TestStand – More than Just Test Execution [Test Management]

When you start out, you will, typically, focus on the need to be able to test and see whether the test was passed or failed. And you will usually reach that goal somehow. After a short time, more needs will appear. For instance, the case of creating variants without changing or copying the test sequence, processing of results to different outputs, or to parallelize a test. Maybe, it turns out that user management with different privileges for different users is necessary.

And this is where it starts to be very difficult: If you are to create a system yourself that will meet these needs, while also maintaining and developing tests for daily production, it becomes difficult to keep the overview. The risk that you are creating a system that mix-up things is very high. Furthermore, there is also a huge risk that you will end up with a system which is difficult to split up into reusable modules. This is where we often see that test departments in most manufacturing companies do not have the capacity to perform a task like this.