Automating Distributed Production Testing

Abstract

Many small and medium enterprises in the embedded systems’ field cannot afford to carry out their production testing efforts, which is known to be costly and time-consuming. Hence, their tendency to commission third party service providers to perform these tasks. Therefore, testing can be distributed among many testing locations, where isolated and locally operated test benches perform the tests on the Devices under Test (DUTs). The first goal of this work is to connect the system on the cloud level for better collaboration and online management of functional tests on software-intensive embedded systems. The second goal is to enhance the testing process by closing the open gap between testing and feedback on two levels of operation: the local level between the test benches and the DUTs, and on a wider level with the cloud. This is achieved by connecting the system online via the cloud, and by adopting the DevOps approach, which aims at automating the different processes to achieve an automated workflow that can automatically adapt itself to change. In this paper, the system architecture and prototype are presented, based on which, an automated and continuous feedback-based testing cycles were implemented and tested on two levels of operation.