Not too long ago, Przemek (sh-em-ek) joined us to lead software automation for mbed. His task is a big one, but he has already made some great strides in developing the next version of our testing framework. I stopped by his desk to chat about how he was getting on, and took a few photos that I thought I might share.

Here is the man himself:

One of our first goals is to make a really solid automated testing solution for platform SDK ports, so we can be confident mbed is running well on all supported platforms. As the number of companies and individuals contributing ports continues to rise, having a well structured and comprehensive test framework will really help us improve the quality over time.

Up until now, we've had various scripts and tests that have done a reasonable job, coupled with some hardware rigs we have built. Things like:

But running the tests and interpreting the results was somewhat manual, and with the growth in hardware platforms, rigs on desks was not going to cut it any more. So Przemek has been starting to put together a next version of our testing framework, to make this much more automated from the software side using things like buildbot:

And some of the tracking for our internal goals - you can see over 100 tests already in place, of which 42 are fully automated.

Lots more to do here, but the software side is just half of the problem. Luckily, this all coincides with us moving in to much bigger offices, so we've now also allocated a whole wall for us to build a really comprehensive hardware test-farm for these platforms:

First up is ordering some racking!

There is a long way to go, but thought you might be interested to see the startings of this work. If you are interested in this area and maybe helping out somehow, please feel free to comment below or contact Przemek Wirkus directly.