Automated HIL(Hardware in the Loop) Test Processes

Komathi Sundaram - Watch Now - EOC 2025 - Duration: 28:46

Komathi Sundaram

Abstract Test Your Knowledge Questions & Comments (5)

This talk will focus on how end-to-end automation of Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) test processes accelerates developer feedback, ensures more robust development pipelines, and streamlines release cycles.

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According to Komathi Sundaram, what is the core advantage of an automated HIL test process when integrated into CI?

A It eliminates the need for any manual testing or human oversight of HIL benches.

B It provides quick, CI-integrated feedback on pull requests while optimizing bench usage and multiplying test engineers' impact.

C It guarantees that benches will never fail and removes the need for recovery scripts.

D It primarily increases headcount by requiring more test engineers to run automated scripts.

E It replaces regression testing with only long-duration soak tests to find rare hardware bugs.

What configuration does Komathi recommend for PR-triggered HIL tests to gate developer merges effectively?

A Run full system-level regression and soak tests that take multiple hours for every PR to ensure nothing breaks.

B Require manual bench allocation and human approval before any PR test can run.

C Use a fast smoke/sanity test suite that completes within about 15–30 minutes to catch major breakages before merging.

D Only run tests on the release branch and allow PRs to be merged without HIL checks to speed development.

E Schedule every PR to wait for a nightly regression run instead of running immediate PR checks.

What role does Komathi recommend for a dedicated HIL bench services team in a robust automated HIL CI system?

A They are unnecessary because automation and CI will keep benches healthy without human intervention.

B They monitor bench health dashboards, recover or bring up benches when needed, and ensure efficient bench sharing across teams.

C They should permanently reserve the best benches for manual debugging and prevent CI from using them.

D They should only buy more benches whenever any test fails to avoid troubleshooting existing benches.

E They should disable logging and dashboards to reduce noise and let developers discover bench issues by chance.

Which approach does Komathi suggest to prevent automated HIL workflows from becoming bottlenecks and benches from being hogged?

A Require every PR to run the complete release test suite on the most expensive system bench before merging.

B Unify benches into a shared scheduled CI system, configure priorities for bench sharing, and use appropriate test gates and scheduling for different test types.

C Give manual bench requests absolute priority over CI so developers can always debug immediately.

D Avoid automated recovery scripts and only fix benches manually to ensure careful handling.

E Eliminate night and weekend runs so benches are always free during business hours for any request.

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Upvotes Newest Oldest

xanderhendriks

Score: 0 | 8 months ago | no reply

Great presentation. HIL is such a powerful tool to have in the toolbox.

LeeT

Score: 1 | 9 months ago | 1 reply

As someone with no experience with HIL testing I would have liked to have seen an example presented of an actual HIL test setup. What hardware, software, test benches are used. Could have been for any product.

xanderhendriks

Score: 0 | 8 months ago | no reply

I created a workshop a while back showing how to use CI for an STM32 project. It shows how to build the code in the cloud and how to run a series of tests on it. In Lab 8 it runs through how you can setup a Raspberry Pi as github action runner to execute HIL tests.
You can fork the repo and merge the lab_8 branch into master to see it in action without having to go through all the labs.

glennk

Score: -1 | 9 months ago | no reply

Really nice to see automated HIL get some love! Especially combined with CI! Brilliant!!!

datamstr

Score: 1 | 9 months ago | no reply

Excellent presentation!

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