Test passed, failed, but what about NA?

[Cobravox]

Hi,
We use your tests on a daily base for the company I work for, and we use the certificate to give it to customers after all burnintests are passed.

Some things that would be interesting for computer/assembly companies, are:
- if a test fails, because it isn't present, that it would show 'NA' (not available), cfr. com/usb/network-ports.
- selective options under report information to show only fail, passed or NA or a combination of the three.

We are testing many computers with different hardware and created some base configuration files, but it would be an immens job to make for every configuration, hardware another file.

If a device is not present, because of time-out or other means to check, it would be more interesting to put NA as result. If it is present, but not working 100 %, than it would be FAIL.
So for the reports, we could show/print only PASS- and/or NA and/or FAIL-tested components.

Now, we have to remove all FAIL-items manually for hardware which is not present.

Could that be implemented in a future version, offcourse the result would change, if one of the tests has NA, that on the resulting end it would show PASSED on the screen.

Greets from Belgium!

[Ian (PassMark)]

We will consider some type of improved automation for hardware detection and/or a change in reporting for the next major release of BurnInTest.

I would like to invite anyone else with interest in this type of functionality to post their thoughts about what they would like.

In considering this, it should be noted that automatic detection or re-rating of error levels based on automatic hardware detection or inference from error type could lead to real errors going unnoticed. For example a not uncommon COM port error is that the COM port is not actually visible to Windows (i.e. the Serial port device driver has failed to load), setting this to NA rather than fail may give the user a sense of 'well it has not failed' when in fact it may be that the COM port does not exist on the hardware, or it is faulty. As such, BurnInTest err's on the side of raising a FAIL, rather than a PASS, so that any event such as the one above is at least considered before accepting the system.

Please note that the error level of all BurnInTest errors can be set by the user/company to Information, Warning, Serious or Critical. So, you might want to review these settings for your company, and treat some errors as lower level errors than the default - hence making the review of a FAIL a bit easier.

Also, please note that we currently allow the automatic detection of Hard drives, and will soon allow the automatic detection of CD/DVD drives.

Regards,
Ian

[Comark Corp]

We will consider some type of improved automation for hardware detection and/or a change in reporting for the next major release of BurnInTest.

I would like to invite anyone else with interest in this type of functionality to post their thoughts about what they would like.

In considering this, it should be noted that automatic detection or re-rating of error levels based on automatic hardware detection or inference from error type could lead to real errors going unnoticed. For example a not uncommon COM port error is that the COM port is not actually visible to Windows (i.e. the Serial port device driver has failed to load), setting this to NA rather than fail may give the user a sense of 'well it has not failed' when in fact it may be that the COM port does not exist on the hardware, or it is faulty. As such, BurnInTest err's on the side of raising a FAIL, rather than a PASS, so that any event such as the one above is at least considered before accepting the system.

Please note that the error level of all BurnInTest errors can be set by the user/company to Information, Warning, Serious or Critical. So, you might want to review these settings for your company, and treat some errors as lower level errors than the default - hence making the review of a FAIL a bit easier.

Also, please note that we currently allow the automatic detection of Hard drives, and will soon allow the automatic detection of CD/DVD drives.

Regards,
Ian

For my Company, this would not be a good thing. Every config we have is customized to a certain product line. If a device is missing (Say the COM1 port has been disabled in CMOS setup) We want to flag this as an error, and have the tests halt right away.

My 2 cents worth.