Testing Beyond the 5 C’s of IoT
Testing is Crucial for Mission Critical IoT
Today, many IoT device manufacturers test wireless devices separately at the component, device, and software application levels. This approach assumes that the integration of the separate components will be seamless and without errors. However, it may put a company’s reputation at risk as a device can fail unexpectedly in a real-world environment if one of the components malfunctions. It could even put lives at risk if medical devices such as pacemakers or infusion pumps fail to perform as expected. As more IoT systems become complex and mission-critical, testing is crucial to deliver the highest-quality device and best possible customer experience.
5 C’s + 1 Test Approach Ensures Your Devices Thrive
The rapid growth of wireless devices on the industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) bands has increased the complexity in device design, test, performance, security, and usability. Testing these devices is one of the biggest challenges for design engineers and device manufacturers. They need to address the following 5 C challenges across the IoT device lifecycle:
- Connectivity ensures that your IoT devices connect to other IoT devices, the cloud, and the world around them.
- Continuity requires that your IoT devices have an extended battery life to do their jobs.
- Compliance requires that your IoT devices adhere to global regulations.
- Coexistence ensures that your IoT devices work harmoniously in crowded IoT environments.
- Cybersecurity safeguards your data from cyber security threats.
Build Customer Experience-Centered IoT Devices
The first five C’s — connectivity, continuity, compliance, coexistence, and cybersecurity — are all important. However, another C, customer experience, puts your device ahead of the competition. A complete customer experience testing focuses on how the devices work throughout the user’s daily life and how the devices should respond to the user’s input or behavior. Incorporating user’s needs and behavior into product design and test early in the lifecycle is paramount to satisfying and retaining your customers.
- Customer experience testing ensures quality products that delight and retain your users.
Customer Experience Testing
Users generally experience IoT devices through software and firmware applications. Testing these applications can be very difficult and here are some of the reasons why design and validation engineers are struggling.
- Software often includes features that users can customize. The number of possible paths and permutations of various settings can be too extensive to test manually.
- IoT applications often run on different hardware platforms — PCs, tablets, kiosks, smartphones, smartwatches, and other common consumer devices. To complicate matters, an IoT application may involve several platforms. End-to-end customer experience testing must incorporate all platforms, including the various hardware revisions and operating systems that need support.
- Market pressure to quickly release each IoT device and software update means you must test using an automated approach.
Complete Testing Maximizes Device Performance
Luckily, integrated solutions on the market today, such as Eggplant’s Digital Automation Intelligence and Robotic Process Automation (RPA), can tackle these test challenges facing design and validation engineers. These solutions are intelligent model-based test solutions that can test the end-to-end customer experience and optimize the product. These solutions include four components that can provide comprehensive test coverage for the entire range of potential user journeys.
- Device modeling with a measurement control interface that creates a digital twin of the test instrument to measure performance
- Equipment that uses advanced automation to replace manual human interactions to enable quick and more precise development.
- Software or application modeling to simulate real user scenarios to test the complete customer journey for quick and effective end-to-end design validation.
- Cloud-based software modeling with machine-learning data analysis algorithms to profile user behavior to improve the end-user experience.
IoT presents many exciting and transformational opportunities in dozens of vertical markets, but the
design and test challenges are formidable. The opportunities with end-to-end testing are wide-ranging. Following the comprehensive 5 C’s + 1 approach — connectivity, continuity, compliance, coexistence, cybersecurity, and customer experience, as shown in Figure 1, can maximize your IoT device performance.
End-to-end customer experience testing provides two significant benefits:
- Seamless user experience ensures that the digital ecosystem works as intended — timely and error-free — from the user’s perspective.
- Deep insights into the complete user journey enable IoT device manufacturers to continuously optimize and enhance their products to provide better user experiences.
Design and validation engineers should optimize the product and ensure comprehensive test coverage of the entire range of potential user journeys. Using a modern AI-assisted approach to model-based testing that emulates user behavior enables testing any technology at every layer. Design and validation engineers can predict the quantified impact of new product versions to create high-quality products that meet and exceeds users’ needs.\