Westermo has a strong commitment to developing our own industrial data communications solutions and hence invest considerable resources in our research and development department. Last year over 14% of turnover was committed to R&D allowing us to forge strong relationships with leading chip manufacturers and to continue the development of our market leading switch operating systems WeOS.

With reliability so critical in our key markets huge strides have been taken in enhance product validation. 24 hour automated testing is carried out on WeOS as well as regression testing to ensure backwards compatibility to older Westermo platforms.

Having a range of networking devices powered by the same software, WeOS, and unique testing processes developed and performed at the company’s testing facilities in Sweden gives Westermo a major advantage over other manufacturers.

This has allowed Westermo to create a specific test framework for WeOS, which enables all resources to be concentrated on that software. The test framework has been developed over many years and is now in daily operation within Westermo's software testing laboratory. When features and functionality is added to the WeOS software, new automated tests are developed and these are executed every day, resulting in millions of completed tests.

The extensive software testing processes have been developed to identify any possible quality issues, which will reduce the risk to absolute minimum ofreleasing software with any quality issues to the market.

Test framework example

To achieve maximum authenticity, all tests are performed on the final product configured as it would if it was installed in a real a customer application.

For example, a test of a firewall may consist of three products. The outside node (router 1) trying to communicate through the firewall, the firewall node (router 2) blocking thecommunication, and the inside node (router 3) which is being protected. The test framework will first configure the nodesand then hand over control to the test case for execution.

In this test case there might be 4 steps: 

• Ensure that the outside can reach the inside
• Configure the firewall rules
• Ensure that the outside no longer reaches the inside
• Clean up used resources and terminate gracefully