Concern for product quality, system security and standards compliance serve to highlight the importance of rigorous testing. In today’s fast-paced environment of short lifecycles and increasingly complex deliverables, test automation is key to meeting QA/QC and shipment goals, across ecosystems and entire industries. As the basis for a variety of industry-leading test instruments and test automation solutions, OpenTAP has a palpable and positive influence on modern supply chains.
Moreover, the call to “shift-left” — to test earlier and across life-cycles — is not constrained to a single organization or development group. Equipment manufacturing and software development has evolved from a self-contained activity that takes place within the confines of a single company to be a process of integration, tying together hardware and software components furnished by an ecosystem of suppliers. Effective test must reach “upstream” to assure quality and compliance across the entire supply chain. OpenTAP, as a standards-based open source test automation platform, is well suited to serve the needs of and propagate across supply chains.
The Impact of Test Automation
Test automation plays a crucial role in enhancing the efficiency, reliability and timeliness of supply chain management, with impact across many/most aspects of supply chains of various types:
Risk Reduction: Automated testing helps identify potential issues early in the supply chain process (shift-left), reducing the risk of disruptions and ensuring smooth operations. An open source test automation platform further reduces risk of vendor acquisition and product abandonment, and of loss of expertise for in-house testing software.
Regulatory Compliance ensures that practices and processes comply with industry standards and government regulations, essential for sustaining quality and avoiding liability.
Efficiency and Reliability: By automating repetitive tasks, from supply management to software components discovery, test automation increases efficiency, reduces human error, and provides a more objective basis for design decisions.
Scalability: Automated systems can more easily scale to handle increased volumes of testing, and test results data.. OpenTAP and Keysight TAP offerings boast a history of scaling from small installations to product testing at major manufacturers and their ecosystem partners.
Example: Automated Testing in Automotive Supply Chain
Scenario: A vehicle manufacturer (OEM) needs to ensure the quality and reliability of parts supplied by various vendors. This requirement spans major and minor subsystems and covers both hardware and software components. Increasing, a large portion of that software is open source.
Solution: Automotive OEMs and the suppliers that serve them (Tier 1 and 2) are Implementing test automation to verify the quality of both inbound components and outbound parts, reaching upstream and downstream in an integrated discipline.
The Role of OpenTAP
OpenTAP can play a critical role in all types of testing across multi-tier supply chains in Aerospace and Defense, Automotive & Transportation, Consumer Electronics, Medical Equipment, Network and Telecommunications Equipment, Semiconductor and Electronics Manufacturing, and beyond.
Benefits of Standardizing on OpenTAP Across a Supply Chain
Common Test Automation Platform — streamline ingress and egress testing across suppliers and customers
Shareable, reusable test plans — reduce unrecoverable engineering investment in testing software by reusing test plans, instrument drivers and other plugins
Support for multi-vendor ecosystem — from legacy test equipment to next-generation hardware and software testing solutions in a single automation platform
