Editor's Pick: TestStand 2016

Dear DE Reader:

National Instruments’ TestStand solution for developing, deploying and managing automated tests and test systems has evolved nicely over the years. Today’s Pick of the Week takes a look at the just-announced 2016 release.

It's easy to understand why NI TestStand has attracted a loyal following of thousands of test and validation engineers and has spawned an ecosystem not only of enthusiastic users but all sorts of developers and add-on vendors. Out of the box, NI TestStand has functionality for building automated test sequences, testing your tests and distributing/installing your final test applications. It has operator interfaces, and supports parallel and multithreaded execution as well as report generation capabilities. TestStand lets you customize each of its functionalities to better fit your unique requirements.

And, in a way, customization circles us back to that ecosystem mentioned earlier. According to NI, many of the new and enhanced features introduced in NI TestStand 2016 are based on feedback from that ecosystem.

Key developments making their debut in NI TestStand 2016 that should interest current users include a newly redesigned Property Loader for importing/exporting things like test sequence variables, limits and properties. The Execution Profiler has been enhanced to better identify when steps or substeps take too long to complete because of some kind of test hardware or software resource conflict. Additionally, it's also now easier to find and debug slowdowns in parallel applications.

Also noteworthy is the new native enumeration (enum) data type. It eliminates the need to manually create a unique cluster when working with enum data, and you can use it to pass data to and from enums defined in code modules.

Now, compared to the press attention that NI offerings like LabVIEW system design software receive, NI TestStand can seem like the quiet sibling. Whether that is so or not, when you couple NI TestStand with LabVIEW and NI’s high-performance, modular PXI instrumentation, it should significantly increase the capabilities of NI’s intelligent platform-based approach to building automated test systems.

You can learn more about NI TestStand 2016 from today’s Pick of the Week write-up. Hit the link at the end to get access to a library of introductory and demo videos showing NI TestStand in action. Then hit the link to get yourself a week-long (extendable to up to 45 days) evaluation copy and see why so many test and validation engineers have made NI TestStand their go-to solution.

Thanks, Pal. – Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood

Editor at Large, DE