Test equipment from multiple vendors

As my earlier blog said, we're here to get a discussion on the future of testing, and what it means to legacy testing as it melds with next generation products and services. 

I have been identifying some critical issues in the field of testing.  So, we need sensible ways to address the need to ensure product integrity and quality while meeting aggressive market deadlines and coping with dynamically changing test environments. 

Today I'm going to discuss the use of equipment in test labs. Test labs have a variety of equipment to do a variety of tests.  The equipment often is from multiple vendors, each requiring proprietary scripts. To be able to automate the multiple scripts from multiple machines into one program would be a test engineer's dream come true.

No one piece of test equipment does everything well, thus many labs utilize equipment from more than one vendor. In fact, companies may spend as much as $300K or more on just one piece of test equipment that can sit idle more than half of the time if used ineffectively. Also, test equipment, while homogenous at a protocol level, each has its own unique test case scripting, control interface, and test result storage method that must be managed independently by the tester. In-depth knowledge of each piece of test equipment including the content and location of test scripts is required to perform each repeated test correctly. A test organization ends up with stovepipe or vertical instantiations of manually intensive test regimens that must be repeated properly and frequently for every release or version of the device or system under test. These individual solutions do not lend themselves to scaling or reuse across multiple projects.

To date, none of the equipment vendors offer a comprehensive automation solution that overlays this multi-vendor, multi-device hybrid lab environment. Automation of these tests and equipment would allow testers to run tests all day, every day, not just during an 8 hour.

Test automation can fully utilize equipment that may be idle overnight, on weekends and on holidays, for a 300% improvement on hardware usage and efficiency. Labs can avoid the purchase of additional equipment to support increased demands on limited test teams during their 8-hour day. Instead, managers can invest a much lower amount in commercial third party test automation solutions to optimize equipment usage and speed testing. This requires a commitment to keeping test setups physically stable to avoid wholesale test case rework.

Your comments and experiences are welcome!

Next time, I'll discuss the data repository for all these tests.

Terry