Service Oriented Architecture for agile automated testing environment

Abstract

System test development, automation and execution process are key stages of the overall product development to both the New Product Introduction (NPI) and Production Release processes. For NPI, companies must create test systems to support product validation and verification. For manufacturing companies, ongoing process metrics are used to ensure the product meets quality specifications and can be sold to customers. This entire test process is time consuming and resource intensive and therefore negatively impacts the overall product net revenue, both in terms of time to market and in terms of development resources. Large and successful companies invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in automated test systems to support product development. Such infrastructures provide a competitive advantage by enabling a systematic methodology to generate test plans and then automatically have the test plan flow through the test software and hardware development, test and data collection, and results analysis phases. The Automatic Testing Equipment (ATE) industry has pushed to develop a framework that supports the sharing of test information, data, and analysis results across various enterprise platforms. An IEEE standard know as Automatic Test Markup Language (ATML), comprising of an XML schema, was proposed and developed in order to allow interoperability of test case, data, equipment information, and results. Our methodology provides a Service-Oriented Architecture that provides an interoperable solution. Users can begin with a test plan, deploy a scalable data monitoring and analysis capability, and follow the process from NPI through production. Various additional capabilities such as advanced analysis capability, customer data sharing resources, test software generation and deployment, closed and open source software library access, test station monitoring and equipment tracking, automated reporting schedules, and others are among the possibilities that can be added to the overall process. The proposed architecture is entirely scalable and can be deployed in single-site or global applications and may be installed behind corporate firewalls or in the cloud.