How Test Automation Improves Quality in the Manufacturing Domain?

Test Automation - “Quality is free, but only to those who are willing to pay heavily for it.”

In the digital world, quality is the most critical challenge faced by small to large scale businesses. The reason is customers are more demanding. They are more knowledgeable. Even they are smart enough to write a negative review about poor quality (e.g., via internet discussion groups or emails). They stay more active on social media and are more prepared to complain to the company regarding their poor service. They are so obsessed with quality brands.

After knowing this, no one would like to ignore the value of software testing. Today, maintaining quality goals has become one of the major concerns for every business. But when it comes to manufacturing companies, no one can forget the quality lab because it improves the standard of living and boosts economic productivity.

To ensure reliability and quality of products, manufacturing software testing solution is much-needed. It helps maximize the company’s profits and reputation, and also ensures that your products will meet customer expectations. From transportation, electronics, chemical industries, furniture & fixtures, fashion industries, and household goods to building materials, every manufacturing industry should invest in software testing for manufacturing services because it allows your team to fulfill the increasing customer demands by manufacturing high-quality products at reasonable costs.

Reasons to Go For Manufacturing Test Automation

Manufacturing test automation offers many benefits, such as less downtime, more repeatability, and lower operating costs. There are common reasons to choose test automation for manufacturing software systems. Let’s read in detail:-

Reduce Test Time

When you go with industrial automation software testing, professionals help you to reduce the time to run repetitive testing from months to days and days to hours. During development cycles, software tests are often repeated to ensure quality. Each time source code is changed when software checks in a repeated action. This process consumes so much time and costs huge money due to manual efforts. However, automated tests are conducted using automation tools and save both time and money.

Gain Productivity

To improve manufacturing quality, some aspects of the testing are entirely performed through automation, and operators execute some similar activities with the testing are:

• Part handling
• Dealing with paper data sheets or electronic data sheets
• Reacting to failed parts

Ensure Safety of Property & People

When the test system executes some dangerous processes with extreme conditions, such as current, voltage, pressures, and temperature, the test system may control the connections and proximity events to protect the humans from unexpected incidents. Moreover, the test system checks the test conditions, removes energy from the system, and shut down the unit operations to help people experience safety through test automation.

Benefits of Automated Testing in the Manufacturing Domain

Speed

Speed is one of the main benefits of automated testing in the manufacturing domain because it helps run tests in parallel and on multiple platforms to deliver better product quality faster.

Efficiency

The industrial automation software testing focuses on improving performance through test automation tools. In manual testing, test cases are implemented by human testers, and they are prone to making mistakes. 

Maximum Overall Test Coverage

Automation gives time to write new tests and allows to add to the automated test suite. On the other hand, lengthy experiments are often avoided in manual testing, resulting in poor quality applications. With automation, you can add as many features in your manufacturing software systems and improve communication among designers, coders, and product owners.

Earlier Detection of Bugs

Documentation is an essential part of manufacturing software testing and makes it easier for testing teams to prepare software defects reports. It increases the overall development speed and ensures that all functions will work accurately. The faster the defect is identified, the more cost-effective it is for customers to meet all the expectations.

DevOps

Automated tests are an indispensable part of the DevOps cycle, including continuous development, continuous integration, continuous testing, continuous delivery & feedback, continuous deployment, and on-going operations. The aim of manufacturing software testing services with DevOps strategy is to deliver all features, fix bugs, frequent updates, and fulfill all business objectives using the shorten systems’ development life cycle.

Reusability

The automation testing of industrial automation software systems saves many pennies to companies due to the repetitive nature of test automation cases. It gives them an outstanding opportunity to understand the automated test suites with all related tools such as continuous integration pipeline. The advantage is that one can work on two or more projects with automation and achieve faster testing results than manual testing.

Better Insights

The automated manufacturing software testing provides better insights about the applications even when some tests fail. It shows data tables, memory contents, file contents, and other internal program states to help developers understand what’s gone wrong with systems.

Different Types of Automation Tests

Different types of testing can be automated for manufacturing software systems. Here, we have mentioned some types of automation testing.

Unit Testing

The individual units or components of a web application are tested in unit testing. Unit tests are written by a team of developers and automation testers. Unit testing is the first level of web app testing that can be performed during the development phase.

Functional Testing

It is used to analyze whether all functions of manufacturing software systems work as expected or not. This section covers functional testing of APIs, user interface, security, database, client/server applications, and overall functionality of your manufacturing domain.

Smoke Testing

The purpose of performing smoke testing is to ensure whether the deployed build is stable or not. In this testing, QA engineers verify the working process of essential features before proceeding to another testing level.

Integration Testing

It is a software testing type that combines individual software modules and then tests as a group. It helps to identify system-level issues such as broken databases, integration mistakes and provides a way to resolve them at the earliest stages. Moreover, it improves the overall development and production time.

Regression Testing

Regression testing is considered for the verification of a recent code change. It ensures that the existing features of your manufacturing software systems do not affect and work as expected before making new changes.

Other than these testing types, some other automated tests are black-box testing, data-driven testing, and keyword testing that companies execute as per the manufacturing domain requirement.

Why is Automation Needed for Small to Large Manufacturing Industries?

The President and CEO of the NAM (National Association of Manufacturers), Jay Timmons, expressed the situation and said,” already manufacturers are struggling with interruptions to their businesses due to the outbreak of COVID-19, with many expected financial and operational risks - even before some of the weekly developments…Across the nation, manufacturing companies are trying to keep their communities and employees safe and healthy, working very closely with elected representatives, we can make sure the resilience not only of our businesses but also our country.

By acquiring the benefits of automated testing in manufacturing domain with DevOps-driven methodology, this sector can experience improved productivity, streamline workflows, real-time performance visibility, and end-to-end cultural change. By adopting and implementation of DevOps in the manufacturing domain, you can gain numerous benefits, likewise-

• Transparency across the manufacturing processes.
• Faster identification and elimination of performance bottlenecks.
• Greater visibility into everyday activities.
• Holistic and repeatable solutions development.
• Maximum efficiency, minimum waster, and more productivity.
• Actionable insights on product design, supply chain, and customers.
• Develop cross-functional teams for focusing on a single component.
• Real-time performance data.
• Limited involvement of human staff.
• Higher workplace safety.
• More efficient usage of materials with lower chances of errors.
• Reduce labor costs and factory lead times.
• Deliver better product quality with the lowest defect rate.
• Ensure manufacturing at double speed.

How can BugRaptors Become your Support System?

BugRaptors takes pride in maximizing the business potential of manufacturing through its innovative and latest manufacturing software testing solutions. We don’t quit until we don’t make manufacturing systems completely error-proof, secure, and user-friendly. We have 75+ ISTQB certified testers, a mobile test lab that supports 100+ physical mobile devices, 10+ test automation tools, and DevOps strategies to give you 50% overall cost-saving manufacturing software testing services with improved deployment quality and greater operational efficiency.

We’ve shared a lot about the benefits of automated testing in manufacturing. Now, it’s your turn to discuss your project needs with our manufacturing domain experts. Let’s connect here.