Conformiq and Fraunhofer FIRST launch joint initiative

SARATOGA, USA & BERLIN, GERMANY: Conformiq Inc., a worldwide provider of software test design solutions, today announced a partnership with Fraunhofer FIRST. Fraunhofer FIRST is one of 80 Institutes in the Fraunhofer Group, one of the largest research groups in the world with a total staff of over 17,000.

Already firmly established as a leader with its Conformiq Automated Test Design technology in Europe, India and North America, Conformiq has been steadily increasing its German market presence since last year, and the partnership with Fraunhofer FIRST provides an instant boost.

The combination of Conformiq technology and its industry-leading practices with the deep know-how of Fraunhofer FIRST will allow organizations with large R&D operations to more quickly profit from benefits that can be achieved by deploying Conformiq Automated Test Design.

“Our partnership with Fraunhofer FIRST will not only increase the reach of Conformiq to serve our existing and global customers but will also provide the Conformiq solution to companies looking to dramatically change their approach to deliver quality assurance services,” says Michael Mandahl, chairman of the board for Conformiq.

“This initiative is a good way to accelerate the knowledge transfer of our industry-leading methods to the European industry,” says Prof. Dr Jähnichen, Institute Director of Fraunhofer FIRST.

Conformiq Automated Test Design helps software and system testing teams work at a higher level of abstraction, use available resources more effectively, spot more specification defects, shorten testing turn-around time, tackle more of their testing challenges and customize their test sets for different phases of product development.

Customer benchmarks show 5X to 20X productivity improvement in test development while achieving the same or better test coverage as with manual test design. This productivity improvement can be capitalized to improve and extend test coverage, and further shorten the time-to-market of products. Conformiq Automated Test Design is already widely used by equipment vendors in the information and communication technology domain for a wide variety of systems and applications, but is now also starting to establish itself in other domains such as transport, defense and embedded systems.

Fraunhofer FIRST is known for its extensive applied research on model-based testing and facilitating its deployment in German automotive, railway, industrial automation, and medical industries. Innovation is fueled by a team of highly skilled experts, led by Friedrich Schön and Prof. Dr. Holger Schlingloff, with industrial experience in developing modeling methods for discrete and continuous systems, new approaches to test generation, as well as development of testbeds and automated test execution environments.

“Model-based testing is the next logical step in the evolution of software quality assurance,” says Prof. Dr. Holger Schlingloff, professor in informatics at Humboldt University in Berlin.

“After the automation of test execution, we next automate the design of tests. This is especially beneficial when the software to be tested is still under development, since changes to models are easier to propagate across entire test suites. In model-based testing, product architects, software programmers and test developers can work closely together. This avoids communication problems and enables a truly joint product development,” continues Professor Schlingloff.

“The use of models in testing, especially in early development phases, allows us to achieve the earliest possible detection of defects and to significantly increase the efficiency and effectiveness of test activities. The result is a clearly higher product quality which, at least in the mid-term, reduces costs as compared to a manual approach.”

At the European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI), Conformiq has been driving the development of a first set of standards on model-based testing in the Technical Committee Methods for Testing and Specification (TC MTS). This initiative, led by Conformiq, is strongly supported by the key international players in the market including major tool vendors, service providers, research institutes and telecom equipment vendors such as Microsoft, Ericsson and Fraunhofer.

The goal of the first phase of standardization is to define a terminology and a common feature set that all model-based testing tools have to adhere to in order to be useful for automated test design.