•A computer system under
test in the early development stages monitored an ARINC bus and reported statuses. Some of the notifications were considered nuisance
messages because of intial settings.
Some might be related
to a sensor with too narrow a hysteresis, a parameter incorrectly set in the
s/w,
an out of adjustment
gadget, or less likely, an actual defective component.
note: the content of
these reports and the specific systems involved are not included, "dummy
data is used“
•10 reports were generated for each test cycle of the system.
•19 test runs were made under different conditions to ensure
full compliance.
•a USB device is used to copy the text files from the system.
•The 10 reports were copied into Excel
•each report would be sorted in Excel by ATA chapter
•copying and sorting the reports would take an hour.
•after all 10 reports were sorted, the engineer compared them,
looking for common errors.
•It took another 3 hours to compare those 10 sorted reports
•The engineer had 13 hours invested in this analysis for just
ONE test cycle, there were 19.
•The engineer then examined each of the common errors in the
original reports.
•Once he determined the issue, he'd resolve that one and move to
the next.
Analyzing his process and test results, we
determined the plain text files had a consistent format
with an easily spotted
"key field", i.e. the ATA Maintenance Chapter.
The reports had names unique to the product
under test. This info was also in each report.
To protect the original reports and to make
handling the sorts easier,
We copied the
originals with new names from 01.txt to 10.txt, with a "txt" suffix for interoperability.