Increasing ROI in Test with NI TestStand 4.0
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Automated test engineers face pressure to increase return on investment (ROI) from two seemingly contradictory sources. They are challenged to decrease the cost of test systems and, at the same time, reduce the amount of time needed to implement these systems. As test engineers lay out their strategies to increase ROI, developer productivity stands out as providing the biggest opportunity for cost and time savings. Of all the costs involved in the creation of a test system, development time – the engineering resources needed to create the test system – accounts for more than 30 percent.
Two of the most effective strategies used to increase developer productivity are the emphasis of modularity in the software architecture and the use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software. Modularity increases the reusability of the software while facilitating its maintenance. With COTS software, you can use prebuilt development tools provided by a vendor. With economies of scale created by the vendor, COTS software is more cost-effective and of higher quality.
Test Software Architecture
Historically, engineers built test systems from scratch using a monolithic architecture for which the different layers were fused together, significantly limiting system maintainability and reusability. Today, engineers can use modular software architecture, which consists of four hierarchical layers: test management software, application software, measurement services, and measurement hardware.
Figure 1: Increase the maintainability and scalability of your test system by using a modular software architecture.
Test Management Software
Test management software, the highest layer of the modular software architecture, brings together the rest of the layers to develop a complete test system. By using COTS test management software and a modular software architecture, you can reuse the modular components of the architecture and maintain each of the pieces independently, improving your developer’s productivity.
One of the biggest benefits of COTS test management software is a development environment designed for performing tasks at the architectural level of test system development. With NI TestStand 4.0, the latest version of the National Instruments test management software, special emphasis is placed on improving developer productivity with the newly redesigned Sequence Editor development environment. The new Sequence Editor consists of reconfigurable panes you can use to easily define the look and feel of the development environment.
The Sequence Editor also includes the Insertion Pane, which you can use to quickly create new steps by dragging and dropping them into a sequence. By displaying all the different steps you can use, instead of hiding them under different menus as in previous versions, you can more easily understand all available functionality in NI TestStand.
Figure 2. Accelerate test system development by using the redesigned Sequence Editor in NI TestStand 4.0.
The Insertion Pane also includes the ability to store and reuse preconfigured step templates. These templates decrease the amount of time you need to develop test sequences by facilitating the reuse of existing test elements.
In addition, the new version of NI TestStand includes tools that further improve your productivity by facilitating everyday tasks, such as providing the ability to call the NI TestStand Engine directly from Expressions; the output window, which you can use to easily post debugging and event messages during execution; and the ability to use expressions for test limits. The new version of NI TestStand also includes tools to develop custom Sequence Editor development environments.
NI TestStand 4.0 improves enterprise system connectivity and reporting through requirements management integration, the sequence file translator framework, and the new XML and binary sequence file formats. The new version of NI TestStand reduces the amount of time necessary to trace requirements stored in requirements management systems such as Telelogic DOORS to their implementation in NI TestStand sequences. The sequence file translator framework, included with NI TestStand 4.0, increases ROI for customers who must define their tests using industry standards such as the Automatic Test Markup Language (ATML). This framework facilitates the integration of your test systems with these custom test description formats by providing tools for creating translators that convert custom test descriptions into NI TestStand sequences automatically. To increase the integration of default NI TestStand test sequences with enterprise systems and applications, NI added the XML sequence file format to NI TestStand 4.0, which is more readable by developers as well as software applications.
Application Software and Measurement Services
You can significantly increase ROI in the next two layers of the modular software architecture, application software and measurement services. Due to the ever-increasing role of application software in test system implementation, providing an application development environment (ADE), such as National Instruments LabVIEW and NI LabWindows™/CVI, that increases test developer productivity is critical to increasing ROI. In addition, based on the significant amount of time engineers spend debugging instrument communication and driver issues, it is important when building a test system to use measurement services software, such as NI Measurement & Automation Explorer, that offers interactive debugging tools and test panels as well as the ability to communicate between application software and hardware.
From the measurement services layer to the test management layer, there is always an opportunity to increase developer productivity and reduce costs. Whether you use COTS software such as NI TestStand for test management, or additional measurement services in addition to driver software, you increase developer productivity and therefore ROI when you use the right tool for each layer of your test system software architecture.
View this 20-minute webcast to learn more about NI TestStand 4.0.
The mark LabWindows is used under a license from Microsoft Corporation.
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