Test Data Management Software for Small/Medium Buisness?

[jfseneca]

Hey all,

Try to use the forum as a last resort; my google fu is lacking on this one. Appreciate any advice.

I work as the lead technician for a small/medium business. We've grown rapidly, bringing on more tools and personnell but our structure is lacking. One glaring hole is how we take & save test data. it's all over the place, in random folders in employee's computers/the cloud/the internal server share. Would like advice on what software is out there that's off the shelf.

I say "small/medium" buisness because while we're firmly midsize, we consider ourselves a software company first. So there are very few people doing electronics work or testing.  Which makes this both a harder sell (the number of people who would actually use this software is in the tens, not hundreds so the cost may not be justifiable) but also it's important to lay the foundation now (we're hiring more electircal engineers and taking on more complex electronics projects). Considering ourselves a software company foremost, we do have several well known industry standard on premises software development tools and dev-ops teams to support those tools. SO that being said, we can afford something for electronics testing.

For me, I'm new to the industry so I don't know what's out there. A lot of tools seem geared toward factory management or software development. We (I've) been struggling the past year to properly organize data on our next generation product. The excel spreadsheets are becoming more and more cumbersome to maintain and develop. And as lead, I should be handing off more work, but without structure, it's hard to hand the work off so I end up doing a lot myself.

I've looked into Access, but to be honest I dont think I have it in me to make a custom thing right now. Personally, a little burnt out. Not to mention, would have been ideal if Access DBs could be hosted on Microsoft Sharepoint (we use Sharepoint and the rest of the MS suite heavily) but that doesnt seem to be the case.

Looking through this forum, someone mentioned WATS (https://wats.com/price-and-compare/) and this seems like it has most of what I want. But interested in any alternatives as I dont want to put all my eggs in one basket. Would have been ideal (secondarily to Access) if Keysight, Tektronix, or R&S offered some sort of on-prem database tool but I dont think they do (please correct me if I'm wrong). Like Tektronix offers TekDrive but that seems to be more of a way to share data than a full management system and R&S seem to be offering  management software geared to specific fields, not to the totality of electronics engineering. Most likely going to schedule a demo for WATS this week or next week.

This is what I'm looking for in software:

Would like to link these things Linked in a relational way:
   1. DUT Inventory
      a. DUTs as disparate parts, to assemblies, to combinations of assemblies
      b. Rework performed (R&R components on PCBs, swapping parts on chassis, etc)
      c. Issue Tracker
      d. Assignment to employees
   2. Assets (Measurement Devices & Equipment)
      a. Intelligent equipment tracking (oscilloscopes, spectrum analyzers, DMMs, etc.)
         i. Calibration tracking
      b. "Dumb" equipment tracking (RF loads, cables)
         i. Order information
         ii. VSWR Data, etc
      c. General lab equipment not related to test data (soldering irons, consumables like solder, flux, etc)
   3. Test Data
      a. Place to save…
         i. … raw data
         ii. … Artifacts (excel sheet, pictures,screenshots, config files)
      b. Tests organized into a tree style format (Electronics > Power >Undervoltage Protection, for example)
      c. Analytics/insights/Reporting either with manual scripts or AI
      

Nice to have:
   1. On premises
   2. Separate spaces for different teams
      a. e.g., that team can only see or edit their own DUTs, test data, etc. while management can see/do everything, anywhere
   3. Barcode scanning
   

[JustMeHere]

I'd look into the standard software DevOps stack:
Jenkins (automated or even manual testing) -- It's good at keeping test data
Git or GitHub for tracking issues with code -- History and Blame Feature make it easy to track changes
Jira for tracking Issues -- For tracking issues in general.  It can interface with GitHub.  (I can know in minutes who changed code and why it was changed)
Sonar for code quality checks -- Finds bugs by just analyzing code

All of the product above can interface with each other:  Some checks in code to GitHub, Jenkins sees this and executes automated tests, Sonar is called by Jenkins during the tests.  Jira watches GitHub for changes and associates them with issues.

Never had any thing to do with asset tracking so can't recommend much there.  Barcode scanners can act like keyboards.  In other words, put the cursor in the field and scan the barcode.  Then if it's acting like a keyboard, it will fill in the field.

[SmallCog]

  Barcode scanners can act like keyboards.  In other words, put the cursor in the field and scan the barcode.  Then if it's acting like a keyboard, it will fill in the field.

Some (perhaps many but not all) can be configured with a "follow up" keystroke after a barcode scan

Look for one where this is configurable so that you can have it do "enter" or "tab" or "keystroke right" or whatever is appropriate for your circumstances.

I can't help with much else, beyond the fact that my employer had something bespoke built because the parent/child relationships for assets and sub assemblies within assets just didn't jive well with everything else they looked at.

We're only tracking assets, purchase history, documentation, and calibrations though with our database not development work in that environment.

[jfseneca]

Hey JustMeHere,

Thanks for the reply; I think Iwasnt clear in my message though. While we consider ourselves a software company first, we actually develop hardware & have electrical engineers to run our stuff on. We actually use all of those tools you mention in your post on the software side of things except for sonar. But my problem is, as an electronics technician, I dont have anything like that on the electrical testing side of things.

I did raise using Jira for hardware issues, extending it for more than just software tickets, but got shot down for some weird reason. But, Jira alone wouldn't be enough anyway to do the full suite of what im envisioning, which is the asset management & test database, etc.

best,

[JustMeHere]

I mentioned Jenkins because it's real good at saving test data and it can be reviewed.  You just need your test harness to output data in a format Jenkins can work with.  Jenkins will archive all of the things it used for testing and these can be examined later.  Beware that it can take a lot of disk to do this, but you will run into this problem no matter what you do.

DO NOT USE MS ACCESS for anything other than learning DBs.  And still then DO NOT USE MS ACCESS.  Learn with a real DB instead.

MySQL (or Maria DB), Oracle XE, or SQL Server Lite is the way to go.  These all offer point-in-time data recovery given you are running backups correctly.  If you don't want write programs to access the data, then look WYSIWYG tools that can sit in front of them.  This one looks interesting on the surface: https://www.wysiwygwebbuilder.com/mysqlcrud.html

Excel is a bad way to run a business.  It's good for actual math accounting and things where you can take advantage of the formulas, but its horrible for a data store and  presentation tool.  A database is far more appropriate.  Spreadsheets are hard for more than one person to work on at a time (though some of the SharePoint like tools do allow concurrent update).  Also the backup advantage of a real DB beats spreadsheets.

I've never used it, but a quick look at Jira Asset & Configuration Management looks promising: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/service-management/features/asset-and-configuration-management

With all Jira, go with the cloud.  This way you don't have to deal with backing up data and don't have to constantly keep installing update.  I've used both and the Cloud option is by far easier to manage over time.

Google "barcode scanner keyboard emulation"

Not sure what you are doing in a hardware test so can't offer too much on how to automate it.  Designing the PCB so it can easily be plugged into some type of test harness can help.  Dave talks about this:   

[Jeroen3]

I'm interested what you end up with. We have too many swiss army tools here making life hard.