WASHINGTON — Tobyhanna Army Depot IT specialists looking to reduce costs and manual tasks have developed a functional automation program for testing the Tactical Ground Reporting (TIGR) system.
TIGR is a virtual simulation that allows soldiers to digitally capture, report and retrieve patrol data in relation to common incidents, village leaders and residents. The automated testing of TIGR seeks to decrease test time from eight hours down to only 30 minutes, saving Tobyhanna 30 hours of labor in the course of a month.
“The efficiencies gained will improve Army readiness allowing for shorter timelines to mitigate cyber vulnerabilities in the field,” said Donna Askew, chief of the Cyber Security Services Division of Tobyhanna‘s Production Engineering Directorate. Prior to testing automation, it would take two employees four hours each to verify the functional testing of the TIGR program.
Brian Medwetz, an IT specialist at Tobyhanna, said “the automated process will never miss steps or mistype something or click and drag the wrong items onto the page. It may take 30 minutes to run but it only takes a mouse click to start, then the employee could focus on something else. Hopefully, in the future there will be a web interface where the quality assurance specialist can log in from their computer to monitor and sign off on the test.”
Tobyhanna Army Depot is the Department of Defense’s leading provider of C4ISR systems, providing overhaul and logistics support from radio and software to joint threat emitters and radars for the Army, Air Force, Marine Corps and a portion of the Navy. Tobyhanna seeks to provide tech and material applicable to all military branches in order to increase interoperability with one another.
C4ISRNET reported that Tobyhanna’s previous experience with automation came in the form of automated systems conducting software tests in less than an hour, allowing the systems to be released to the Software Engineering Center the same day. For both forms of software automation, Tobyhanna hopes to both improve war-fighter readiness, remove the burden from engineers and save customers and employees significant amounts of money and time.
