A Major Automotive Systems Manufacturer

Tackling application complexity

To design its sophisticated components and control systems, the company relies on Teamcenter from Siemens to handle Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). As part of continuous innovation and development, each year in May and November an internal team provides employees with a new customized release of Active Workspace, the graphical user interface (GUI) for Teamcenter.

With our integrated set of solutions, we can manage tens of thousands of functional tests at high speed and with complete visibility. We can automate almost all testing, we can analyze root causes, and we can create flexible reports.

A company spokesperson comments: “Active Workspace is a vital application for our business, so we must ensure that every new release is fully tested and validated for our users’ typical daily workflows and processes.”

Because the company manufactures and distributes a large number of products, with numerous customization options, the software testing and validation processes cover a huge range of possible configurations. For example, an Active Workspace user might select from a drop-down menu with 50 different language options, then another drop-down menu with 50 different production locations, and so on.

“A single GUI might produce 100,000 different possible combinations of attributes, of which we need to test the most-frequently used,” says the spokesperson. “If we tested every configuration, we would simply run out of time. Even with the subset of configurations that we test, it’s a very time-consuming process.”

Accelerating functional testing

To optimize testing and validation, the company deploys OpenText solutions, delivered on the SaaS model. The team accelerates functional tests using Business Process Testing (BPT) to build high-level test flows that interact with the PLM application in the way that users would. Tests are stored as re-usable components that can be executed manually using Sprinter, or automatically using ALM Lab Management and UFT One.

“With our integrated set of solutions, we can manage tens of thousands of functional tests at high speed and with complete visibility,” says the spokesperson. “We can automate almost all testing, we can analyze root causes, and we can create flexible reports so that we always know the status of our validation processes.”

He adds, “For us, BPT is the gate for deciding if we will go live or not. For each new release, we start scheduling the tests on Friday and we finish automated testing at midday on Sunday. That’s when we make the decision about releasing the system to key users for final validation.”

Automating over 90% of software tests

ALM/Quality Center is at the heart of the automotive company’s testing and validation processes, providing a single pane of glass for software quality management. The solution acts as a repository for all test assets, as well as providing reporting and dashboards to show progress.

The company creates complex functional tests using BPT, a component-based test framework that enables the company to build or capture business process flows and store them as reusable components for both manual and automated tests. The company creates test scenarios that replicate typical user workflows, confirms that they work appropriately by running them as manual tests through Sprinter, and then uses ALM Lab Management and UFTOne to run large-scale automated testing across multiple machines. The organization uses ALM Lab Management to schedule over 90% of its tests to run automatically, overnight.

"The OpenText tools deliver notifications to developers, telling them which tests passed and which failed,” says the spokesperson. “They can then analyze whether each failure is a development issue or simply a test automation issue: the script can run many times faster than the application, so we sometimes need to introduce delays, otherwise page elements may not load in time for the test to interact with them.”

Maintaining a consistent view of global testing

The automotive company has created around  a dozen dashboards in ALM/Quality Center to show the status of testing and stay on target for each planned new release. In addition to enabling managers to govern and visualize testing processes, ALM/Quality Center provides a single point of control for test planning and execution, for defect tracking, and for overall software quality. 

“We have created extensive integrations between multiple software testing tools, with ALM/Quality Center acting as the hub,” says the spokesperson. “In the ALM/Quality Center client, we define everything: the lab resources, the testing hosts, the business-specific user permissions, and so on, and then we define the test resources. We have 25,000 stored test configurations and related documents ready for use, and all our developers use the same shared object repository. As we accumulate test configurations and documents, we can reuse these assets to save significant time and effort.” 

Using the dashboards in ALM/Quality Center, the company can immediately see the overall status and progress of testing, then drill down into the performance of individual tests, testers, components and more. The spokesperson says: “ALM/Quality Center presents a beautifully organized interface: we can see the exact status, and drill into reports to determine the root cause of issues. We also export data into Excel so that we can create additional graphs. All testers around the globe use ALM/ Quality Center to report on their activities, so we always have an up to-date view of status.”

Taking advantage of the test-framework approach employed by BPT, the spokesperson has built a repository of reusable components that it can assemble into scripts for simulating user workflows in the PLM system. When a component is updated, the revisions automatically propagate across all relevant tests, reducing the workload for the test management team. 

Working with OpenText technologies enables me to meet my primary requirements: I can automate the GUI, execute tests, analyze root causes, quickly identify where I have issues, and create good dashboards. The key thing is that I never lose visibility.

“Working with OpenText technologies enables me to meet my primary requirements: I can automate the GUI, execute tests, analyze root causes, quickly identify where I have issues, and create good dashboards,” says the spokesperson. “The key thing is that I never lose visibility.”

He concludes: “Now that we have adopted the SaaS delivery model for our tools, it’s a real advantage to have our own dedicated SaaS champion engineer. This has made a huge positive difference to the support we receive, and we look forward to achieving more on this joint journey.”