Experience Report on Teaching Distributed Testing Bench for Cloud-Based Applications

This experience paper presents a practical way to teach and learn testing infrastructure in the real industrial world. At the beginning, it is as simple as possible and it has the ability to add complexity step by step and build a very complex environment gradually. Having an overview and also being able to go in-depth into each piece of the project, it makes this very good both for the employees and students. Both can learn faster and easier all the big picture of Real-Time data acquisition and testing process in any industry and, at the same time, they have the possibility to explore many hardware and software used in real companies. The system proposed is composed of a testing station which contains a device under test (DUT) represented by a NI myRIO™ that is connected to a test equipment NI-DAQ™mx, both communicate with a PC or NI PXI™ using TCP/IP protocol. NI LabVIEW™ application is running on all these 3 devices and simulates the test. Using NI TestStand™, all data recorded during tests are saved and sent into NI SystemLink™ Cloud. The architecture for one testing station can be replicated and thus create a bigger testing infrastructure. We can adjust and modify and create all the diversity that we want on each testing station. As an upper level, we have visualization and analytics applications that show to the users all the insights from all the tests. Using artificial intelligence and machine learning we can create models that predict and help in the testing process. In a company context this project creates a user-friendly demo for any customer or employee or student that is curious about applications workflows, the use cases solved by this approach or ideas of solution for problems of testing. This experience paper presents all the teaching and learning process that we created and shows some lessons learned after the feedback obtained from everyone involved in software engineering domains.