Test framework to accelerate device development

Software promises to reduce the complexity of the quality assurance process, creating significant cost savings and time to market opportunities.

Wind River Systems has turned its attention to test automation with a product designed to help device manufacturers significantly shorten the testing process, drive down product development costs and bring devices to market more quickly.

Specifically, Wind River Test Management will automate the software quality assurance process and improve overall code quality.

It is expected to be available in the third quarter of 2008.

With the introduction of Test Management, Wind River is expanding its presence in the device software test automation market and is adding another critical software solution to its solutions portfolio to help customers during the entire device lifecycle.

According to Venture Development Corporation (VDC), the worldwide test automation market is forecasted to grow at more than 12% annually from 2006 to 2009.

This acceleration is being driven by the adoption of new technologies, primarily multicore processors, increasingly complex design requirements and evolving consumer expectations amid increasing time to market pressures.

"Quality is a corner office issue and is directly related to brand and revenue impact", said Amit Ronen, Vice President and General Manager of Device Management at Wind River.

"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".

Test Management will be a scalable, distributed testing framework that links device software development and quality assurance teams in an intelligent, collaborative workflow.

It will enable teams to efficiently plan tests, execute tests, perform fact-based analysis, and rapidly resolve issues encountered throughout the testing phase.

This streamlines the software-testing process so that more defects can be identified and quickly resolved.

For instance, when the quality assurance team finds a defect, developers can immediately access detailed logs and fault data collected in the test lab to quickly isolate and resolve the defect on their cross-development environment.

"With software driving technology innovations, one-time testing in a closed environment is no longer sufficient for device systems", said Theresa Lanowitz, founder of analyst firm Voke.

"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".

Other key product features and benefits of Test Management will include: test planning facilities, which enable test teams to create manual and automated test cases, and assign each test to a designated engineer; a test execution framework that automatically executes multiple test suites on selected target devices; automatic collection of test and fault data, giving developers the tools to quickly reproduce defects; a diagnostics interface that enables test and development engineers to shorten the defect resolution process and reduce risk of project delays; auto-generated "dynamic" code coverage and performance measurement, which is collected without any special test builds or additional test harnesses; and Virtual Lab Management, which enables the project team to manage boards, provision new software builds and share access to boards.

Wind River Test Management will be integrated with Wind River Workbench, the industry's leading Eclipse-based development tool suite, and will support devices running the company's leading 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 cycles", said Chris Rommel, an analyst at VDC.

"Wind River is addressing this market challenge by automating the software quality assurance process which can contribute to quicker time to market and higher product quality".

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

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