Introducing Automation Tools

My favorite Double 00 Raiser, I’m sure this goes through major firmware testing

Some of the best ways to communicate to say a local server is through telnet and gRPC

Telnet

Telnet, this protocol is still used everywhere in the automation testing industry. Providing bidirectional interactive text-oriented communication facility between the client and the server. You can easily open a python telnet connection and communicate with the server while creating automation scripts in parallel.

However, since Telnet is only text-based it is more difficult parse information as the results from the server needs additional formatting.

Introducing gRPC

One of the latest frameworks I use on a daily basis at work is the remote procedure call (RPC) from Google gRPC. This, my friends, is a major upgrade from command the line interface.

Now, you can use this framework to define the entire server’s structure. As the client invokes any method (query or command), the responses are in an organized and effective structure and higher level unit testers can easily use this information for quicker verification purposes.

Comparison - Telnet

Let’s say you’re getting the hardware’s information from telnet it would look like this:

tn = initializeTelnet()
tn.write('getunitinfo')
result = tn.read_very_eager()

The ‘result’ is just a plain text form (originally converted from bytes but that’s not the main point):

` Unit Number: 1234 \r\n Serial Number: 5678 \r\n `

But the value you need while scripting the automation scripts is the actual unit number and serial number.

Comparison - gRPC

gRPC however does that for you:

result = ModemManager_Stub.GetInfo(clientChannel)

and the ‘result’ is a class where the response from the server is prefilled for you, all you need to do from now on is to access them using dot notation like so:

unitInfo = result.unitInfo
serialNumber = result.serialNumber

Cool eyh?

Joshua Liew

Your friendly Computer Engineer

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