Helping to improve test methods.
Drive up efficiencies.
Bring down costs.
AVi is an Oxfordshire based company, with a mission to design & deliver Automated Test Solutions to help companies streamline, improve and to drive-up efficiencies of their current test & measurement processes.
Just as it is important to have tests in place, it also matters how we run these tests. Some companies prefer to do manual testing, although that’s not the best approach. The next logical step is automating your testing process when you have tests in place. Manual testing should be minimized at all costs – Test automation increases overall product development efficiency and robustness.
Each project we undertake is embraced wholeheartedly and with total dedication. Whether we’re configuring you an Independent Test Unit (ITU), to simply replace or upgrade your old test-box, or building you a new ground up automated verification system, we invest our collective knowledge into making sure that everything is delivered on time and to your complete satisfaction. In addition to this, we have bundles of industry experience in the area of electronics design & development, so our Test Development Engineers are therefore able to fully understand the finer details of your requirements so as not to waste time unnecessarily.
Why use an AVi Verification Solution?
The role of an Automated Test System is to generate or simulate real-world stimulus signals that your Device Under Test (D.U.T.) is designed to encounter, analyse its performance over a range of conditions by acquiring data and reporting outcomes. The nature of testing will often need to be consistent, rigorous, repeatable, and carried out over long periods of time, especially if the D.U.T. is expected to perform over a wide range of environmental conditions.
One example is when a Production / Engineering department needs to stretch the functional legs of a newly developed prototype and to verify its performance, robustness, endurance and so on, additional time will need to be devoted to developing a suitable approach to test & measurement.
Developing an automated test solution is the best approach to providing greater test coverage and ensuring that your Unit-Under-Test (U.U.T.) is on the right path to meeting its functional specifications. An automated solution will vastly improve the speed at which data is acquired, assessed, and reported, ready for reviewing by your team.
Before the start of testing, a Design Verification Test plan (D.V.T.) is usually created which outlines all the test parameters and requirements that must be met by your design.
The plan is an important document, used as a basis to form the building blocks of a suitable Test System. How these tests a run comes down to the importance of having good application test software. An Automated System, if developed well, can yield significant cost and time savings to a project, which can be anything up to 20% depending on size and complexity.
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Transforming Older Manual Test Methods
Some test systems are often cobbled together in a rush and can end up looking like the example below. We however can take your old system and integrate all of its unwieldy functional elements into one system. Transforming it into something more manageable and intuitive.
Benefits of choosing an AVI Automated Test System
- Significantly reduced Development Time
- Faster Time to Market
- Quicker Test Set-up Times
- Better Signal Integrity & Improved Accuracy
- User Interface to Eliminate User Error
- Tests can be left to run unattended
- Test Results are stored locally
- Better Data Acquisition & Reporting
- Systems are scalable as the development lifecycle progresses into new requirements
- Manageable Equipment Footprint
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When to start thinking of developing a Test Verification Solution?
When embarking upon the initial planning stages of an engineering project, the testing phase can often be overlooked, even though its acknowledged as being an important part of the development lifecycle.
In an Ideal scenario, due consideration would have been given to the process of defining the development of a reliable and purposeful test system, and accounted for during planning. Any test development plan should run concurrently with key phases of development lifecycle during project execution.
In practice however, this is rarely the case and the development of a test system usually ends up happening way too late – nearer the later stages of the project, often dropping in the lap of an already overstretched design engineer.
Invariably the engineer has to spend additional time and effort, not accounted for during planning, defining and developing some kind of mechanism to verify their work with and use it to feedback their findings accordingly.
Because of the limitations of time and perhaps even money, you end up with something that looks cobbled together in a hurry which can suffer from a lack of reliability and inconsistent data acquisition.
In scenarios such as this, AVI can help by offloading most if not all of the burden of managing the test development process.
Leaning upon our experiences of the past, we believe that the V-Model approach should be adopted as guidance where possible when undertaking a project of a reasonable size, scale and complexity.
According to the model, from the outset, consideration is given to the differing types of testing that will be required by the project.
As the project matures, test requirements are also continually evolving which should be inextricably linked to other phases within the project.