Agile testing concepts based on keyword-driven testing for industrial automation systems

In the field of industrial automation systems software becomes an important factor because engineers tend to move the realization of functional requirements from hardware to software components. The main reason for this is that software components allow increasing product flexibility. As a consequence software complexity increases rapidly and requires systematic, automation-supported and agile testing approaches. Thus, systematic and agile testing are key challenges in industrial control software development to ensure and improve systems quality. Further different implementation standards, i.e., IEC 61131-3 and IEC 61499, arise additional challenges in constructing and testing industrial automation systems software. This paper presents an agile and keyword-driven test approach with focus on testing implementations based on both important industrial standards and illustrates the applicability of the purposed approach in a sample implementation, i.e., a High Speed Pick and Place unit. Main results show the applicability of keyword-driven testing based on a defined subset of keywords (common for IEC 61131-3 and IEC 61499) and thus enable agile and automation-supported testing more effective and efficient.