Advancing QA: IDEs for Testing?

By Kingston Duffie, Fanfare CTO

For years, developers of high-tech equipment have taken advantage of the automation capabilities of integrated development environments (IDEs) that relieve them of many time-consuming, repetitive, manual tasks. Unfortunately, such advancements for their quality assurance (QA) counterparts have not kept pace, creating huge bottlenecks in the testing and validation phases of release cycles.

The result of these testing backlogs has left many equipment manufacturers with two equally unattractive prospects: missing opportunities due to increased time to market or reduced customer satisfaction because of inadequately tested product releases. And as hardware and software complexity continues to increase with the competitive demands for more differentiated product features, the problem can only be expected to worsen.

There are several factors that are making new tools for testing and validation critical to the survival of any high-tech equipment manufacturer. These include:

Equipment complexity

More sophisticated hardware and software enables equipment manufacturers to continually add more product features. In addition, because more devices are embedded or integrated, the complexity of requiring verification of operation with new protocols, middleware, and applications continues to rise.

Faster time to market

Average time to market for networking equipment has shrunk from five or six years in the ‘90s to just one or two years today. Verification and testing have become bottlenecks as companies race to introduce more features in less time.

Globally distributed testing

While globally distributed testing — sometimes outsourced — has introduced a number of competitive advantages for today’s manufacturers, it comes with a definitive cost: complicated and expensive coordination of product releases.

Less sophisticated customer base

Today, many equipment manufacturers have expanded their product lines to home users who purchase items such as broadband modems, wireless routers, and networked digital video recorders (DVRs). As a result of less familiarity with technology, many companies are bogged down with support calls from consumers not able to perform troubleshooting on their own.

Lack of tools

Verification and testing typically consumes one-half of the development lifecycle, yet no automated testing tools have been available to help QA staff test and deploy equipment software. The lack of a viable testing infrastructure has resulted in a steady degradation of field quality, declining customer satisfaction and slower time to market — all of which reduce a critical revenue window.

Summary

As more and more companies move toward addressing the technological and market forces that demand a faster release of more differentiated products, they will find a valuable solution with the incorporation of test automation tools into their validation processes. In the same way that IDEs made developers more productive, next generation tools for test automation save valuable QA time and manpower for higher quality products.