[Electrical Industry Client behind NDA]
Background
Today’s manufacturing industry has a growing trend of incorporating software into physical products. This poses new challenges in the testing processes, as the product’s functionality is heavily reliant on the embedded software.
A renowned industrial corporation focusing on electrification and automation solutions faces this challenge in their evolving product line. To ensure the success of their products, they require a more advanced test automation solution that can handle the complexity of their embedded software. Automated testing has long been a critical asset for this company, as it offers a reliable way to efficiently test the functionality of their products and guarantee their quality.
Challenges
The project encountered multiple challenges due to the inadequacy of the company’s legacy test automation systems. The C#-based test automation system demanded high programming skills from test engineers. At the same time, the Robot Framework-based system had too many low-level keywords making it challenging to implement and maintain user-centric tests. Furthermore, the test system setup was slow, leading to unacceptably slow feedback.
However, the company took a proactive approach and started to search for new solutions to enhance the testing process’s efficiency and flexibility.
Solution
A new test automation architecture was chosen to be developed to cater for the testing demands of the current product environment. The architecture is centered around user-centric Robot Framework libraries and test system-specific configuration. The new solution is built with easy-to-use keywords developed in Python-based Robot Framework keyword libraries.
Libraries were implemented so that the system is flexible enough to accommodate testing for different products. The keywords have been thoughtfully designed to shield the test automation system users from the complex logic involved in the testing process. It is worth noting that the developed system was not meant to replace the older Robot Framework-based solution for in-depth hardware testing at this stage. Instead, it was intended to complement it by providing a more efficient solution for acceptance testing.
Results
The project culminated in creating an automated testing system that relies on Robot Framework and Python libraries. This system has significantly streamlined and improved the testing process, making it more user-friendly and efficient. The development of the automated testing system adhered to standard software development methods, such as unit and integration testing. Moreover, the test pipelines were integrated into Azure DevOps, ensuring continuous integration and validating that the developed automated testing system works with the supported test targets.
The client and project team were extremely pleased with the expert’s contribution. The outcome demonstrated that well-designed, well-implemented, and well-tested automated testing systems can bring substantial value to product development.
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