Development of HIL test systems for software testing

For a customer who develops and manufactures industrial products, Infotiv has designed, developed and deployed a HIL (Hardware-In-the-Loop) test system intended for automated testing of software in an embedded system. The delivery also included building automated test cases from previously manual test cases, and integrating the automated tests into a flow for Continuous Integration.

The customer ordered the system with the purpose of being able to test software deliveries earlier in the development projects but also to be able to perform regression tests in an efficient way. Important requirements from the customer were that the test cases with results should be traceable to software version, and that the solution should be scalable to handle additional controllers or variants.

Infotiv's solution is based on the National Instruments PXI platform and includes modules for real-time execution, FPGA, relay cards, analog I/O, digital I/O and CANopen. To control and configure the system, the VeriStand software from National Instruments is used. In addition, the existing test executive (built in LabVIEW) was modified to integrate with VeriStand.

In the Continuous Integration flow, Jenkins is used to build the software to be tested. Infotiv's solution integrated the test system into the flow through connections between Jenkins, the test executive and VeriStand. The flow could thus be extended to automatically start test suites and to report results after changes were made to the software to be tested. New software was built and tested every night in order to present results to the development team the following morning.