White Paper

Automated Embedded Testing with Robot Framework and Tinkerforge

Any piece of software must be thoroughly tested before being released on the market, and this holds for the firmware of embedded systems too. But testing these devices revels itself to be trickier than testing other systems. This whitepaper shows how to address these additional challenges by using a dedicated framework to automate the tests.

Automated Embedded Testing

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The challenges with testing embedded systems

Tight coupling of software and hardware, strict critical safety requirements, real-time performance constraints despite of limited computational resources are just some of the characteristics of embedded systems that make testing them at the same time of paramount importance and complicated.

Automating tests using frameworks

Automating the testing phase is considered a best practice in software engineering and preferred over manual testing, because it allows to easily integrate tests in the CI/CD pipeline and makes them less error prone. Especially when applying a white-box approach, automating tests has the great advantage of expanding their coverage and the size of the inspected code.

It is not just convenient, but also easy to automatically test the firmware when adopting dedicated automation frameworks. They provide developers with basic objects to build tests upon, an environment to run the tests themselves and execution reports too. Such frameworks greatly simplify the implementation and maintenance of the automated testing setup.

The solution

Robot Framework + Tinker Forge

This whitepaper presents a solution delivered by Concept Reply to one of its customers for the automatic testing of one of their products upon new firmware releases. The implementation is based on Robot Framework, a keyword-driven automation framework thanks to which it is possible to define the actions to be performed during a test through a composition of human-readable keywords.In order to test both and the hardware and the software at the same time, a setup was created, using some of the hardware modules from the Tinkerforge set, to realize a so-called “hardware in the loop” simulation. During a test it is in this way possible to generate signals for the sensors of the device and monitor the corresponding outputs sent to its actuators. This enables to verify the behaviour of the device in any kind of environmental condition, including safety critical ones.

Customized testing automation

Our experts from Concept Reply can provide advice and assistance when it comes to automating the testing phase in the development of an embedded product. Given our consolidated experience in the development of such systems for IoT applications, and our curiosity for the latest trends in software testing, we can find together the optimal solution tailored to the individual needs of your company.

Perfect support for your project. Let us automate your software testing together.

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I declare that I have read and fully understood the Privacy Notice and I hereby express my consent to the processing of my personal data by Reply SpA for marketing purposes, in particular to receive promotional and commercial communications or information regarding company events or webinars, using automated contact means (e.g. SMS, MMS, fax, email and web applications) or traditional methods (e.g. phone calls and paper mail).

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Concept Reply

Concept Reply is an IoT software developer specializing in the research, development and validation of innovative solutions and supports its customers in the automotive, manufacturing, smart infrastructure and other industries in all matters relating to the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing. The goal is to offer end-to-end solutions along the entire value chain: from the definition of an IoT strategy, through testing and quality assurance, to the implementation of a concrete solution.