Quality Assurance for Renewable Energy Software: How to Do It Right?
Having emerged as an environment-friendly alternative to fossil fuels, renewable energy has grown in significance over the past several decades. The process wasn’t exactly swift, but every technological advancement improved efficiency and optimized costs, making wind, solar, hydroelectric, and geothermal energy, among others, more accessible and widespread.
Nowadays, one of renewable energy’s remaining bottlenecks, the instability of natural energy sources, is being solved with Energy 4.0, which enables the integration of power sources, demand management, and more precise energy distribution. None of this would be possible without software.
Importance of Software for Renewable Energy
From gathering operational data with IIoT systems to weather forecasting with AI-based platforms, software is one of the key tools to ensure no electricity is wasted. Though the concept overall is still pretty raw, and the technologies are being implemented on the go, renewable energy infrastructure already includes multiple solutions that enable better generation:
- Smart Grid Software helps optimize flows and integrate variable energy sources into the grid;
- Energy Management Systems bring a better balance between consumption and distribution;
- AI and ML make production more predictable with maintenance monitoring and weather forecasting;
- Storage Management Platforms are crucial for stabilizing renewable energy supplies and smoothing out intermittency;
- IoT, SCADA, and Analytical Tools help leverage data to optimize and automate energy management processes.
Along with that, other technologies are also being actively integrated, like Blockchain, which is currently used for security, renewable energy certification, and P2P electricity trading. Or Vehicle-to-Grid Systems that allow turning electric vehicles into mobile energy storages.
All of the advancements already brought by Energy 4.0 drastically impact the market, making us less dependent on fossil fuels. On the downside, we have risks connected with active digitization. In an effort to embrace the niche faster, it’s easy to overlook the importance of quality assurance in software, a mistake that may lead to critical system defects.
What to Cover with QA
Energy is a highly regulated industry with quality demands that must be thoroughly followed. Make sure your team is well acquainted with guidelines like ISO 50001, NERC CIP, IEC standards, and other policies depending on the region.
It’s better to consider the regulations before the start of the development process, but compliance testing is also a good option that will allow you to check whether the platform or separate builds you plan to release meet the standards.
Thoroughly consider every aspect of the platform. Energy management is about working with critical infrastructure, where each failure may pose serious risks (public, economic, environmental, etc.), so the software is always expected to be polished in its core features.
Dissect your platform into functional areas and plan the testing process accordingly. Each feature should be supplemented with test cases to document system behavior and potential failure points. Remember compatibility, UI, accessibility, and security to achieve complete functional coverage.
Personnel with different technical backgrounds will use the platform on varying hardware. Compatibility testing should help you ensure smooth performance on a multitude of devices, while UI and usability testing would provide a proper perception. It’s also recommended that the guided tutorials be integrated into the system and reviewed for clarity.
As long as your software is intuitive and understandable on multiple levels, from admins to regular users, proceed to accessibility. Your customers may include people with disabilities, which makes features like screen readers, closed captioning, and voice recognition, among others, crucial for the platform. Acts like the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) and the European Accessibility Act (EAA) also make accessibility testing a must-have.
Security testing is another essential part of your functional coverage, as energy is among the top 5 most targeted industries (according to the 2024 X-Force Threat Intelligence Index by IBM Security). It should be an integral part of the software quality assurance process so you can assess the probability of potential unauthorized access and data breaches and protect sensitive data, including personal information.
Non-functional factors like reliability and performance are also vital, as downtimes and glitches can cause significant disruptions. Reliability means the system is consistently operational. So, the platform needs to be accessible whenever it is required, fault-tolerant to continue to work correctly even in the event of failure, prone to varying real-world conditions like weather changes or grid failures, and scalable so that in the event of the plant expansion, there’s no performance degradation.
Regarding performance, consider resource usage, platform speed, and responsiveness, especially under different workloads and conditions. In renewable energy, systems often process vast amounts of data, so it’s essential to ensure efficient resource usage and low latency during varying loads.
Speaking of data, it should not only be well-protected but also precisely gathered, transferred, and stored. Though it sounds straightforward, all intel is collected in real-time, which increases the chances of system glitches. Accurate data drives stable performance of energy infrastructure, supports thoroughly prepared decision-making, and ensures retention.
The approach to data quality should be well-thought-out and cover all aspects related to data gathering and processing. Set measurable data quality goals and compare how the testing results reflect them in terms of accuracy, reliability, and consistency. Check how the system integrates with any related software and hardware and validate the correct API implementation into the platform.
Test automation can be used to optimize your platform’s quality assurance as well. It’s most impactful for regression testing, as it snowballs into a time-intensive routine when done manually. Regression is required for platform stability, as it’s the way to ensure the existing functionality is intact after each expansion. Automated testing can also bring extra value when you want to simplify the data validation process. This approach may seem expensive initially, but it becomes cost-efficient over time.
How to Make Software QA Easy
It’s not rare to neglect quality assurance when developing software for the sake of cost- and time-saving. However, the price of a mistake in critical infrastructure is much higher. Systems can break down in the most unexpected ways, and efficient testing often requires a specific mindset that is not typical for developers or end-users. Sometimes, a bug or a data discrepancy can become evident over time, ending up in huge expenses aimed to make up for the glitch.
Though hiring software QA professionals is by far not a recruiter’s favourite, there are options like independent testing. Whether the goal is to build a team or expand the existing one, QATestLabe can provide fully managed testing engineers to cover a broad range of processes. No matter the scale of the project, we will plan it, supplement it with extensive documentation, and support it with sharp communication. Contact us if any of the recommendations from the article have not yet been implemented; we can help.
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