Product Testing of an IP Net Camera for Surveillance Industry

Executive Summary

ennovate is a software division of eInfochips which is a technology design services and solutions company. eInfochips’ embedded team designed an IP Net Camera (IPNC) based on Texas Instruments’ DM6446 processor and ObjectVideo®’s video analytics.

This IPNC camera allows user to set-up alerts using on-board video analytics, for example – email/SMS alerts can be set as soon as some human / vehicle appears / disappears / crosses a virtual line drawn on the camera’s view.

ennovate team took up the challenge of complete product QA & Testing and executed testing of a product in real time, wrote more than 200 test cases and automated the test environment for 24x7 testing.

The Customer

• eInfochips is a technology design services and solutions company. ennovate is a software division of eInfochips. eInfochips offers embedded reference designs to customers to expedite product development. IPNetCam is a reference design based on Texas Instruments’ DaVinci™ processor with on-board video analytics from ObjectVideo® (a leader in Video Analytics)

The Challenge

• The biggest challenge which the team faced was to test it in a real time environment, taking into consideration the extreme climatic conditions it would be used in. Features like correct identification of a vehicle/person/object needed to be tested for all varied conditions and probabilities without missing a single event
• Testing in a real time environment under different weather conditions at different times of the day
• Testing the video analytics library for reliability of alerts

The Solution

• Requirement refinement & enhancements

  Requirement analysis & Design form the basis of a successful product. A deep QA insight of requirements & design may help a product to be successful there by retaining customers. Our team of experienced & highly qualified QA engineers constantly analyze the requirements while developing test cases using real time & exhaustive set of scenarios under which the system may fail to meet customer’s expectations. Hence, if a real time scenario requires an extra but highly important & crucial feature, it is incorporated into the requirement & the design, thus enhancing & refining the requirements.

• Testing in Real Time

  As IPNetCam has evolved as a product, the testing cycles evolved & matured with real time scenarios where the system may fail. Following are the different types of testing we have for the product IPNetCam

  • Functionality Testing: ensures that all documented features are working flawlessly
  • Reliability Testing: ensures that the product works consistently & smoothly and is able to withstand under varied and extreme situations
  • Regression Testing: ensures that the buggy functionalities once fixed don’t bug again & that they don’t affect the other areas of the application
  • Stress & Load testing: ensures that the system will work properly under different user loads and doesn’t crash unexpectedly
  • Automation Testing: helps to eliminate the human factor up to a certain extent from the testing cycle and ensure that all functionalities are thoroughly & consistently tested using a set of predefined test cases & scenarios

The Technology

• Automation of various test cases for volume and 24x7 testing was done using the automation tool SilkTest 7.0

The Benefits

• Complete testing (included automated) of an IPNC reference design helped eInfochips in delivering a very stable & ready to use reference design for its customers thus resulted into best end user experience