Testing of a Smart Transportation Application for Electronic Toll Collection

Customer

The Customer is a provider of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) that employ information and communication technologies to support and optimize road transportation, including infrastructure, vehicles, users and industry. The systems aim at improving traffic flow, increasing road safety and helping to protect the environment and enhance public security.

Challenge

A state organization operating as a road building and maintenance company commissioned the Customer to develop a system that would use fully automated electronic collection and processing of vehicle tolling data to conduct toll collection with no interference to traffic flow. Based on microwave DSRC (Dedicated Short Range Communication) technology, the system would allow road users to pay toll without stopping at toll plazas. The toll would be calculated automatically thanks to direct communication between the on-board unit (OBU) mounted in the vehicle and the toll gantries.

In order to ensure sustainable system operation, the Customer developed:

• Two CRM applications written in C# (back end) and Delphi (front end) – for operators to run the toll collection system
• Four applications (C# and Delphi) – largely for managerial statistics
• A website written in PHP – for drivers to manage their personal accounts

The Customer needed to augment his team of testers with local testing specialists proficient in several languages and able to perform full lifecycle localization testing of the given software. It was decided to hire two testers from ScienceSoft who along with the Customer’s testing team contributed to the successful take-off and operation of the toll collection system.

Solution

ScienceSoft testers stayed with the team for 2 months prior to and 8 months after the launch of the system. In close cooperation with the Customer’s business analyst and developers they performed a wide range of tasks:

• Local testing team coordination, planning and task distribution
• Checklist preparation and test design
• Test plan and test case writing
• Functional, regression and localization testing of system modules
• Test results reporting
• Bug review, reporting and verification
• Product quality evaluation

ScienceSoft team put a considerable amount of effort into the on-field testing together with the local system operators, which particularly required the language knowledge as none of the Customer’s specialists was proficient in local languages. This allowed to facilitate and significantly speed up the entire testing process.

Since in the Customer’s local unit there were no dedicated testers, ScienceSoft specialists provided an extensive and thorough training, so that the local team could take over after the system was launched and the initial testing team returned to the company’s headquarters. Thus, the Customer avoided the expenses caused by relocating QA specialists.

All processes and workflows followed agile methodology with 3-4 week sprints. ScienceSoft team managed to organize the process with minimum idle time for the testing team.

Results

The project was delivered on time. ScienceSoft testers played a key role in localizing the system and helped the Customer to considerably reduce the costs of its implementation. The system launch was regarded as the most successful among those performed by the Customer. Currently, the length of the toll roads in the country totals 1,200 km.

Technologies and Tools

Testing software: TestTrack Pro (Seapine), SoapUI

Framework: Microsoft .NET

Database management system: Microsoft SQL Server 2008

VPN software: Cisco Systems VPN Client