SKA South Africa, National Research Foundation of South Africa, Cape Town, South Africa
The 64-dish MeerKAT radio telescope, under construction in South Africa, will become the largest and most sensitive radio telescope in the Southern Hemisphere until integrated with the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). Software testing is an integral part of software development that is aimed at evaluating software quality; verifying and validating that the given requirements are met. This poster will present the approach, techniques and tools used to automate the testing of the software that controls and monitors the telescope. Jenkins continuous integration system is the server used to run the automated tests together with Git and Docker as the supporting tools to the process. In addition to the aforementioned tools we also use an Automated Qualification Framework (AQF) which is an in-house developed software that automates as much as possible of the functional testing of the Control and Monitoring (CAM) software. The AQF is invoked from Jenkins by launching a fully simulated CAM system and executing the Integrated CAM Tests against this simulated system as CAM Regression Testing. The advantages and limitations of the automated testing will be elaborated in the paper in detail.
