Firmware QA Scaling for Innominate

In 2014, Innominate embarked on a major extension of its security product portfolio. The company planned to introduce a new generation of appliances that would make remote service management more secure and convenient, including scenarios involving cloud-based operation.

This expansion placed additional demands on firmware quality assurance. The mature firmware at the heart of the mGuard family had to support an increasing variety of devices, configuration combinations, network environments, and practical usage scenarios without compromising product quality.

The internal QA department therefore needed to increase QA capacity while making the validation process easier to scale across several development projects. Simply adding more QA resources was not enough: Innominate also needed consistent testing practices that could accommodate the growing complexity of its product portfolio.

At the same time, release schedules left little room for lengthy process changes. The company was looking for an external engineering partner with strong firmware QA and networking expertise that could join ongoing R&D activities quickly, provide additional specialists, and improve the efficiency of existing QA workflows.

SaM Solutions joined the project as an independent software quality assurance partner. The company brought extensive experience in developing and validating firmware for Linux-based network appliances.

The cooperation focused on applying high technical standards, reducing QA cycles, and introducing measurable quality indicators for appliance firmware.

Common QA standards and processes

SaM Solutions worked with Innominate to establish shared approaches to test plans, definitions, and reporting across several R&D projects.

The team also aligned workflows and procedures for handling identified issues with the processes used by Innominate’s R&D teams. This provided a common framework for QA activities across multiple projects.

Virtual testing environment

SaM Solutions created a virtual test lab that could be configured according to the needs of individual scenarios.

Quality engineers could prepare different environments with combinations of firmware versions, system configurations, and network topologies. The required environment could be created with a mouse click.

Manual and automated firmware testing

The team prepared test definitions for ongoing product releases and performed both manual and automated checks.

These activities provided Innominate with additional QA capacity for validating firmware as the company’s product range continued to expand.

Performance and stress testing

SaM Solutions also carried out performance and stress validation for multiple devices.

For this purpose, the team developed an automated cluster-based test suite. It supported virtually unlimited N:M network connection setups and enabled network traffic generation and monitoring during testing.

The cooperation developed into a lasting business relationship between Innominate and SaM Solutions.

With SaM Solutions supporting its quality assurance activities, Innominate gained greater transparency and measurability of its testing processes together with reliable QA execution.

The cooperation also helped the company significantly improve testing timeframes, reduce the effort required for testing, and maintain consistently high quality of the firmware at the core of its products.

These improvements supported Innominate’s strategy of rapidly extending its product family with next-generation security appliances while preserving its focus on innovation and product quality.