Level Up Your Embedded Testing Game - Christian Schlotter, ZEISS & Tobias Kästner, inovex

Level Up Your Embedded Testing Game: FRETish, Robot, and Twister: A Dream Team - Christian Schlotter, ZEISS & Tobias Kästner, inovex
Additional author: Stefan Kraus, Senior Software Engineer, UL SIS
Developing embedded software for regulated environments like medical devices presents unique challenges. Crucially, we need to document how the software design fulfills stated product requirements. While functional testing remains dominant for verifying functional suitability, deriving and maintaining effective test suites can quickly become cumbersome.
This talk explores a novel approach to this longstanding problem. We leverage NASA's FRETish method for formally capturing requirements. We will talk about how the formal nature of FRETish requirements allows for automatic test case generation leveraging the Robot Framework. The latter was specifically chosen as it is partially supported by Zephyr's test harness today and allows to utilize twister for automated test execution of these test suites on real hardware. This method has the potential to streamline testing, offering benefits such as reduced time and maintenance efforts as well as accurate coverage metrics from very early on in the project's lifecycle.
We'll discuss our progress in implementing this approach, the challenges we encountered, and potential solutions for deeper integration with the Zephyr project.