Launching BootLoop Test: Why Hardware-in-the-Loop Testing Stays Out of Reach for Most Embedded Teams
June 15, 2026
Blog
Ask almost any firmware engineer whether their team tests enough, and the answer is almost always “no”. The gap between the testing hardware teams should do, and the testing they actually do is one of the quietest, most expensive problems in the industry.
Ultimately, it comes down to tooling and economics, and understanding why helps illuminate how and why embedded products fail in the field. In this article, we’ll look at the challenges of implementing rigorous testing in embedded development and how our new BootLoop Test platform makes it more accessible to companies of all sizes.
Testing Shortcomings are Pervasive
In 2025, at least 166 automaker recalls were traced to software issues, marking an all-time high and the sixth consecutive year that number has increased. Recalls are the visible tip of a much larger iceberg of firmware that shipped without being exercised the way it should have been.
Meanwhile, the engineers who could solve this issue are in short supply. Around 80% of embedded engineering job postings go unfilled for months. The engineers who are already on staff spend the majority of their time on bring-up, debugging, and validation. With so many other priorities and pressure to ship products, engineers deprioritize establishing a rigorous testing program and sometimes avoid it entirely.
So testing gets deferred, because the path to doing it well requires resources and tooling that most teams can't realistically adopt.
All of the Available Options Have Serious Flaws
When a team does go looking for a real hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing setup, it finds two options, and neither one fits most companies.
On one side is the enterprise approach. Big aerospace, automotive, and defense programs do invest in serious HIL testing, but in practice, it almost never looks like a team buying NI TestStand or dSPACE off the shelf. It looks like a dedicated test engineering team that has spent years building a homegrown system in-house, tuned specifically to the products and benches the company works on. Engineers can spend months building harnesses and writing test sequences before they run their first test, and the headcount and timelines that come with a dedicated test organization are their own kind of cost. The biggest hardware companies in the world already do this. Almost nobody else can afford to.
Leaner organizations end up with a testing solution more akin to a few scripts, lots of manual testing, and maybe automation around some test instruments. It might catch a couple of the bugs they run into day-to-day, but it’s not reusable across the company and won’t move the needle on velocity. And it definitely isn’t the solution that’s going to take you through manufacturing. A firmware engineer might write a quick script to check the application logic, and when the manufacturing engineer tries to reimplement the same setup six months later, it’s nearly impossible.
There is very little middle ground. Good HIL testing has effectively been a luxury that’s available to teams that can fund a test organization, and out of reach for everyone else.
Visions for a New Test Framework
To actually close this gap, a new kind of test framework would need a few specific properties. The first is that it has to be easy to adopt and fast to get to real coverage. Most teams aren't going to design a framework from scratch. They need something where the control plane is already handled, so the team can spend its time writing tests instead of building the system that runs them.
The second is that the same test has to travel. The check a firmware engineer writes during board bring-up should be the same check that runs in CI on every commit and at the end-of-line on every production unit. The moment an engineer needs to rewrite a test for a different runner or reimplement it for the production line, most teams simply won't do it. Tests have to be portable and reusable by default.
The third is that results have to be shared, and anyone on the team has to be able to contribute. When a unit fails in production, an engineer should be able to pull up that exact test and see every prior run of it without reconciling spreadsheets between multiple systems. Just as importantly, firmware engineers, EEs, and manufacturing engineers all need to be writing into the same growing library of tests, so the whole company is pushing the testing coverage in the same direction instead of three teams maintaining three half-overlapping setups.
How BootLoop Approached the Problem
We built BootLoop Test to be a single testing framework that delivers all of these features across the entire development lifecycle.
The starting point is the bench-as-code idea. With BootLoop Test, a team installs a Bench Daemon with a single command, then describes the bench in a simple drag-and-drop interface that specifies which instrument is connected where. Teammates can run tests against this bench from anywhere in the world when it's not in use, or quickly duplicate it for themselves. And because tests are portable across bench configurations, a test written once will run on any capable bench. The framework automatically uses whatever equipment it needs, so nothing has to be rewritten for a different setup.
Importantly, the test creation process is grounded in actual hardware. BootLoop Test runs an AI agent that uses the firmware codebase, PCB design files, and relevant component datasheets to write integration tests that provide real coverage. Because execution is deterministic, every test returns a clean pass or fail.
The piece that ties it together is promotion. Once a test does what it should, one click makes it a team-wide test, and that same test can ship to manufacturing to run at the end-of-line. Every run, at every stage, lands in a single Run History, with the firmware binary, bench configuration, test code, and results all versioned together. For teams in regulated domains, the workflow also runs in ITAR-controlled environments, and you can get full traceability across years of testing.
The Bottom Line for Embedded Teams
Inadequate testing is a rational response to tooling that has historically forced teams to choose between an enterprise-scale investment and an unmaintainable bench script. With BootLoop Test, we’re eliminating that choice. As HIL testing becomes something a small team can stand up in days rather than months, engineering teams of any size can start shipping better, more reliable systems at production scale. And when every change is tested against real hardware, teams can ship faster and with more confidence.
Go to BootLoop.ai to learn more about how to get started today.
