Unit testing/continuous integration with Simulink/Stateflow

Question

How can I perform unit testing in Simulink, or preferably, Stateflow?

I\'m a fan of agile software methods, including test driven development. I\'m responsible for the d

Answer 1

I've seen different solutions to the problem of unit testing Simulink models. Simulink Verification & Validation which did not support xUnit concepts of test runners and test suites at the time of examination, TPT being overloaded with functionality, not easy to use and very hard in terms of changeability and maintainability.

Furthermore I've seen custom solutions with Matlab scripts and Excel tables which were lightweight but also difficult in terms of understandability and maintainability. I'd still not recommend using any of these approaches, at least not for unit testing.

In the end, we ended up using a C unit testing framework (CUnit) testing the generated code. While this definitely has the disadvantage that you have to generate code before testing, it also has a lot of advantages, like easy integration into CI systems, high flexibility of writing unit tests, fast execution of unit tests and last but not least refactoring capabilities in terms of switching from Simulink to another model-based environment or to hand-written code. Especially the last point should not be underestimated since I have seen many Simulink models that should have been hand-written modules in the first place. Nowadays, I'd recommend using GoogleTest instead of CUnit.