Nevion, a Sony Group Company and award-winning provider of virtualized media production solutions, had a requirement to develop an automated test framework outside of product testing, focusing instead on system specific interoperability requirements not support by standard regression testing.
The client needed to create a dedicated framework for customer specific system automation testing, extending the scope of the current testing provided to customers. The challenge was that Nevion did not have resources available for this project and subsequently was looking for a technology partner to support them with developing this system.
Nevion turned to us because Solwit provided the best fit for their requirements, including being able to provide automated test architectural consultancy services along with scalable development resources.
Solwit was able to meet their requirements and worked with Nevion to overcome the challenges of developing an automation testing framework that met performance metrics, and was reliable, stable, and scalable.
As we have extensive experience working on audio and video systems and expert knowledge in the field of software testing, we agreed to take up this challenge.
The final system was based around a configurable framework for performing automated tests and generating reports. The framework created by the Solwit team can be used to perform automatic tests and generate reports both in laboratory conditions and in an environment specifically for a given end customer (considering the limitations resulting from security requirements).
The testing automation framework is configurable, includes non-functional testing, load testing, interoperability testing, and also the ability to simulate real-time activity to test the degradation of system resources over time.
The overall goal of the system is to predict as many potentially costly failures in the production environment as possible for each end customer.
The tested system (SUT) is operating in high stability, availability, reliability, and dependable failover conditions whilst constantly under stress of maintaining hundreds of interconnected endpoints serving audio & video streams. The framework supports scenarios spanning a couple of minutes to even months, to test the functional capabilities of a web browser-based GUI, a REST based backend, network intermediaries (e.g., switches) whilst allowing for constant live collection/analysis of non-functional metrics. The framework utilizes technologies such as Python, pytest, Ansible, PostgreSQL, REST, Prometheus, Selenium Webdriver 3-4, Selenium GRID, Docker, Jenkins.
Marcin Gryczko, Test Automation Consultant
The effective implementation of automated testing framework was an introduction to extending the cooperation and starting work on the analysis of the entire client’s system for video and audio data transmission.
Additionally, we automated the process of changing the software version on any machine. This allowed room for savings by minimizing the time of system shutdown for the customers. All automated test scenarios are configurable and adapted to work in end-customer environments. In the future, we plan to prepare additional test scenarios and parameterization of automated functional tests.
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