Dimensioning Wireless Embedded Test Environments to Support Continuous Integration

Abstract

Software development and testing is a complex process involving skilled people and infrastructure. A mix of evolving organizational practices, development practices and infrastructure contribute to the efficiency of the overall process, which is relatively well understood for general-purpose development. The development of wireless firmware and its testing in a real environment, however, is notably more challenging because the code needs to be compiled, uploaded and tested on target embedded hardware instead of a general-purpose computer. This requires purposefully developed testing infrastructure that needs to be optimally dimensioned to satisfy the needs of the development team. In this paper, we propose a capacity dimensioning of the supporting infrastructure illustrated in a reference case study. In particular, our capacity dimensioning simulator shows that for a team of 10 developers, only 1–2 parallel embedded test environments are needed to ensure test completion in less than 10 minutes in 95 % of the cases.