There does not exist a book about Robot Framework for the context of cyber physical systems yet. I’ve taken a lot of notes about this topic over the years and I’m summarizing them into a lean publishing book Python for Cyber Physical… by Florian Kromer [PDF/iPad/Kindle] ATM. The book includes a section about Robot Framework (the challenging topic of end-to-end test automation for distributed systems, RF for hardware-in-the-loop test automation, …). I need to merge a lot of architectural diagrams still. I would be super thankful if you (the community) could have a look into the free table of content (Read Free Sample). Thanks a lot for your support! I hope I can contribute a valuable reference about this underrepresented topic to the community.
Looks promising. I guess here RobotFramework would just be a subset within the greater tooling/ecosystem that you are covering? From looking at the ToC.
Yes, that was the initial plan. From a Robot Framework (user) perspective it would be more valuable if the scope of a book would be limited to the Robot Framework scope probably. Would this approach be in line with what you implicitly told in your comment?
Depends on the intent, are you targeting RF users as the intended audience? Or some other (embedded systems?) testers as audience? Or combination of both?
Think of the story you want to tell, and arrange the book content around that. Are you trying to teach how to do the book related content using RF and available RF libraries as well as how to customize code to work with RF (for areas of functionality that don’t already have existing RF library).
And/or are you trying to teach aspects of DevOps and other things (k8s, javascript, UI, QEMU, AWS, etc.) or focusing on RF integration with them? If focus is not to cover the other things, you should just have short blurb mentions of them in book and offer some resource links for further learning for the reader, and make assumption reader is already familiar to some extent with the different tools/features. You cound put this assumption in the book foreword section, etc.
The current layout is not tailored enough for RF users, unless you want it to be a comprehensive book like a “for dummies” book that covers all those other tools/features and tell you how to use it with RF (for say someone unfamiliar with most of the topics covered). As a comprehensive book, that then is a big project if you want to take that on.
Thanks for the feedback!
tldr: I want to make it an expert, short (no dummies) RF specific book („Robot Framework for Cyber Physical System Test Automation“). I don’t have the time nor the motivation to „reinvent the wheel“ (writing something someone else already did).
A combination of both: I’m targeting RF users who want to apply it in an cyber physical system (CPS) context AND embedded system developers/testers who want to automate on the system level in distributed systems (beyond the usual HIL and SIL).
I‘ll focus on the hard stuff (no for dummies book) which is not covered elsewhere yet: test system architecture (TAS), DevOps for TAS deployment infrastructure e.g. The easier stuff (writing tests using web UI libs, database libs, …) I‘ll use blurb mentions and references for.
After rework of the TOC I‘ll let you know.