Maintenance effort to adapt our test automation software for TV to our new TV platforms / new user interfaces
We are the Test Design Team inside Arcelik’s Test and Verification Department. Our responsibility is to develop software for test teams for 2 main reasons: 1) Make their process traceable 2) Create test automation tools to decrease man-month spent for manual test of TVs.
TV RoboTester is the name of our test automation tool developed in house for TV tests. We are able to create test scenarios on the tool dynamically. The tool has its own scripting language. Some features available on the tool are:
Actions to simulate test environment
1.1. Simulate user interaction on TV (remote control that can be controlled via PC)
1.2. Play recorded tv broadcast on Stream Players
1.3. etc.
Test oracle: Decision points to decide if test result is PASS / FAIL
2.1. Picture capture (LVDS): Live image on TV can be transferred to PC to compare with the reference image
2.2. Picture capture-windows: Live image on TV can be transferred to PC to compare with the reference image (only a portion of the full image)
2.3. OCR: Image from TV is parsed into text and compared to the reference text, etc.
A common television set software footprint was 64Kbytes in 2001, whereas today it is more than 250 MBytes. Due to this increase, software testing cost in the industry increases too. Currently a new platform of smart television requires more than 200 man x months (8 months’ work with approximately 25 men) black box testing to have an approved product on the market. Our test policy is to approve only easy-to-use, reliable products that exceed user expectations and have desired quality. So, during the development of a smart TV project, several software versions are released in order to create a product in line with Arcelik’s vision and quality policy. Each release requires excessive testing and full test of a software version requires 187.27 days of work for 1 tester. So test automation is really important to reduce test effort.By reducing our maintenance effort with the help of XIVT project, we will be able to spend more time to increase our test automation percentage.
Each TV platform needs to have a different user interface so that the product will receive user attention. This makes maintenance of the automation software more painful. While creating new automation test scenarios require so much time, new TV platforms come up every year. It’s hard to keep up with the speed of the TV software upgrades. Arcelik aims to extend their ongoing effort and enhance their platform by adapting the methods and tools that XVIT project promises.