Functional Testing of Climate Control & Heated Seat ECUs

About the client:
A US based Tier-1 supplier of thermal and climate control systems for various industries like automotive , healthcare, logistics, and more.

Business Challenges:

Our customer is a trusted name in the automotive Industry for their climate control and heating/cooling solutions for the Seat ECU.

In order to uphold this legacy even through their existing and future automotive ECU products, our customer wanted to ensure that their Climate Control seat ECU solutions are tested with 100% coverage of the test-cases.

Hence, this reputed Tier-I automotive supplier was looking for a trusted Functional Testing partner with extensive experience in the Automotive Industry and expertise in the HVAC systems.

Image: Cooling & heated car seats

Embitel Solution:

After the initial phase of discussions, our automotive testing team spent sufficient time to understand the customer’s product line as well as the development process.

We also shared some of our Global Success Stories with the customer. Having gained trust and confidence in our ‘People, Process and Technology’, this partnership of mutual success was inked!

Post the kick-off of this challenging Functional Testing project, our Automotive Testing team collaborated with the US based Automotive Supplier for the following work-products:

• Functional Testing of different Heat and Vent Modes of the Automotive Seat ECU (electronic control unit)
• Functional Testing of Remote start functionality
• Functional Testing of all possible faults such as Short/Open to battery, Short/Open to ground.
• Functional Testing of Diagnostic Trouble Codes based on different instances of faults such as a malfunctioning of Heater or Cool element, Voltage and current abnormalities and more

Our Automotive Testing Team attributes the success of this project to the creation of a well-defined workflow along with the project management (DOORS by IBM), quality management (Quality Manager) and simulation tools (CANalyzer / CANoe) that were deployed for this project

The following Testing Process Diagram gives a complete overview of this robust Functional Testing ecosystem designed by our Automotive Software team:

1. Requirement Specification: The client uploads the requirement and functional specification on the DOORS (Dynamic Object Oriented Requirements Management System).
2. Artifact Analysis: Embitel’ s automotive testing team analyzes each of the artifacts uploaded in DOORS to segregate the software requirements from the hardware requirements.
3. Test Case Definition: The team then defines specific test cases corresponding to each software requirement, in the Quality Manager Tool.
4. Linking Test-Case: Next, each of the test-cases is linked to achieve bi-directional traceability.
5. Software Simulation: Once the test cases are defined and linked, Simulation Software is developed for DUT (device under test) using either CANalyzer or CANoe.
6. Testing: Next the automotive testing team executes the Test Cases.
7. Bug Identification & Logging: All the bugs detected during the testing are logged into the Quality Manager and a test summary report is created for future use.
8. Bug resolution: The bugs that were logged in the Quality Manager are appropriately tracked for resolution.
9. Reporting: If the number of bugs reported is found to be more than a prescribed number, software requirement is shared with the customer for further inspection.
10. The complete testing procedure, right from step 1, is repeated if the number of bugs reported is high and further testing is suggested by the client.

The Embitel Impact:

• Embitel ensured that the product development was validated with 100% functional testing coverage during the process. This ensured that the Climate Control seat ECU was validated for all the software artifacts and any failure to meet the project requirement has been adequately reported.
• Embitel team’s had an in-depth understanding of functional testing of automotive systems. It helped in accelerating the test-case development, execution and identification of the critical bugs, much before the product release.

Tools & Technology:

• IBM Jazz: is an extensible technology platform that is used to integrate tasks throughout the software development lifecycle.
• Rational DOORS (Dynamic Object Oriented Requirements Management System): is a requirement management applications built on Object Oriented Database. The tool has an open architecture that supports third-party plugins.
• Rational Quality Manager: IBM’s rational Quality Manager is web-based, quality management solution that helps in seamless test planning and test asset management. The test management tool, built on Jazz, offers a central repository of test data and the tests are organized into test plans.
• Vector CANalyzer: is a comprehensive analysis software tool used by automotive companies to analyze the data traffic in serial bus systems like CAN, LIN, FlexRay, Ethernet, J1939, MOST etc. It is developed by Vector Informatik GmbH.
• Vector CANoe: is software a development and testing tool , developed by Vector Informatik GmbH. Used mainly by the automotive manufacturers and suppliers, Vector CANoe, supports a wide range of vehicle bus systems. It is widely applied for development, analysis, simulation, testing, diagnostics and start-up of automotive ECUs.
• Tool chain: The climate control ECU is based on PIC (or) Renesas based Microcontrollers tool chain.