RoboCon2025

I have 20 years of experience in dealing with systems with inherent parallelism. From embedded systems with interrupt systems to distributed systems in the industrial context, NFC systems with multiple communication interfaces or measurement setups with many independent data sources.

In this workshop, I would like to share with you how it is possible to live with this problem and have a good experience while doing so.

This workshop will be broken down into

• We will explore the concept of parallelism in the testing context and find common ground on naming
• discuss why the class of solutions like Robot Framework struggles with threads
• discuss the message based coordination of threads solution
• In a hands-on session we will implement:
• a keyword that enables threads to access Robot Framework logging infrastructure
• two examples showcasing concurrency in Robot Framework, using select and threads
• look at nondeterministic parallelism
• what problems it brings
• what advantages it brings
• what alternatives we have

We will build up a mindmap for future decision-making and problem-solving during this process.

While the existence of a GIL has little influence on this topic, removing the GIL will bring attention to this topic, and dealing with parallelism will become more relevant once the Python world becomes more "thready".

Lessons Learned:

• what are the reasons for non-deterministic tests
• how not to end up with non-deterministic tests
• which conditions are necessary to use regular keyword libraries in a thread-safe way
• a handful of pointers on how to create those conditions

Intended Audience:
Not only those engineers interested in venturing into a threaded world for the first time, but also those who did so already, and did not enjoy the experience.