Towards Flexible and Automated Testing in Production Systems Engineering Projects

Automated and systematic testing of automation systems (AS) and production systems (PS) require an integrated testing tool chain for test case development, execution and reporting. In practice, the test automation tool chain cannot be fully automated because of missing links between different tools used in the test automation process. Closing these gaps typically require (high) human effort. Furthermore, domain and software testing expertise is often bundled by one (expensive) engineer who is responsible for the application domain (reflected in use cases and test cases) and software tests (software test code). This paper presents a flexible Testing Automation Framework (TAF) that enables the configuration of test processes involving different tools and various layers for test automation and enables separated roles for the application domain and software tests. We build on best-practice test automation from Software Engineering and design a test automation process for the automation systems domain. We demonstrate the feasibility with a use case, derived from production systems automation, with selected tools covering all test automation layers. First results showed the feasibility of the framework in the evaluation use case making test processes more flexible and automated. Although the successful implementation of the TAF can support the efficient configuration and execution of test processes, there is additional effort for preparing the flexible and automated tool chain.