Testing of Smart Card Software for Public Transport

Customer

The Customer is a Dutch IT company that provides innovative solutions and managed services for near field communication and transportation industries. For over 10 years they have been successfully developing and implementing e-Ticketing and e-Transaction solutions at the nationwide market.

Challenge

The Customer was closely affiliated with the Dutch Rail ticketless travelling program OV-Chipkaart as the main provider of software and hardware equipment for the program. OV-Chipkaart is a contactless smart card system for all public transport in the Netherlands.

The Customer came to ScienceSoft since they needed a dedicated team to carry out testing of system modules that would be sequentially implemented into the Dutch transport network. The project goals were:

• Carry our manual functional, regression testing, robustness testing and performance testing of the system modules;
• Perform the system testing;
• Convert xml files to EOD format

Solution

ScienceSoft 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 services were carried out simultaneously with the system development by the Customer, an iterative approach was chosen for the communication. Our dedicated team received information about the changes and updates of the system and its modules. After that a set of tests was created and performed over the updated versions. Among the tested ones were modules with the following functions: data processing, data backup and verification, transaction acceptance and processing, sending to servers, blacklist update. After each iteration, the dedicated team provided complete bug reports. Conclusions and recommendations related to testing results were stated in the Test Advice Report.

As card readers worked with EOD files, there was a need to convert xml data about blacklist to EOD format. For this purpose an appropriate console application was created.

Results

ScienceSoft’s dedicated team successfully tested the system and its modules and provided several versions of modules to the Customer. Based on the valuable feedback from the testing team, the Customer was able to significantly improve the functionality and performance not only of separate modules, but also of 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++