HIL Test Automation with Continuous Integration
Automated testing
The PROTOS miniHIL enables easy automation of hardware in the loop testing for Continuous Integration.
Continuous Integration with miniHIL
The miniHIL provides a hardware and software platform for HIL tests that can be performed in an automated manner. Thus, an automated pipeline can be created on a Continuous Integration server for different types of tests, such as:
- Smoke test
- integration test
- acceptance or system test
- release test
These tests can continuously accompany embedded software development from the beginning and provide consistent feedback on quality. This can be combined with feature and requirement traceability.
Test setup Continuous Integration
The miniHIL board is connected to the server via USB or Ethernet. In addition, two USB debug adapters are required to flash the evaluation board and the miniHIL test system (e.g. ST-Link or J-Link).
The picture shows the miniHIL test setup connected to a laptop with local Jenkins instance.
A typical sequence of an automated test consists of compiling, flashing and test execution. All sub steps are simple command line calls that can be assembled into a test pipeline using a Continuous Integration solution such as Jenkins or Bamboo. The accompanying graphic is a visualization from the Jenkins Blue Ocean plugin.
The reporting of the test results can be done with the integrated functionality or an existing plugin of the Continuous Integration solution.
MiniHIL also provides a generated report that compares the test results with the previously assigned requirements or features, see Feature and Requirement Traceability.
Automated testing offers many advantages.
