Our primary goal was to conduct Firmware Verification and to do so, we have proposed:

• to build a test system (hardware part),
• to automate tests (mostly regression tests), and
• to develop new tests for new functionalities.

During the three years of our cooperation, we have been in charge of ensuring quality for one of the customer’s main products – servo drives. We built one huge test rack with dozens of motors and servo drives. Project highlights:

• Complete hardware for testing (mechanical and electrical part) was designed by AVISTO Eastern Europe and it was manufactured locally.
• Mechanical design was done in Autodesk Inventor Professional.
• Electrical design was done in EPLAN P8.
• Test rack is modular and moveable.

Process flow:

• Testing framework is located inside customer’s application, which is dedicated for PLC programming.
• All tests are written in Structured Text (ST) which is one of the five languages supported by the IEC 61131-3 standard, designed for PLCs. Tests are running automatically after new FW versions are built.
• Automatic running is done by using Jenkins as an automation server, with the help of Python scripting and SVN as a versioning system.
• FW update on the drives is done by TestComplete, an automated UI testing tool. After each run, HTML test reports with clear results are automatically sent to desired email addresses.