Simulator/Emulator is an instrumental piece of SW/HW useful during a pre-prototype phase. During the pre-prototype phase, all piece of HW/SW is not available but sometimes SW developer needs some basic infrastructure of SW/HW to mimic the near to actual environment of the targeted product. Such a Simulator/Emulator is extremely useful to QA, to perform testing before the actual HW/SW is available. This will enable QA to perform partial testing and identify issues ahead of time. Many times such tools are extremely useful to create multiple instances of setup for development/QA as the actual HW/SW setup is either expensive or not possible to move physically and make it available at multiple locations. In addition to that sometimes Simulator/Emulator will be useful to save time during regression testing as it just mimics the behavior of BlackBox but doesn’t perform the actual process as that piece of SW/HW might not be part of specific testing but is important to provide various input combinations to the DUT.
In agile methodology, many customers are using a unique method where all the modules will be ready from day one but except few, all are simulators (Stub that mimics the behavior). The testsuite will run on all development periodically like a full fledge product. In every phase of development gradually the simulated blocks will be moved out and converted into to actual blocks in a way that in the end all blocks will be converted into real ones. In this type of methodology simulator/emulator plays a key role during the entire development cycle.
Our engineers have experience in working in the hybrid execution model (simulated + real) many times considering the unavailability of HW/SW due to all valid reasons. Our automation engineers are capable to design and develop such a Simulator/Emulator which enables customer for the environment setup flexibility and save significant time to market for the product launch.