Case Study: Exploratory Testing with NFTfi

Profile

NFTfi is a leading liquidity protocol for NFTs. The platform allows NFT owners to use their assets as collateral to borrow wETH, DAI, or USDC on loan terms that deal with interest rates and collateral requirements.
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The platform itself uses smart contracts to ensure that loans are secured by the NFT collateral and where a repayment has not been met (and failed to be renegotiated) the collateral automatically becomes the property of the lender.

Web App Testing
Applying our expertise in web app testing, we helped NFTfi identify the existing bugs and fully engaged in improving the application's functionality. Axinqa made recommendations based on the intended functions of the web app and are dedicated to providing web app testing services that lead in quality.

Manual Testing
Our team manually went through the NFTfi web application, step by step, to identify defects, errors, and usability issues. The primary goal of manual testing in this context was to ensure that the software functions as intended and meets the expectations of users and the specified requirements.

Exploratory Testing
Our team utilised exploratory testing that relies on knowledge, experience, and intuition to uncover defects and assess the overall user experience. Rather than following predefined test cases, our testers explored the application freely, interacting with it to experiment and identify issues.

Challenges

Software testing is crucial for a NFT loan platform for several reasons. First and foremost, the platform deals with financial transactions, so ensuring that the software is thoroughly tested helps to prevent potential security vulnerabilities and data breaches. There are a number of interactions between vastly different components, namely the smart contracts, the applicable blockchain networks and user interfaces. Noting that NFTfi’s smart contracts have received prior security audits, additional interface testing helps to identify and remediate bugs, errors, and inconsistencies in the platform’s code. This is especially important for a platform that deals with user assets, where even small errors or bugs could have significant financial consequences.

Solutions

The Axinqa team conducted paired exploratory testing of the web application and website in order to assess overall functionality and usability. Two experienced software testers conducted the exploratory testing, preparing case notes, discovering a number of bugs, and developing a succinct report for the NFTfi.

The team utilised a risk-matrix methodology when defining, identifying and evaluating issues during the testing process. Once an issue has been identified, the testers evaluate the impact of each issue and then assign a score that identifies its risk level.

Testing was conducted on the recommended browser, Google Chrome Version 112.0.5615.138 (Official Build) (64-bit), and MetaMask Versions 10.24.2 and 10.29.0.

Although manual testing was chosen to be ideal for the context, basic automated testing was conducted on the website and web app to ensure that necessary elements were completely functional.

Specifically, the purpose of testing focused on ensuring that the platform operates as expected during general user interaction and erratic user interaction, including the identification of defects and potential functionality errors.

The Outcome

Testing resulted in 21 findings that ranged from Informational to Medium severity (noting that this is reference to Axinqa's severity definitions). We recommended that NFTfi addresses each of these findings to ensure that the platform maintains its high user experience standards and overall functionality. If you wish to learn more about our Services, click here.

NFTfi now have the resources and a newly conceived perspective to improve upon their product, ensuring that they can maintain their ever-growing presence in the NFT and crypto loan environment. The project benefited from Axinqa's detail-oriented reporting which will ultimately assist in the team's overall costs and user satisfaction.