When Is the Right Time to Automate Testing for Embedded Systems Development?
December 30, 2024
Blog
Automation holds the promise of efficiency, scalability, and consistency, particularly automated testing in embedded systems development. You’re gonna want to automate. But when’s the right time?
Rushing to automate without the right preparation or at the right time often leads to wasted costs, unnecessary delays, and inflexible systems.
Let’s explore the pitfalls of premature automation, how to identify the right moment and the tools that help ensure automation succeeds.
Automating Too Soon Can Hurt Your Progress
While automation offers undeniable benefits, jumping in too early can derail your development process. Automation is a tool that magnifies the efficiency—or inefficiency—of your workflows. If those workflows aren’t yet mature, automation can exacerbate existing problems.
Complexity of Hardware Integration
Embedded systems are usually tightly coupled with specific hardware components, making testing inherently complex. Many times, the production hardware isn’t available until later in the development process. Automating testing too soon in your process may fail to account for the nuances of real hardware integration. Premature automation may miss critical issues that arise from these complexities, leaving you with a false sense of confidence in your system's reliability. Instead of streamlining development, this can lead to repeated debugging cycles, rework, and frustration for the team.
Wasted Resources
Building and maintaining automation systems require investment in time, tools, and expertise. If your testing processes, hardware, and software are still evolving, you may find yourself constantly reworking automation scripts, or even frameworks, which wastes both time and budget.
Loss of Flexibility
Automating immature processes locks you into workflows that may not be optimized. When changes inevitably occur, you’ll face the burden of revising your automation frameworks to keep up.
Slowing Down Development
Ironically, early automation can hinder progress. Instead of improving workflows, your team may spend valuable time troubleshooting automation tools rather than developing and testing the product itself. Troubleshooting automation is inevitable, but it’s wasted time and slows down progress if you’re troubleshooting automation that eventually won’t be applicable.
The Right Time to Automate
Automated testing should be introduced as an accelerator—not as an early development step. To achieve this, you must first establish a stable, repeatable, and optimized manual testing process. Here are three ways to know it’s the right time to automate.
When You’ve Perfected a Process with People
The best and most efficient method to perfect the process is with your people. Your people are your most important resource. Let them do their thing. Once you’ve done so, then you can dive in with automation.
When You Have Something to Automate
Maybe that sounds simplistic, but it's also truth. Processes that require frequent repetition, such as unit tests and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) regression tests are prime candidates for automation. If a task must be performed the same way dozens or hundreds of times, automation saves time and ensures consistency.
When You’re Ready to Ramp and Scale
Scaling a development team—whether it’s adding new members, increasing production, or supporting multiple hardware versions—inevitably introduces more complexity. Automation becomes essential at this stage to handle repetitive, time-sensitive tasks like regression testing and nightly builds. These tasks, if left manual, can overwhelm teams and slow down releases. You may be able to deliver a hundred of your products with your current process, but can you deliver a million?
Automate the Process, Not the Problem
Effective automation starts with people. The strength of your testing process lies in human insight — how your team identifies critical test scenarios, organizes workflows, and executes tests. Automation should amplify this work, not replace it.
The best automation enhances each person’s contribution to the team and the product.
- Automate testing with the tools, equipment, and procedures that your people already use.
- Automate in place.
- Optimize before you automate.
- Don’t introduce complexity where it doesn’t need to be just for automation purposes.
Best Practices for Successful Automated Testing
When you’re ready to automate, here are some strategies to ensure your efforts deliver meaningful results:
Start Small
Automate low-complexity tasks first, such as unit tests, HiL smoke tests, and nightly regression runs. Building momentum with early wins helps build trust in the process and a solid foundation for more complexity over time.
Prioritize Integration Testing
For embedded systems, HiL integration testing is vital. Automate tests that validate how hardware and software interact to ensure full system functionality.
Embrace Continuous Integration (CI)
Integrate automation into your CI pipeline. Every pull request should trigger automated builds and tests, providing immediate feedback to developers.
Automate Results Publication
Automating all the tests is useless unless your people can see the results. Part of your test automation needs to be the automation of the publication of the results. Also, ensure these results are easy to understand. Publish pass/fail, graphs, and other visually simple means of consumption.
Choosing the Right Tool: The Person in the Lab
To choose the right time and methodology to automate your HiL testing, you must have a tool that supports the replication and enhancement of the work done by your people.
The EmbedScale Automated Test Framework stands in for the person in the lab. It does what your people do — manages the devices under test (DUT) farm, executes test scripts, controls mechanisms and acquisition equipment, and collects results. All with the same tools and procedures that your people already use. EmbedScale automates the deployment of test firmware, coordinates test execution across hardware setups, and ensures results are accurate and consistent.
What makes EmbedScale a game-changer is its ability to integrate seamlessly with existing workflows. It doesn’t require teams to reinvent the wheel; instead, it builds on existing processes, enabling automation when those processes are ready. This thoughtful approach ensures that automation happens at the right time, scaling efficiently without introducing rigidity or waste.
By reducing manual intervention, EmbedScale allows teams to focus on refining their overall system, ensuring the process drives the automation—not the other way around.
Conclusion
The decision to automate testing in embedded systems development is about timing and readiness. Premature automation wastes resources and locks teams into inefficient workflows. By focusing on scalability, repeatability, and proven manual processes, you can ensure automation delivers its promised benefits.
Tools like the EmbedScale Automated Test Framework help you automate the right process at the right time, seamlessly integrating with established workflows and amplifying your team’s productivity. Start with people and processes, refine them, and let automation accelerate your success.
Done right, automation transforms your embedded development process into a streamlined, scalable powerhouse.
John Macdonald is a Co-Founder at 4TLAS. 4TLAS specializes in helping embedded systems teams automate, integrate, accelerate, and scale their development. John is a 30-year veteran in the semiconductor and embedded industries, having experience in hardware, software, and systems development, as well as senior leadership of embedded product development teams. For the last several years, he has focused on merging DevOps concepts with customizations for the embedded world.
