Robotic Test Automation

The challenge

Situation: Company is one of the largest retailers of tires in the United States, providing high reliability tires for heavy-duty loads and long transport trails across a variety of terrain over different routes. Security is paramount, and they use a handheld device to measure the tread depths for tires for verifying integrity and estimating tire safety and replacements over long runs. This helps them keep replacement costs under control and ensure safety for drivers across the country.

Company seeks to automate this process with a specialized Robot Arm - the repetitive task of manually testing each tire was done by specialists, but could be configured on a robotic arm.

But, this requires a specialised user story. We have a robot arm that needs to wait for a valid input response from the app, a specialized sleeve communicating readings from hardware into the app, and the app itself needs to rerun after every successful test.

Is it possible to achieve perfect hardware-software synchronicity in such a case?

Our approach

Safety. Automated QA Testing. Happy Robots.

The Company ran on a Xamarin framework where the test cases were constantly re-written, despite a massive 500 test case repository. Switching to other testing solutions would mean having to transpose the existing tests to another library, and having the flexibility to consistently improve the process to assure absolute safety.

With TestGrid, the Company was able to deploy all of their existing testing scenarios to a no-code environment within 30 days. We understood exactly what the Company wanted, and ensured that the transition would go by smoothly and error-free so the company can maintain their top notch QA.

Testgrid Device Cloud for RTA

TestGrid’s instant remote access offered a Device Cloud that could sync up with any physical Android devices over the air. Having a centralized control system allowed the company to scale infinitely with their parallel testing units, limited only by the number of devices that are required for their testing.

Trustable VPN allowed TestGrid-Device connection to be secure and parallely connect with both the scanner devices as well as the Android devices that handled the instruction set.

CI/CD Integration

TestGrid also helped the company achieve perfect CI/CD - DevOps Integration within 30 days, reducing their cost required to create and maintain test cases by 60%.

save over 90% of the time involved in the testing process.

Our team worked closely with the company to ensure the migration was flawless, and executed with precision.

Pair Programming

The Company leveraged TestGrid’s efficient Pair Programming to migrate the test cases and get up to speed with the low code environment in record time. Here’s how that went down:

Phase 1

Setup and access, getting a lay of the land with regards to the security of the software and hardware involved, the VPNs that needed to be synchronized, and obtaining access to the resources required for migration to be a success

Phase 2

Moving test cases from Xamarin to TestGrid, with zero defects - all 500 cases!

Phase 3

Integration with the robot arm, customization of the physical setup process and the configuration environment.

Phase 4

CI/CD DevOps pipeline setup. Deep integration and sanity checks to ensure qualitative quality testing, every single time.

This complete process took only 45 days, end-to-end.

Results

Reduced Human Error. Faster Test Process. Consistent Products.

Boast Higher QA

The Company has achieved perfect synchronicity and automation between all the manual steps it takes between hardware and software to ensure top safety with crucial equipment such as tires used for perilous routes.