umlaut Device Farm – for the revolution of testing

All industries are facing challenges of digitalisation. That does not only mean that business models change, and the software side of a product gets more and more important, but also that development cycles are sped up by several factors.

While software plays a bigger part than ever before, hardware also becomes more complex and the integration of both hardware and software becomes a major challenge during development. The greatest struggle are the coordination and synchronisation of hardware and functional testing, software flashes and sanity tests while in the meantime the software is developed further and further. In the worst case, the tester's feedback only reaches the software developer when the software version is already outdated again.

Device Farms revolutionize the testing process

Therefore, in the field of web and mobile app testing, cloud connected Device Farms are already an important element of mobile app development. They allow a great reduction in labour costs for testing, as well as increasing the coverage of devices. One popular example is the Amazon Device Farm, with which developers shall be able to run tests concurrently on multiple desktop browsers or real devices.

The umlaut Device Farm already brings the same power to automotive infotainment testing. Currently, especially hardware management and the process of software development and testing are complex and costly. When testing manually, every tester works with its own physical test bench, meaning high invests for a large amount of equipment on OEM side, longer idle phases in between different tests, and time-consuming manual software flashes for testers. The umlaut Device Farm helps by closing the gap between software and hardware and moving both worlds closer together while integrating processes on both sides to an easier to use platform.

Continuous integration to speed up development

umlaut builds a Device Farm to provide the hardware as a service. Hardware devices – e.g. electronic control units – can be booked and interacted with. Completely remote controlled. The service integrates with the development and testing activities of our customers, partners and our own. Therefore, the deployment of new software versions on the hardware is a key enabler for many engineering teams. The standardised interface provides a common way of interaction with the system. Several interaction channels with the devices can be made available – and can also be implemented by third parties as umlaut provides the platform.

In brief: Benefits of a Device Farm

• A Device Farm means optimising the hardware management, e. g. a better utilization and high availability. One device can be shared with multiple developers, testers, functional owners and other stakeholders. Thus, the idle times of devices can be reduced to a minimum. Moreover, you get faster access to different hardware setups.
• The cloud solution stands for easier maintenance and higher quality. Hardware management can be centralized and makes the distribution easier. It simplifies the hardware maintenance and allows an easier distribution of knowledge.
• The Device Farm makes location independent usage possible, which enables for best cost testing, working from any location worldwide and in new working models. Regarding the current Covid-19 crisis, our innovative testing solution kept us working as agile and efficient as before, since our test engineers were able to perform their daily business remotely.
• On top, the Device Farm offers the possibility to analyse the centralised data which leads to an optimisation in the testing process and the development as well.
  

Let’s innovate all industries

Device Farms are not only relevant for app and infotainment testing but they can also optimise the development processes in all industries.

In each industry, where software and hardware are interacting with each other during short time development cycles, the Device Farm approach can provide huge benefits. Within the aviation industry, e.g. where software driven developments take place and hardware is hard to share with suppliers and partners, a Device Farm approach can help to shorten time to market by becoming a substancial effective part of the continuous integration pipeline.