Innominate Security Technologies AG
Scaling QA-Process to Ensure Uncompromised Quality of Expanding Palette of Industrial Security Products
CUSTOMER PROFILE
Innominate Security Technologies AG is a leading manufacturer of network security appliances for use in industrial environments. Innominate's strategic business areas lie in the fields of security solutions for industrial networks and secure remote maintenance via the Internet. With its mGuard product line of network security appliances, Innominate is offering router, firewall, VPN, QoS, and intrusion detection supporting functionalities, complemented with a highly scalable device management software.
Challenge
In 2014 Innominate focused its strategy on rapid expansion of its product offering with a line of next-gen security appliances allowing secure and easy remote services management, including in-the-cloud operation mode. On the way to this ambitious goal, the management faced the challenge of rapid scaling of the quality assurance processes for the firmware, which is the complex and mature core of the mGuard product family.
Quality is the central attribute of Innominate products, and the Innominate QA department required additional capacities and a scaled firmware-testing process, in order to tackle growing number of products, configuration options and usage scenarios.
Innominate realized that in order to keep up with aggressive market window, they needed an experienced provider with deep knowledge in firmware testing and networking technologies, a provider able to quickly bring in testing capacities and to optimize the testing processes across several ongoing R&D projects.
SOLUTION
SaM Solutions came on board as an independent software quality assurance partner offering end-to-end testing services, possessing decades of expertise with developing and testing firmware for network appliances based on Linux systems.
In the engagement with Innominate SaM Solutions committed itself to introducing the highest technical standards, to shortening the testing cycles, and to bringing quantifiable quality metrics for the tested appliance firmware.
On the way to these goals, SaM Solutions deliverables included:
- Agreeing on common standards and approaches to test plans, test definitions and reports for multiple R&D projects, as well as integrating seamlessly a uniform testing process and issue-handling procedures into mutual processes with several R&D teams of Innominate
- Creating virtualized, configurable-on-the-flight test lab, allowing quality engineers to create with a mouse-click individual test environments with various combinations of firmware versions, configurations, and network topologies
- Authoring test definitions, performing manual and automated testing for ongoing product releases
- Carrying out performance and stress testing for multiple devices on the basis of a specially developed cluster-based automated test suite allowing almost unlimited N:M network connections setup, traffic generation and monitoring
Technologies
The stack of applied technologies and tools comprised C, Ruby, BASH, Python, Pacemaker, Linux, Windows, TestLink, Bugzilla, Git, Linux KVM, PostgreSQL, IPMI, TFTP, IPTables, SSH, Telnet, XML.
SUCCESS
The engagement of SaM Solutions that now transformed into a lasting business relationship, has provided Innominate with transparency, measurability and 100% reliability of testing processes, resulting in dramatically improved testing timeframes, reduced efforts, and uniform high quality of the core product firmware. By relying on SaM Solutions as its software quality assurance partner, Innominate succeeded in fulfilling its strategy - to expand rapidly its product family with next-gen security appliances, boasting innovative technologies and uncompromised quality.