Testing

Apart from testing the functionality of the BFR application and underlying BACnet library, BFR testing involves sending a stream of BACnet packets at the application and verifying that the packets are being filtered and routed correctly. There are a variety of testing tools such as Visual Test Shell which make it simple to interactively construct and send BACnet packets, and the tool displays the encoded packet while it is being built.

The BFR has a “console” feature that prints packets that have been received to stdout in hex, and accepts packets on stdin to transmit. While the BFR is running on one workstation, another instance can be used to “stream” packets to it. Both instances of the application can be running on the same workstation, provided they both don’t attempt to open the same socket.

A testing framework, one that can both send sample packets and inspect the behavior of the BFR, with a variety of configuration files, would be a welcome addition to the project.