The client is a financial technology innovator that provides comprehensive solutions for recurring revenue management. They address payment abandonment in subscription models through algorithmic orchestration, delivering a triple benefit to their clientele: boosted topline revenue, lowered operational expenses, and maximized customer lifetime value.
The company has developed unique SaaS billing software with complex business logic that delivers efficient, real-time payment processing and flexible subscription management, empowering businesses of all sizes and industries to optimize their revenue operations.
Given the stringent quality requirements of the fintech industry and the necessity to comply with PCI DSS standard, the client was in search of a long-term quality assurance provider.
To ensure alignment with the client’s strategic business goals, a1qa assembled a team of QA experts who established high-velocity, transparent communication channels, swiftly integrated into Scrum-based delivery processes, and executed the following software testing activities:
As part of manual QA efforts, functional testing focused on validating all features across the client’s entire platform. QA engineers gained a deep understanding of business processes and applied knowledge of the fintech domain, so they didn’t only test the functional side, but also kept tabs on logical and business inconsistencies.
The team conducted the following QA activities:
The client’s software needed to consistently operate under heavy user load and handle large volumes of financial operations without degradation. That’s why performance testing became one of the cornerstone activities for identifying bottlenecks, validating system throughput, and ensuring that key operations, such as processing recurring and one-time payments or generating invoices, remained stable and efficient during peak activity.
a1qa’s specialists were involved in a full spectrum of QA activities. They conducted stress and load testing for determining how software would perform under normal and extreme usage conditions, analyzed suboptimal queries to eliminate performance bottlenecks, and evaluated functional limits to better understand how features could withstand sustained load. QA engineers also verified search for speed and accuracy under pressure, checked database ability to scale to confirm seamless vertical and horizontal growth, detected the maximum volume of requests each processor could handle without degradation, and more.
As a result of a1qa’s contribution, a tenfold performance increase for one-time transactions was achieved, while the database’s efficiency and handling capacity were more than doubled.
To support continuous delivery, significantly reduce manual testing efforts, speed up QA cycles, and allow manual QA engineers to focus on the new core functionality, replacing their usual routine, a1qa’s experts introduced C#-driven automated testing solution using Playwright from the ground up that can be configured and integrated with client’s new IT products with minimal effort.
To be precise, the specialists:
To maintain test integrity, new features were initially subjected to rigorous manual verification and were transitioned to automated testing only after reaching a stable state, ensuring the durability and maintainability of the automation frameworks.
With 800+ test cases now running autonomously, a1qa’s team achieved a massive performance improvement, slashing the time required for build testing by more than 100x and minimizing manual intervention. Additionally, as the application was actively developed, test automation helped to control the quality on a regular basis and get testing results quickly.
Security testing was treated as a shared responsibility across the entire QA function. Both manual and automation QA engineers completed annual training, covering core security testing principles and common attack vectors. This established a strong baseline of security awareness and ensured that all considerations were embedded into test design and execution from the outset.
Given the requirement to maintain strict PCI DSS standards for the payment platform, a1qa’s team meticulously checked for risks related to firewall adjustments. The focus was on ensuring that allowing specific whitelisted data structures to bypass standard firewall rules for processing purposes would not expose the software to compromise or malicious input attacks.
Due to a1qa’s involvement, the audit concluded successfully, resulting in certification that authorizes the system to handle payment transactions.
