Automated Testing Flow: The Present and the Future

Automation has been responsible for the most important breakthroughs in testing, and it is now a fundamental element of the electronics world. Unfortunately, its progress is now limited by several legacy solutions that are implicitly, and sometimes unknowingly, accepted. The duality generation/application of patterns is at the very heart of today's testing ecosystem, but it is being challenged by the very evolutions it, fostered. The IEEE 1687 standard is symptomatic to this: it proposes hardware and software solutions to boost hierarchical and instrument-based testing, but is full application brings the current automated test flow close to breaking point. It is a typical scaling issue: everything seems fine for small-scale systems in the short term, but problems arises when looking at the long-term. In this article, we focus on the long-term vision to uncover and explain these limiting elements. We then propose a new flow that overcomes them, unleashes the full potential of new approaches, and fosters evolution.