How a MedTech company automated regression testing on their flagship blood analyzer which was considered “non-automatable” with TestResults

The Challenge

TECHNOLOGY THAT CAN'T BE TESTED AUTOMATED & LIMITED SOFTWARE TESTING RESOURCES

A major American manufacturer of diagnostic health care products that sell worldwide struggled with software regression testing for its blood analyzer robots, its flagship and cash cow product. The company could not automate software testing because of the technology used for controlling the software.

A limited number of testers performed regression testing, so the analyzer was not tested as much as it could have been—a scenario many companies can relate to.

One of the challenges of automation was that the user interface technology used virtualized elements and remote sharing. The widely adopted approach in automation tools to test based on locators (XPaths, IDs, other identifiers) cannot be applied in such a scenario.

Therefore, they were not blocked from reducing the human effort while testing resources were sparse.

Solution

AUTOMATED & COMPLIANT HUMAN-LIKE SOFTWARE TESTING (BLACK BOX TESTING)

As TestResults interacts with the applications under test like a user would – pure black box testing without access to the code – they could automate the entire regression testing and free up their testers to do more valuable exploratory testing.

TestResults is one of the only tools available that are explicitly designed for the MedTech industry and its needs. Out-of-the-box, it has zero levels of intrusion, traceability, and revision-based reporting. No additional effort is needed to keep testing FDA-compliant.

Besides that, they don't need to validate TestResults with every update, as you usually would have to do with automation solutions, to stay compliant.

TestResults offers the so-called Frozen Solution for regulated industries, where they get all updates without having to revalidate the automation tool. An unexpected additional benefit that highlights the difference between a test automation solution and a test automation solution built for MedTech.

Result

120 E2E TEST CASES ON 3 SOFTWARE VERSIONS AUTOMATED WITHIN 102 DAYS

The initial automation of all their test cases took less time than expected. People usually hesitate to start an automation project because there are insufficient resources, and automation is a huge pile of work. However, they were able to automate 120 complete end-to-end test cases for three different software versions in 102 days.

With a bit less than 7 hours of engineering time per test case, they do not just have their automated regression testing; each test case covers their previous, current, and upcoming software version—which are all in the field, used by customers.

Not being able to automate your software testing takes a lot of time from your testers, which means low test coverage. This means a huge risk for your product, especially in a field where a software error may end someone's life.

TestResults doesn't rely on the underlying technology of your applications and can test medical devices like this blood analyzer robot, a platform for cataract (phaco), glaucoma, and vitro retinal surgery (eye surgery), or any other medical device with a user interface; you can automate any software.

Side benefit: Less sweaty palms at your next audit.