Improving Quality and Velocity with Wind River Studio Test Automation

Organizations developing for the intelligent edge are spoiled for choice when it comes to testing tools: there are tools for specific hardware technologies, vendor ecosystems, software stacks, and there is also a wealth of general-purpose and open source testing tools. Seemingly everybody we speak with is adopting new tools to improve testing somewhere in their project. If you’re investing time and money into tools to identify defects, it’s also important to ensure the tools do not disrupt productivity and findings can be effectively addressed.

In an earlier blog post, I explored a host of problems that impede shift-left testing with embedded systems. In this post, I’ll focus on how Wind River Studio Test Automation helps development teams make the most of their diverse testing tools while also maximizing efficiency and productivity.

Taming Complexity with Flexibility

The intelligent edge is a world of complexity. Embedded devices must securely communicate with other devices and with distributed systems in the cloud, often over occasional or unreliable connections. Building and testing these systems requires expertise in many areas, specialized lab environments, and the use of dozens of tools.

Studio Test Automation tames that complexity by providing a flexible foundation upon which you can standardize all your testing tools and processes. The open platform augments your existing testing tool investments: standardizing access to the testing tools and resources you already have, providing capabilities that fill testing gaps, and establishing automation and orchestration from design to deployment. It is modular and extensible as well, giving you the flexibility to address evolving needs in real time.

In other words, we enable your team to establish reliable DevSecOps practices that deliver higher quality products faster.

Eliminating Expertise Bottlenecks

While projects require expertise in many areas, concentrations of expertise often create bottlenecks in the development process. For example, developers may need to wait for testers that know how to use the testbench, or testers may wait for access to a particular type of hardware resource.

Studio Test Automation and its shared cloud platform help eliminate bottlenecks and improve collaboration by providing the entire team with easy access to tools and resources when needed. Test cases and testing plans incorporate not only logic for running the tests, but operational details such as which resources are needed, how to access them and clean up before and after testing. In the example above, instead of waiting for an expert to run tests on the testbench, a developer could simply run the test – the cloud platform would automatically reserve and prepare the testbench, run the tests, and handle logging/reporting.

Improving Productivity and Consistency

Software and hardware components are often shared between projects, yet these projects rarely reuse test cases. Instead, multiple projects end up implementing the same tests multiple times. Worse, some projects end up with more or better testing simply because they had more resources or better access to expertise.

Studio Test Automation enables teams to package test cases and testing plans into modules which can be aligned with components, to be shared across projects, teams, and organizations. In fact, pre-built testing libraries for Wind River edge technologies such as [VxWorks](https://www.windriver.com/products/vxworks) and [Wind River Linux](https://www.windriver.com/products/linux) are available out of the box. Maintaining tests and modules in a single place makes it easy to establish testing best practices and automatically propagate those to consumers alongside the components themselves.

Regardless of whether tests are chosen from existing modules or created from scratch, Studio Test Automation helps teams make the most of their testing resources. Test runs can be optimized to run independent tests in parallel, for example by spinning up multiple simulated targets, and to leverage sequential scheduling when order is important, or when tests rely on limited physical resources.

The platform maintains comprehensive logging of activity, state, and results, so developers and testers can easily understand testing results and perform detailed analysis. When tests fail, they have the context and information necessary to quickly understand the root cause or to reproduce the problem for debugging.

These attributes greatly reduce the effort of testing while improving the quality and consistency of testing efforts across the organization.

Exposing Visibility Across the Organization

While development and testing teams may implement testing, they are by no means the only stakeholders to quality efforts. Users across the organization, from project teams to the boardroom, need visibility into product quality to keep things running smoothly. That’s not easy given the number of tools and lack of standardization; teams are often forced to choose between making a significant investment to align, understand, and document testing efforts, or accepting limited visibility so they can allocate resources elsewhere.

By standardizing tools and configurations and bringing users together in a shared cloud platform, Studio Test Automation establishes a single source of truth for testing and reporting. No extra effort is required to log activity, normalize results, or update status. Simply by running tests normally, real-time dashboards surface status and results automatically – exposing reliable insight into product quality and readiness to stakeholders across the organization.

Transforming Your Testing Efforts

Wind River Studio Test Automation is purpose-built to solve the challenges that impede automated system- and application-level testing and DevSecOps adoption in teams developing for the intelligent edge. As part of the Wind River Studio Developer platform, it leverages uniform programmatic access to testing resources and integrates seamlessly into automated pipelines as part of your DevSecOps practices. Contact us today to discuss how we can help you accelerate your development projects while improving quality and maximizing your investment in existing testing tools.

About the author

Jon Jarboe is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Wind River