CI/CD Pipeline from Android to Embedded Devices with end-to-end testing based on Containers

Abstract: Embedded devices in the Internet of Things world mostly only have one connection channel, and smaller consumer devices usually communicate with other devices only over a wireless connection. Developers constantly upgrade the Internet of Things devices with Android phones connecting to the devices. If developers break the only possible connection, the devices become unusable, because the devices do not have a wired port. This study explores the options to test the wireless upgrade channel during the development workflow and implements a continuous integration pipeline for the devices. Literature in the field of continuous integration focuses primarily on Cloud and Web-related workloads. The few papers targeting embedded devices with continuous integration are primarily theoretical and discuss the possible advantages of utilizing continuous integration but do not implement a prototype. Our contribution creates a continuous integration pipeline for embedded devices, which automatically tests the update channel between Android phones and embedded devices over Bluetooth on every commit. To verify the correct functionality, we use previously faulty commits from the git history and run the pipeline with the buggy commit to check the pipeline’s functionality. The pipeline evaluation shows that the time improvements for our update validation process with continuous integration is insignificantly faster for the upgrade procedure. However, developers are required to test a combination of versions and here, the automated testing setup excels over the human testing method by being scalable. Furthermore, automated testing enables easier identification of the root cause for an issue and a faster delivery time of fixes. While the pipeline works reliably, we identify issues in adopting the continuous integration process by the developers. Additionally, the analysis summarizes essential tools and features to run the pipeline with an overview of required elements for similar projects. The work was created in cooperation with Wrlds Creations AB and we used the devices actively developed by the company.