As devices become more complex, test teams are under increased pressure to get products to market faster, making an optimized test strategy more important than ever. Test engineers have the difficult task of building the tester for the subsequent product while maintaining previous testers. This paper explores the challenges test engineers face and explains how a test framework addresses the problem by increasing productivity, reducing rework, and decreasing maintenance. Finally, it introduces TestStand, a test executive software from NI as an off-the-shelf solution for building and maintaining a test framework, highlighting the added benefits of risk reduction, flexible development, and feature implementation.
Some things you will learn:
- What is Reactive Test Development and what’s the real cost of it for you
- What makes a good test framework: A test framework is a high-level software application used for developing, executing, deploying, and reporting on automated test sequences. To stop rebuilding test systems, you must identify all the common elements and put them into a framework you can reuse across all your testers. Not only is the framework essential to support the common elements, but it must also be flexible enough to support the unique elements, now and in the future. When organizations leverage this type of framework, they save up to 75 percent on development time and reduce time spent on maintenance by 67 percent.
- Programming language requirements: flexibility, risk reduction, advanced features. Test executives typically have two modes of operation:
- A development mode for defining testing processes or sequences
- A run-time mode for executing sequences, displaying results, and generating reports on these test sequence
Typical funcionalities include:
- Test Sequence Development Environment
- Custom Operator Interface
- Sequence Execution Engine (with Debugging capabilities)
- Results Reporting
- User Management
- Parallel Testing Capabilities
- Unit/Device Tracking and Serial Number Scanning
- Test Deployment Tool
- Localization Tools
- Documentation
You can choose to develop a custom test executive with all these functionalities in-house, but you need to be aware that it is a huge task in terms of development time and complexity. But using a ready-to-run test executive such as TestStand can bring down development time from months to days, and development costs savings can be as much as 53%.
In this whitepaper, you can see a comparison table of the costs associated with implementing advanced features such as parallel execution, custom operator interface, report generation or implementing a sequence execution engine, with a custom-developed software vs. with TestStand.