How can IoT Testing be improved with the right framework

With digital technology driving the world and making the lives of people easier than ever before, the quest is for making it more decentralized, distributed, and easy to handle. This is where the Internet of Things (IoT) comes across as a technology of the future. It entails changing the lives of people by taking computing to the physical realm. This may include devices, buildings, vehicles, sensors, electronics, and networks, among others. Even though IoT brings many benefits including increased automation of tasks, running such interconnected devices flawlessly can be a challenge. This is due to the heterogeneity of such devices and their need to display coordinated behavior in real-time. So, let us first understand what IoT is all about?

What is IoT?

Here, physical elements comprising buildings, vehicles, home appliances, and other elements are embedded with software, electronics, and sensors to exchange data and information over the internet. These devices are increasingly adopted by the industry to derive a range of benefits. It may include cost reduction and increased revenue generation through automated operations and improved efficiency. The speed of adoption of such devices is driven by various factors such as increased bandwidth and processing power, a growing pool of tech-savvy consumers, the advent of new analytical tools, and the low cost of sensors. Given the competitive nature of today’s business environment, enterprises are looking to generate greater revenues and deliver better customer experiences.

However, notwithstanding the slew of benefits such devices bring to the consumers, building them in the form of a network remains a challenging and complex activity. Since such devices have interfaces with a lot of digital elements, there can be issues of interoperability, security, scalability, coordination, and conformation. Nevertheless, IoT is on its way to become arguably the biggest opportunity for software development and testing. The IoT ecosystem will have an eclectic amalgamation of products like home appliances, embedded sensors, buildings, vehicles, and actuators, among other things. To enable the smooth functioning of such an ecosystem, IoT testing has become a critical requirement of the industry. If statistics are to be believed, then by 2020, around 30 billion products might become a part of the IoT ecosystem (Source: McKinsey.)

What are the benefits of IoT testing?

The importance of IoT-enabled devices in the digital ecosystem meant these have to be tested rigorously to gain a slew of benefits. These include

·         Making the business future-proof in terms of interoperability, adoption of technologies, scalability, security, and other parameters

·         Delivering the best user experiences across channels through automation

·         Delivering quicker access to the markets using test automation

What are the challenges for testing IoT applications?

The testing of IoT-enabled devices entails many challenges due to the presence of diverse devices and the need for their seamless coordination and collaboration. The other challenges are:

·         Dealing with the diversity of elements comprising the IoT ecosystem

·         Ensuring high security for data transmission

·         Adhering to a slew of IoT protocols viz., CoAP, XMPP, MQTT, and others

·         Achieving quick responsiveness in real-time

·         Support for scalability and interoperability

Developing the right framework for Internet of Things testing

To overcome the challenges associated with IoT device testing, a robust IoT testing framework should be put in place. Although designing such a framework would depend on the configurations of specific IoT devices to be tested, it should have some basic features.

Data Recorders: These can help in validating various IoT-enabled devices vis-a-vis their compatibility across communication layers.

Protocol Simulators: The IoT testing methodology involves working with many protocols. Protocol simulators can facilitate IoT testing when there are multiple interfaces of devices and their end-points.

Building Labs: These can help in simulating real-time experiences and deriving suitable inferences in the process.

Virtualization: Any real-time validation of the highly complex IoT application can be challenging and time-consuming. Thus, to reduce the dependency on a real-time environment, certain testing services or parameters can be virtualized. 

Any IoT testing framework should comprise a series of tests to check various layers and their interaction with each other.

Application layer: Functional testing, compatibility testing, usability and user experience testing, localization testing, and API testing.

Services layer: Interoperability testing, functional testing, and API testing.

Gateway and Network layer: Network compatibility and connectivity testing.

Sensor layer: Functional and security testing

Conclusion

The Internet of Things is going to drive the future and will have an eclectic mix of devices/elements such as datacentre, sensors, applications, and networks. Since a lot would be at stake based on the correct behavior of IoT-enabled devices, the IoT testing approach should be all-encompassing and rigorous. Hence, developing the right framework for testing IoT-enabled devices should be the priority, which in turn can ensure these devices to remain programmable, communicable, and operable across the industry.