Loader Cart automation enhancement

Target market of PCR 2-way radio is people with critical mission. Thus, quality of radio has to be ensured. Loader cart system is being used actively as an automated testing tool in PCR during system test phase. It is able to stress the radio to its limit to ensure its stability, robustness, and reliability. All major issues reported have to be resolved before end products are shipping to customers. Loader Cart System is used to reproduce complicated system issue repeatedly that was triggered by the same system because it might be time consuming for human to reproduce the same issue manually. In order to do that, the loader cart system has to be configured before it can operate. However, there is a lot of appraisal works and time needed in configuring the same testing environment of Loader Cart System for issue reproduction. This process takes the longest time from developers and it is tedious to be carried out manually. From experience, the environment setup on 8 radios (a set of loader cart system) took ~4 hours. This amount of time is just for one cycle and the time taken for debugs, implementation, and firmware compilation has yet been considered. Hence, this paper aims to reduce “non-value-added” appraisal works of developers and improve loader cart automation test cycle time. The proposed solution is automating this “non-value-added” appraisal works by using free automation tool such as AutoIT that required no expensive license. The proposed solution is estimated to significantly improve the efficiency by at least 85%, which reduces the time needed from ~4 hours to ~30 minutes.