Enabling development of high quality low-level systems in a reliable manner through fully automated hardware testing

Lucas Baschinski (Cyberus Technology GmbH)

In this talk, we introduce Cidoka - our software engineering philosophy and
methodology, as well as SoTest - our in-house automated hardware testing
framework. We demonstrate the necessity of both to deliver high quality
low-level systems in a reliable manner.

As a company, Cyberus Technology set the goal to create reliable software with
the highest possible quality. Working on low-level software products requires
testing on real hardware, which is a challenging task. In traditional settings
this is achieved through QA departments, asynchronous to the development
process. Cidoka aims to shift left these efforts to the developer, to make
hardware testing an integral part of the coding phase. One key aspect to
achieve this is our testing framework SoTest. It enables automated, real-time,
remote, and reproducible on-hardware testing synchronous to the development
process. By design, no change to the product is accepted without successfully
completing full-stack testing. Through mandatory Continuous Integration, the
product is always kept in a verifiably regression-free, deployable state.