She learned software testing in Nigeria, taught it to hundreds, and now leads quality work on the system customers use to file warranty claims at Cummins, a global power technology company. Along the way, she has co-authored ten peer-reviewed papers and become an award-winning journal editor.
Few people think about software when a generator fails at a hospital, or a truck engine needs a covered repair. Yet before the part is replaced or the dealer is paid, the warranty claim travels through a chain of systems: the claim is filed, the failed part is shipped back with a printed label, inspection results are recorded, and data passes between internal platforms and outside partners. Any gap in that chain leads to delayed repairs or rejected claims.
For the past three years, keeping that chain sound has been the job of Aisha Ife Abdulwahab, Warranty Quality System Business Analyst in the Global Warranty organization of Cummins Inc. in Columbus, Indiana. Her route there began more than 9,000 kilometers away, in a Lagos classroom full of aspiring software testers.
A journey that began by teaching
Abdulwahab passed the ISTQB Certified Tester Foundation Level examination in March 2019 and, three months later, graduated from Babcock University in Ogun State with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Second Class Honours (Upper Division). As a quality assurance intern at QaceTech Solutions that year, she designed and delivered an introductory software-testing course that more than 300 people completed.
“Explaining test design to a room of beginners is the fastest way to find out what you do not really understand,” she said. “Those sessions made me careful about every definition I used.”
She went on to test more than ten proprietary applications across seven projects at Summitech Computing Limited, then joined DataSixth Consulting as a contract software test engineer on the Atos and MTN Nigeria API integration program. There she automated API tests in Postman, wrote JavaScript load and performance scripts in k6 for services handling one of Africa’s largest telecom subscriber bases, and validated each API after it reached production.
Chicago, then Columbus
In January 2022, she began the Master of Science in Software Engineering at DePaul University in Chicago. She finished in November 2023 with Distinction and a 3.95 grade point average, served as a graduate assistant supporting more than 50 undergraduate programmers, and completed a research project on how models and metamodels evolve together in model-driven engineering. A summer 2023 internship with the Cummins warranty systems team, where she automated two legacy-system functions in Tricentis Tosca, turned into a full-time offer that began in January 2024.
At Cummins, she sits between the business and the engineers. She converts what warranty users need into written functional and non-functional requirements, validates them with the technical team, and leads the user acceptance testing that decides whether a release goes live. Her requirements work has halved requirements mismatches on warranty releases, and her UAT leadership has contributed to a 98% reduction in post-launch issues. She has helped retire a legacy warranty system and migrate its data, tested a new claims-filing system for the Power Generation business unit, and written the requirements for a new integrated end-to-end warranty platform. Colleagues in Global Warranty-Quality gave her a One Quality Kudos for her end-to-end testing of the DHL shipping-label process in the Parts Warranty System.
“A defect that reaches a customer is usually a requirement nobody wrote down clearly,” Abdulwahab said. “When the business and the engineers agree on what done looks like before the build starts, testing becomes confirmation rather than discovery.”
Research that starts with the requirement
Abdulwahab has carried the same conviction into research. She has co-authored ten peer-reviewed papers published in 2024 and 2025, two as lead author, each proposing a named framework for a problem enterprise teams meet every release.
Her lead-authored review “Evaluating User Acceptance Testing Effectiveness” sets out the VERDICT framework and argues that the share of defects escaping UAT is the most defensible measure of its value, provided the observation window, severity weights, and attribution rule are fixed before testing begins. Her second lead-authored paper, “Comparative Evaluation of Selenium Cypress and Tricentis Tosca for Enterprise Test Automation,” builds a tool-selection model from knock-out gates and analytic hierarchy weighting. It finds the choice clear for a JavaScript web shop or an SAP estate, but unstable for a regulated bank running several languages once maintainability and governance carry heavy weight. With co-authors, she has also shown, in a December 2025 paper on explainable machine learning for defect prediction, that headline accuracy figures overstate a model’s value when teams ignore time-ordered data splits and labelling delay.
“Teams ask which automation tool is best, and the honest answer is that it depends on what your organization cannot afford to get wrong,” she said. “The model makes that trade-off visible instead of leaving it to whoever argues loudest.”
The work behind other people’s papers
Abdulwahab also helps decide what gets published. She sits on four journal editorial boards and is Section Editor at the Computer Science & IT Research Journal, the Engineering Science & Technology Journal and the Gulf Journal of Computer Sciences. Between 2022 and 2025 she completed 92 certified manuscript reviews across six journals.
2026 has brought three honors for that work: Reviewer of the Year 2025 from the Gulf Journal of Technology & Environmental Sciences on February 11, Reviewer of the Year 2025 from the Engineering Science & Technology Journal on March 19, and Editor of the Year 2025 from the Gulf Journal of Computer Sciences on March 23, which cited her dedication and contributions to its editorial team. They add to Editor of the Year 2024 awards from the Computer Science & IT Research Journal and the Engineering Science & Technology Journal.
What comes next
In March 2026, she led a Global Warranty Lunch and Learn, “Prompting AI Smartly for Better Results,” teaching colleagues seven structured prompt patterns; the Director of Global Warranty called it very useful. In June, she spoke to QUALES alumni about moving from testing into business analysis.
“The tools keep changing, from Selenium to Tosca to generative AI,” she said. “What does not change is the discipline of saying exactly what a system must do and then proving that it does it.”
