Open Source Summit Europe 2024

Level Up Your Embedded Testing Game: FRETish, Robot, and Twister: A Dream Team

Vortrag (EN) von Dr. Tobias Kästner (inovex GmbH) und Christian Schlotter (Carl Zeiss Meditec AG) auf dem Open Source Summit Europe 2024

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.

About the speaker:
A physicist by training, Tobias Kästner has always been fascinated by the intersection of the physical with the digital world. His professional career started as a SW team lead in a medical device start-up and since then he has served a couple of roles for 15+ years in this industry. At inovex, he serves as a solution architect for the IoT in general and medical devices in particular. He is also one of the maintainers of the Bridle project, an effort to publish integration patterns of FOSS into embedded devices and to promote the adoption of FOSS in safety regulated environments.