How NOVUS products are tested during development
New products need to be tested before they can be released for manufacturing and marketing. As obvious as this information may seem, the part that involves the seriousness and commitment put into the development of these products, which allows them to be well tested, may not be so obvious.
At NOVUS, we have learned many years ago that the person who develops a part of the product (hardware or software) is not the best person to test it. The reason for this is that they usually see some functionality of the product in a certain way and have already used it while developing that feature.
In other words, if the person envisioned that the configuration of an alarm would typically be done by the user in a certain order and with a certain range of values, he will develop the functionality so that it operates in this certain order and with this certain range of values. Then, probably, when testing the development itself, the developer will use the same order and the same values.
What happens if other values are used or the order is changed? Will the product still work well? Or will a condition not foreseen by the developer occur?
How are products tested
To avoid situations like this, where the product is always tested in the “expected” way, we have specialized Testers on our development team. Their job is to identify all the features that need to be tested and imagine ways of testing them. Besides the most basic tests, our testers try to imagine situations that were not foreseen to discover “bugs”.
The bugs are documented in a system and passed on to the developers to be fixed. Once fixed, they are tested again, in an iterative process. The process of testing all product features is called by our team a Test Battery.
More recently, we started to automate several tests that until then were executed manually. With the success of the first cases, we have invested more in the test automation process. This decreases the execution time of the Test Batteries and encourages the repetition of tests already performed to make sure that the addition of a new feature did not cause problems in pre-existing features.
Automated testing
It is interesting to note that the automated testing system goes through a Test Battery before being allowed to be used! This is necessary so that we can be confident that the automated test is reliable and that it does not have any bugs.
The entire testing stage allows possible future problems to be detected and corrected in products already during the development stages. This helps to ensure the final quality.
Within NOVUS’ development stages, the testing process is also seen as a healthy battle between the developer and the tester, resulting in both the elimination of product problems and the wounded pride of the developer who thought that he could make a flawless product!
NOVUS releases are also tested by beta testers, users who use the devices in real operations and activities in various segments. Thus, NOVUS products reach the market ready to meet customers’ demands with quality.
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