TcUnit

The user base for TcUnit, the free open-source PLC/TwinCAT unit testing framework, has grown enormously. Current estimates are that there are over 100 installations of TcUnit worldwide. Running an open-source project has for some moments taken all my spare-time to maintain the framework, and answer all the questions from the users (I’ve added an FAQ since). The most asked-for functionality of TcUnit that was missing was the possibility to run unit tests in a sequence/in order. Up to now, all tests defined in TcUnit were running in parallel, while in many use cases it was desirable to run the tests in sequence. Thanks to several fantastic contributors from the TcUnit community on GitHub, this is now available in TcUnit starting from version 1.2.

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This is a joint article by me and Peter Kurhajec.

Unit testing is the practice of writing a test for a required functionality. In the world of “classical” IT software development, the concept of unit testing has been around for almost two decades. What is a standard procedure in languages such as Java, C++, .NET/C#, Python, etc. — has been completely lacking in the world of PLCs. The world of automation did not have the proper tools, and nor did it develop any comprehensive automated testing frameworks. Here we present two possible approaches for unit testing in Beckhoff’s TwinCAT 3.

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Dear TwinCAT/PLC developers,

I’m very happy to announce the release of the TcUnit-Runner, an open-source tool for integration of TwinCAT unit tests into a CI/CD toolchain automation server such as Jenkins. When TcUnit, the TwinCAT unit testing framework, was released back in December of 2018 I would never have imagined how widespread it would get. Since then, I’ve received e-mails from PLC developers every week with questions, improvement suggestions or just gratitude for this open-source software. The TcUnit framework has found its way into the full range of projects ranging from small machines to multi-billion € projects. With this response, I would say that there definitely is a need for unit testing in the world of automation. The adoption of TcUnit into TwinCAT projects across the globe has motivated the further development of TcUnit. One limitation of the TcUnit framework was that it was only possible to run the unit tests locally on your development machine (or PLC), and thus needed to be run manually every time a change in the software was made. Modern software practices advocate that software development should adhere to the practices of continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), so that tests would be run automatically when committing changes to version control. Thus, TcUnit-Runner was developed.

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TcUnit is a unit testing framework made specifically for TwinCAT3. It’s an open-source project released under a MIT-license. Since the launch of TcUnit the response from users has been overwhelming! I’ve received tons of feedback from individuals and automation engineers from both small and large companies. Judging by the sheer amount of e-mails received over the last half year I would say that there is a big need for a unit testing framework for PLC developers.

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Sharing knowledge with other TwinCAT developers using a blog is not only an easy and good way, but it’s also quite fun. After a long day at work, I often find it enjoying to sit down and write a little bit on a new blog post. Quite recently I launched TcUnit – the TwinCAT unit testing framework and even though there now is tons of documentation and example code on the official website, some people prefer to learn by watching a video. For this reason I’ve created a series of four videos that will introduce TwinCAT software developers to test driven development (TDD) and how to do TDD using TcUnit.

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Dear TwinCAT developers,

I’m very happy to announce the release of TcUnit – an unit testing framework for TwinCAT3. TcUnit is an xUnit type of framework specifically done for Beckhoffs TwinCAT3 development environment. This is another step in the direction of modernizing the software development practices in the world of automation.

Before dwelling into the details, let me tell the background of this project. In 2016 the development of the CorPower wave energy converter (WEC) was in an intensive phase. Software was being finalized, tested and verified for delivery. In a late phase of the project some critical parts of the software needed to be changed. The changes could be isolated to a few function blocks (FB), so in an initial phase the tests simply consisted of exporting those FBs to a separate project and running them locally on the engineering PC. The FBs were changed and executed in the engineering environment, and then online-changing the inputs and seeing whether the expected outputs were given. After doing this for a couple of hours an important question was raised:

Shouldn’t this be automated?

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