Automated Testing of Appliances: How It's Made

Nowadays, there is a lot of information about automated testing for mobile platforms, web, and even desktop applications in the public domain. Moreover, there are lot of frameworks, methodologies, and approaches to automation. Take and use them.

Our task, however, was to automate functional testing of software and hardware suites, server and network equipment. In other words, to dive into those areas where containers and virtual machines are powerless, and proven methods are not applicable.

In this talk, I will explain why automated hardware testing is a challenging task, what problems we had to face, how we resolved (or are still resolving) them, and why we had to write our own framework and design our own equipment for automated testing.