The Quarks had their final IPPD event this week. This event was the culmination of two semesters worth of work, planning, and developing. We were able to listen to some great speakers, ask questions, network with amazing people, and most importantly present ATOM. Through a private showcase, final presentation, and public showcase, we were able to show off our project and all the work we’ve put into it this past year. From the first time we heard the project description to the final result, we created ATOM from just an idea to a full fledged application with all of its automated tests. We are happy to have such a good team to work with through the whole process and a great coach, liaisons, and staff to support us along the way.

After many presentations, assignments, filling out documents, and coding, it was extremely rewarding to send off our final product. This experience has been one of a kind and was an amazing way to end our time in college. We have learned, developed, and grown so much from the beginning of this course back in the fall and are better engineers for it. Thank you again for a great year! IPPD was well worth the work. The Quarks thank you for coming along this journey with us!

Last blog post before FDR! With our final week approaching fast, the project, documentations, and presentations are being finalized now. ATOM is going through its last updates before it settles into its final deliverable form to be handed off to RTX. The User Manual and Developer Manuals are completed and will help future work and use with ATOM. The manuals include steps to set up the application, necessary configuration, and helps users navigate test creation, execution, report generation and more. The Developer Manual gives insights into our code and how it functions. We provide reasoning for certain development choice and hope to clearly explain the behind the scenes of ATOM.

As a preview for FDR, we had the chance to practice our presentation to our peers and receive feedback on our performance. As the last peer presentation, we have had a lot of practice showing this project and are very familiar with the teams in our group. While it is routine at this point, there is always room for improvement and we are grateful to the final questions and comments from our classmates. Our presentation has come a long way to make our showcase as good as it can be from cutting out unnecessary chunks of text and talking to emphasizing key aspects and accomplishments. We are proud of the work we have accomplished through these last two semesters and the work we put into this project will be shown during FDR. These next couple of days will be for knocking out final issues and polishing up a few final areas. The Quarks are locking in one last time.

After a long semester of coding and developing ATOM, it was a nice change of pace to work on ATOM’s showcase video! It was amazing to see our storyboard for this video come to life and we had a great time filming, directing, and acting together for the video.

Through the video we hope to showcase the main points of ATOM: It will save time and it is easy to use. To do this we created a story that include elements that show passing time including clocks, tired workers, and a dinosaur. While a lot of work and technical development has gone into this project, we hope to show that this application doesn’t require advanced software knowledge. A short demo is shown in the video to show the application itself.

Putting this together gave us new challenges such as writing scripts, planning shots, and editing it all into a cohesive story and seeing how far our work has come was incredibly rewarding. The video highlights ATOM’s core features and use cases, and brings out the personality and creativity that our team has put into it.

With FDR around the corner, we are preparing our final documentation and getting ATOM to its final deliverable state. Peer presentations are next week and we are excited to bring our best to one of the last presentations on IPPD!

This week was the spring Prototype Inspection Day!

After a long semester of working on ATOM, we were proud to present our spring prototype to three pairs of judges along side the rest of the IPPD teams. Our fall prototype was a series of wireframes that facilitated page navigation and presented the user interface. Our current prototype is a functional windows application that demonstrates the automated testing aspect of ATOM which includes test creation, modification, deletion, and running tests. We also had functional test report creation and saved report history. The presentation consisted of an initial overview of the project and what the main functions and goals of ATOM are. We then moved into a demonstration showcasing all of the application’s functions and ran through a few automated scripts using ATOM. We were lucky enough to have some of the same judges from the fall PID so they were able to compare our progress now to last semester. We also got some new faces which provided us with a fresh set of feedback. As we prepare for FDR, our sights will be focused on the last major aspects of ATOM and cleaning it up for it’s final version. Prototype day went amazing and we are looking forward to a strong finish. We are thankful for everyone involved who made PID go so smoothly and for the judges who provide meaningful insights into our project!

As we enter April, there is just about a month left of IPPD before the Final Design Review. With the second prototype inspection day coming up next week, we are cleaning up our application to provide a clean version of ATOM to present at PID. Our plan for PID includes a short presentation going over ATOM followed by a full demonstration of the current prototype. We are hoping to receive valuable feedback to work on for the final stretch of the semester. The create and edit pages have been fixed and are clear of bugs! Modularization of scripts is progressing with launch, closing, and editing blocks being created. Pop up blocks have also been added to various sections to add a second layer of confirmation before making or deleting changes. We have pop ups for deleting tests, creating tests, making changes to existing tests, and discarding edits made to existing tests. These pop ups should prevent any accidental overwrites or loss of information.

Outside of PID, we are working on both the poster and storyboard for the video on ATOM. We have an idea of what we are looking for and a temporary script for the video! We are excited to start filming and show off what ATOM is all about. Our main highlight is to show the time efficiency of ATOM and the benefits it has for the software testers at RTX.

Leading into spring break the team is making a lot of progress on ATOM with another virtual work session in lieu of class! With the completion of the report generation UI page the UI is nearly complete. Test modification has been implemented this week for both the functionality and the UI. Created and uploaded tests can now have any of its data changed and can also be deleted! The select/select all functionality for the reports page has also been implemented which will now allow you to export or delete all reports. Changes are currently being made update our test grouping and detection process from being more static to a newer dynamic approach. This will allow ATOM to create groupings and load files based on the actual existing file directory rather than the previous alternative hierarchy used to store and group tests. Automation on the mail services testing processes continues with progress and a few action items for our liaisons. Looking over our old documents from fall semester, certain designs need to be updated for FDR. One of these include the system architecture, which needs to updated for the final version of ATOM to reflect any changes we made before including it in our FDR.

Spring break however does not mean the work stops. We plan to work on the FDR draft and user and developer manuals for ATOM along with the addition of a settings page. No blog post next week but we’ll see you soon!

ATOM updates!

Tests created using ATOM will be automatically shown in the test tabs section. This means we can run ATOM, created a test, and run that test in one instance of the application. The test will show up within the tab it was created in and be saved there unless altered and will be shown in any future instance of the application. Additionally, we have report generation! Run tests will generate a report describing the pass/fail nature of each step as well as the over score displayed as Passed Tests/Total Tests. The report can be viewed on the report history page which will contain all past reports as well with the date and time recorded. Test automation continues along with the initial creation of manuals for using ATOM and planning ATOM’s product video.

Testing is starting to be implemented to ensure functionality and success of ATOM’s processes. Unit tests focus on individual components to ensure they work correctly in isolation, system-level tests verify that integrated modules function together as expected, and E2E tests will simulate test engineer user interactions to confirm the entire application behaves as intended. These different test scopes help us catch errors and ensure reliability across ATOM.

ATOM has had it’s first demonstration of the current prototype!

Leading up to the demonstration was all hands on deck. The UI team showed massive progress to get a navigational and clean looking prototype ready to present. The home page with test selection and test results was completed as well as the report history page. Connecting that to the backend to allow test selection and multiple test selection was another accomplishment as well as test creation functionality.

During our weekly liaison meeting, the current ATOM was demonstrated to our liaisons Joseph and Alex, as well as one of the RTX testing engineers, Valerie Tellier. The demo showed functionality of the home page, selecting tests, running one and multiple tests, creating tests, and showing test results. We also explained some of the setup, how to update, and the general backend of ATOM. The demo went well and were able to get questions and feedback on it. A questionnaire was sent to them which will be used to calculate the System Usability Scale score.

This represents a huge milestone for ATOM and the Quarks but the work is not finished! QRB2 was this week and it’s clear that our progress must continue! Beneficial feedback was also received from our panel of judges and we’re excited to make those changes. We’ll see you next week!

This week as we prep for our QRB2 presentation, integration between frontend and backend continues!

ATOM’s UI is progressing quickly with more progress happening with the test creation page which now allows for test steps to be added and removed. Test creation functionality has also been implemented allowing users to use ATOM to generate the XML files that the tests are formatted in. The home page is close to having its final look and has been linked with the test creation page. The report history page has also been completed. More on the backend, we are working on parameterization which will allow for user inputs to be fed into the testing scripts for versatility of scripts. A method for detecting parameters before a script is run to aid in test creation. Additionally, we can now pass parameters in using an instance of powershell instead of having to go through the command line as was the previous method. Looking forward, QRB2 is coming up and is the last big checkpoint before FDR! We are also hoping to get feedback from test engineers this coming week and obtain a System Usability Score for ATOM.