Since its inception, Thread Group's member companies have collectively invested thousands of hours to create a networking protocol specification with exciting capabilities that will enable a new era of products for the connected home. The specification, however, is just the first part of the equation for enabling new technology into the market; thousands more hours have been invested to prepare a rigorous certification program to ensure that Thread products connect effortlessly and securely.
Let's dive deeper into what needs to be considered for Thread product certification:
It takes a village
A key strength of industry alliances is the company collaboration, which yields far more innovative and competitive technology solutions than any single entity can produce. While the collaborative process precisely defines the critical "nuts and bolts" and restricts implementations where necessary to make a technology function correctly, it also intentionally provides degrees of freedom in appropriate areas where member companies can innovate and create products that have unique value. It is within those areas of freedom that human nature - differences in interpretation and prioritization between members - creates the possibility of incompatibility between products. Even amongst products using (and tested for) the same application layer, incompatibilities in a networking layer such as Thread can lurk undetected until the right combination of factors - different vendor stack, network topology, network conditions etc.- combine to push a device into a code path that does not end up as a happy place. Thread testing is designed to ensure that Thread-certified devices will get along happily together.
31 flavors of testing
As with ice cream, there are many flavors of product testing. Regulatory testing is legally mandated and safety-oriented, necessary to sell a product in a market.. Conformance tests are behavioral checks, required by administering organizations for inclusion in various ecosystems. Performance tests may be voluntary but are often necessary for a company to prove that a product is market-competitive. Many other types of testing exist. Thread product certification combines two facets - conformance testing for validating that a device correctly implements the "nuts and bolts" of Thread, and - the magic nugget - interoperability testing for verifying that a device can interact successfully with other Thread devices across the areas of freedom within the Thread specification.
Interoperability - It's not about you
During your school days, when you wanted to do something that pushed the envelope, a parent may have said "it's not you I worry about - it's all those other [students, drivers, people, etc.]." For product manufacturers, interoperability testing is critical for addressing the same concern. Manufacturers are very good at testing their own devices thoroughly within their own environment, but the ability to test their device against the sea of other manufacturers' devices is a tightrope between coverage and cost effectiveness. In a perfect world, a new device would be tested exhaustively and repeatedly against every other Thread device on the market. Thread certification aims to provide substantially similar coverage to its members within reasonable cost and time.
Thread certification - making it real
From its inception, Thread Group has held a rigorous testing and certification program as a cornerstone of delivering products that connect effortlessly and securely. To achieve this, Thread built an automated test platform, comprised of market-leading Thread network stacks, executing a test suite that has been vetted for coverage by Thread experts. To ensure quality and integrity throughout the certification process, global, 3rd-party, ISO-compliant lab networks test the devices. For real-world applicability, devices are tested in their go-to-market state with production firmware. Interoperability coverage will be continually expanded through the addition of other Thread stacks to the test platform as the ecosystem grows.
Developers, retailers and consumers alike can feel confident that solutions featuring the Thread Certified Component or Built on Thread mark provide a solid,secure networking foundation to usher in a new era of connected products.