Continuous Integration meets industrial automation: testing industrial controls frameworks

Continuous Integration (CI) pipelines are a cornerstone of modern software development, enabling early bug detection and robust validation across all system layers. Extending this concept to industrial automation introduces unique challenges due to the involvement of real hardware and vendor-specific proprietary tools. This paper presents how CERN has built a fully automated testing pipeline for one of its industrial controls frameworks, covering every stage from framework releases (traditionally manual developer tasks), to end-to-end PLC-SCADA validation, simulating user workflows. The pipeline automates the generation of platform-specific PLC projects, the configuration of SCADA systems, and the establishment of the PLC-SCADA communication, achieved through a combination of in-house and third-party tools to programmatically execute these steps. Implementing such CI pipelines requires establishing a permanent testing infrastructure, including PLCs, development machines and SCADA servers. While the setup demands significant initial effort, the maintenance cost remains low, yielding high returns in the form of time saved for developers and testing engineers during the pre-release validation phases. This approach bridges the gap between modern software testing and industrial automation, enhancing reliability in complex, multi-platform environments.