Testing

Zephyr has an extensive testing infrastructure. The CI that tests every pull request in the GitHub repository uses this test infrastructure to run build tests and unit tests. The main framework for that is the Zephyr Test Framework (ZTest). Twister is a test runner that collects all tests and platforms, composes them into test runs and generates reports after a completed test run.

The workshop shows how to test the app application with ZTest. ZTest can be used to test on several levels (unit-, integration- and E2E-tests). The main test platform for all those levels is native_sim. Since there is no hardware dependency and native_sim runs on any Linux Host it can easily be used to create a CI pipeline.

For tests that must run on hardware, frameworks like pytest or Robot can be configured to work with Twister and Zephyr’s Shell Subsystem.

This workshop demonstrates Component Testing with ZTest, based on ZBus messages. This allows testing components in an isolated fashion, and validates their interface to other components (ZBus messages).

ZTest also supports E2E-testing in a simulated environment by utilizing emulators. This workshop showcases emulators in sample 05_sensor where a TI HDC1010 Temperature sensor is emulated. ZTest can connect with those emulators (button, led, sensor) and validate the behavior of the whole application.

All of those levels have their place and the native_sim environment in Zephyr with its many tools like test frameworks, test runner, emulators and simulators (BSim) can greatly accelerate product development.

Additional Resources

Zephyr Documentation:

Links to source code from the zephyr-workshop repo