Design and Implementation of a Test Framework

Agilent Technologies is one of the leading manufacturers of test and measurement equipment. At the moment the High Speed Digital Test division is developing a new Pulse- and Pattern generator. In order to improve the quality of the firmware development process, the firmware should be automatically tested. This will help find errors faster and identify side effects of any changes in the source code.
For this, a test framework that can carry out these automatic tests was developed. The test cases are defined in XML to make the processing easy. The results are also saved to XML. This allows both human and machine readability and to transform the result to a HTML formatted report.