Test Automation Market Lures Wind River
By CXOtoday Staff
Mumbai, Jul 17, 2008

Wind River s test automation solution - Wind River Test Management, aims to aid device manufacturers in shortening the testing process, reducing product development costs and bringing devices to market quickly.

The solution will automate the software quality assurance process and improve the code quality. It will hit the markets in Q3 08.

According to Venture Development Corporation (VDC), a technology market research firm, the global test automation market is forecasted to grow over 12 % from 2006 to 2009. This rise is because of the emergence of new technologies such as multicore processors and increasig demand for complex designs along with rising consumer expectations as well as time to market pressures.

Quality is a corner office issue and is directly related to brand and revenue impact.By introducing Test Management, Wind River is significantly reducing the complexity of the quality assurance process, which brings with it significant cost savings and time-to-market opportunities, said Amit Ronen, vice president and general manager (device management) of Wind River.

Test management will be a scalable, distributed testing framework that links device software development and quality assurance teams in an intelligent, collaborative workflow, claims Wind River in a press release. It will enable teams to efficiently plan and execute tests, perform fact-based analysis, and rapidly resolve issues during the testing phase.

According to the company, the tool streamlines the software-testing process, which identifies defects and resolves issues faster. For instance, when the quality assurance team finds a defect, developers can immediately access detailed logs, fault data from the test lab and quickly isolate it to resolve the defect in its development environment.

With software driving technology innovations, one-time testing in a closed environment is no longer sufficient for device systems. Added complexity of device software and competitive time-to-market pressure are driving the need to leverage commercially developed test solutions like Wind River Test Management to keep on top of rapid release cycles without compromising device software quality, said Theresa Lanowitz, founder of analyst firm, Voke.

Other features and benefits includes test planning facilities to enable test teams to create manual and automate test cases, and assign test to a designated engineer. With the test execution framework, it automatically executes multiple test suites on selected target devices.

The tool itself collects test and fault data, which help developers identity defects. With diagnostics interface feature it enables test and development engineers to cut the defect resolution process and reduce project delays. It has an auto-generated dynamic code coverage and performance measurement feat that works without test builds.

In addition, the Virtual Lab Management enables the project team to manage boards, provision new software builds and share boards access. The tool can be integrated with Wind River Workbench, the industry s Eclipse based development tool suite and also supports devices running on VxWorks and Linux run-time platforms.

The demands for increased functionality are driving the volume and complexity of code that needs to be developed and tested, which is adding more pressure to budget constraints and shrinking product development cyclesWind River is addressing this market challenge by automating the software quality assurance process which will result in quicker time-to-market and higher product quality, said Chris Rommel, an analyst at VDC.

VDC s 2008 embedded developers survey stated that the developers using test automation tools report a greater percent of their projects completed on or ahead of schedule than those who are not using a formal test automation tool.


Related Links:

Test Automation Framework