RoboCon 2024

Microwave backhaul is a method used in telecommunications to transmit data, voice and other signals through radio frequencies. Our portfolio includes hardware units with diverse functionalities that can be flexibly configured to create various network/radio topologies. In addition to this, all units support the following user access interfaces: webct (web page), snmp and ongoing integration of netconf, REST and cli. Testing should cover frontend, backend, and end-to-end functionalities for each hardware unit, spanning all interfaces and multiple topological setups. In order to mitigate these complexity issues, we introduced an approach to overload keywords with custom python annotations. In this talk, we'll explore hardware testing challenges as well as our framework structure.
The most significant principles in our framework are:

• One Keyword Approach
Every action on our product is associated with a specific keyword that will apply it to the access interface given as input argument. Since multi-interfaces are supported, it is ensured that each keyword will return consistent outputs.

• Test Reusability Across Interfaces
By extending the above principle from keyword-level to testcase-level, we achieve test uniformity across interfaces, saving development time and resources otherwise spent on separate test case creation.

• Test Adaptability Based on Network Topology
Product functionality should be tested across different hardware units and different network topologies. Tests designed for one network topology can be adjusted to similar topologies. The system-under-test is described in a Python class variable file with each test dynamically loading network parameters from this file during runtime. Changing the python file, reuses the test to another hw unit and topology.

• User Experience Simplification and Code Readability
To enhance user focus on keyword-driven actions, common interface actions are hidden by adding interface-related parameters as function arguments. Python decorators facilitate these principles by mapping system-dependent variables to their values and executing required actions for each interface.

• Extendable to new interfaces

Support for new user interfaces can be incorporated just by implementing the interface python functions and due to one-keyword approach and test adaptability, no new tests need to be re-written to test existing functionality!