Today’s IEC 61850 solution providers and product vendors face a triple challenge. They must optimize the quality of increasingly complex protection and automation systems – and to do so more quickly and cost-effectively than ever before – in order to deliver reliable systems that yield a high return-on-investment and provide a competitive advantage.

Time and time again, IEC 61850 solution providers and product vendors have successfully demonstrated the power automated functional testing to thoroughly test, rapidly develop and reduce the cost of delivering high-quality/reliable protection and automation applications. Yet, 85% of those vendors that attempted comprehensive functional testing fail. This high failure rate is symptomatic of a mindset that views comprehensive functional testing as a quick, turnkey solution.

There is no question that functional test automation can allow organizations to produce higher-quality products while leveraging existing resources. However successful organizations realize that a comprehensive functional testing solution is only one part of the answer. They must make an investment in planning a quality-driving development process, training quality-related personnel and developing the right test framework.

This technical brochure provides practical insight into the lessons learned by those that have successfully followed the guidelines described. It answers questions such as: 

To be more specific, this brochure builds on the concept of black-box testing which is a quality assurance process used to verify that an application’s functionality works accurately, reliably, predictably and securely. Functional testing can involve either manual or automated methods. Either way, it entails a series of tests that emulate the interaction between IEC 61850 intelligent electronic devices and the application in order to verify whether or not the application does what it was designed to do.

As describe in this brochure, the comprehensive approach uses the Unified Modeling Language and Use Cases to describe the applications from a user point of view. Failure Mode and Effects Analysis augmented with Hazard and Operability Analysis as defined by IEC are recommended as suitable tools to list the possible faults on components, logical nodes and functions to ensure complete test coverage. Such an approach delivers the long term advantages of reliability, predictability and consistency, and productivity that shorten test cycles and increase product quality.

Collectively, these advantages enable quality assurance to accurately assess quality levels, make sound decisions regarding release readiness and minimize deployment risk