If you stumbled across this journal entry but haven't read our testing case, please do so now because it provides the necessary background information.

Link to our continuous hardware-in-the-loop case study

Our overarching goal was to incorporate hardware in the loop (HIL) testing into our continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, but there was no existing solution to manage testing hardware and map virtual machines to it in a dynamic fashion.

#Thus, Grizzly was born, and its job is to fill this role.

#But what exactly does Grizzly do?

Grizzly receives a test job configuration from Jenkins, detailing the exact software and hardware requirements this test job has. Grizzly next queries a database that contains all test benches for any that fulfill the hardware requirements. Should an available test bench be found, Grizzly will reserve it.

Grizzly then finds and starts a virtual machine image that contains the necessary software and assigns the reserved test bench hardware to it. If a suitable test bench exists but is not available, Grizzly will queue the execution request for when the test bench becomes available.

Lastly, if no test bench exists to fulfill the hardware requirements or no virtual machine image exists to fulfill the software requirements then Grizzly will return an error to Jenkins.

Once the testing node is fully configured Grizzly sends the node details back to Jenkins, which can then begin test job execution. Jenkins notifies Grizzly upon test job execution completion. Grizzly will then shut down the VM and make the test bench available again for further job executions.

#Benefits

With Grizzly we are able to move away from having multiple boutique testing machines, all with every piece of software that could be necessary for a test job. We can now use virtual machine images which only have the required software for the job at hand, and nothing more

In moving away from fully-equipped testing machines, we can reduce the number of software licenses we have to own to use the software, as not every virtual machine will potentially require all software licenses

Testing hardware on test benches can now be used OS-independently, instead of being directly hooked up to a specific testing machine they can be coupled with any existing virtual machine

We no longer need every test bench to contain every piece of hardware for testing, as we can connect a single virtual machine to different test benches

Tests are now always executed from a known and defined OS state

#What's next?

Grizzly will optimize the test job execution order based on parameters such as assigned priority, job duration, total software requirements, and total hardware requirements. This will decrease test job idle times and improve test bench utilization.

Grizzly will provide configurable, reservable jobs where a user can define the hardware and software they need, and Grizzly will give that user a virtual machine with connected test hardware to use for any purpose. When the user is done the virtual machine is destroyed.

Introducing Grizzly