RomLibEmu: Network Interface Stress Tests for the CERN Radiation Monitoring Electronics (CROME)

The CERN RadiatiOn Monitoring Electronics are a modular safety system for radiation monitoring that is remotely configurable through a supervisory system via a custom protocol on top of a TCP/IP connection. The configuration parameters influence the safety decisions taken by the system. An independent test library has been developed in Python in order to test the system’s reaction to misconfigurations. It is further used to stress test the application’s network interface and the robustness of the software. The library is capable of creating packets with default values, autocompleting packets according to the protocol and it allows the construction of packets from raw data. Malformed packets can be intentionally crafted and the response of the application under test is checked for protocol conformance. New test cases can be added to the test case dictionary. Each time before a new version of the communication library is released, the Python test library is used for regression testing. The current test suite consists of 251 automated test cases. Many application bugs could be found and solved, which improved the reliability and availability of the system.