How To Test A LED-Bar Longer Than The Eiffel Tower?
Ard Kramer & Dennis Schouten
ImproveQS & Dutch Railways
When you arrive at Schiphol Airport and take the train Amsterdam, you may have seen a shining a LED sign 330 meters long! This bar informs train passengers: where the train will stop and where the doors will open. The reason to implement this sign was to spread the crowd along the platform in order to avoid dangerous overcrowding situations. It helps passengers to board the train safely.
To achieve this goal, an innovative product needed to be developed. In just one year we had to find partners. The hardware and software of the LED-bar and control software also needed to be designed, developed, tested and connected. We then needed to implement at the Schiphol Airport train station.
The presentation will tell you everything about our journey to develop and test such an unique product: How to develop a minimum valuable product, suited Schiphol Airport train station. How to integrate the different parts in a busy train station. What were the (product) risks and how did we mitigate the risk?
Key Takeaways:
- Which (test) problems must you concur to reach the minimal valuable product?
- How to deal with a situation where a supplier has the most expertise of your product?
- How to set up a representative integration test and how to perform this test on a busy location as a train station?
About Me!
Ard is software tester from the Netherlands and he works for ImproveQS. He uses the title Qualisopher which stands for someone “who loves truth and wisdom and at the same time is decisive to improve man and his environment” . He is interested in the world around us, to see what we can learn and apply in software testing. That is one of the reason why I tell stories in books and at (test) conferences such as EuroSTAR, Expo:QA, Belgium Testing Days, CAST and Testnet conferences.
Dennis is responsible as Test manager for systems that generate information for train travelers. He works at the Dutch Railways where he works in a complex environment. The LED-bar is a part of this complex environment and architecture, therefore he worked closely together with Ard to get the project to a successful end.