical to supporting SafeBoda’s growing user base and expanding array of features. 

The Advice

Overall, Derrick recommends TestProject to friends and other organizations looking to build test automation coverage quickly. His advice to ensure a successful implementation is as follows: 

1. Organize your work from the beginning. Reuse will be easier when the project hierarchies, element library, test case repositories, and nomenclature are all defined.
2. Leverage the recorder. It can allow users of any skill set to create robust and maintainable tests with minimal time or training.
3. Maintain your elements. Using a page object model within TestProject will allow you to minimize your test maintenance investments.
4. Keep your tests small. The smaller the tests, the easier it will be to reuse them across future test cases.
5. Run your tests on a recurring basis for a consistent view of application quality. TestProject’s built in job scheduling makes it easy to run tests on a regular cadence.
6. Take advantage of the amazing support team and community. The support team can get involved and quickly address any difficult issues that need attention.