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

R2016b introduces integration between Simulink Test and MATLAB Unit Testing framework. Tests created with Simulink Test using Test Manager (*.mldatx) are recognized by and can be run natively using the MATLAB Unit Test Runner and thus you can generate JUnit style XML test results or TAP test results facilitating Continuous integration workflows.

See this reference for more information: https://www.mathworks.com/help/sltest/ug/run-test-files-using-matlab-unit-test.html?s_tid=gn_loc_drop

The documentation shows an example of producing TAP results using matlab.unittest.plugins.TAPPlugin but you can use XMLPlugin (https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/matlab.unittest.plugins.xmlplugin-class.html) instead just as easily.

This should open up a better integration within just MATLAB environment even without CI in the picture with the ability to have MATLAB and Simulink Tests together in the same test suite and have them run together seamlessly. For example if you have a directory MYDIR with both native MATLAB unit tests and Simulink Tests, you can do something as simple as the follows to execute both kinds of tests in one shot:

results = runtests(MYDIR)

Answer 2

Unit testing Simulink is not straightforward, unfortunately. Mathworks have the SystemTest. Alternatively, you can roll-your-own Simulink testing framework, which is the approach that we've followed and is not too difficult, but you may need to built test-harnesses programmatically.

In order to integrate with CI, you need to create a function/script that executes all the tests, then you can use the command-line parameters for MATLAB.exe to run a script on start-up. I'm not sure anyone has a good way of integrating the test reports with the CI software, though. Just look at the number of comments in Unit-testing framework for MATLAB.