Thoth: A Lightweight Framework for End-to-End Consumer IoT Rapid Testing - PhD Seminar by: Salma Aly

Abstract: The proliferation of IoT devices in consumer environments has elevated the need for efficient, systematic testing to ensure reliable operation. However, manual testing of these devices is time-consuming, error-prone, and non-scalable, underscoring the urgency for automated IoT testing frameworks. Existing automated IoT testing approaches, while useful, often lack comprehensive coverage of IoT system behaviours, consider cascading failure testing, and do not offer standardized, quantifiable evaluation metrics. In this seminar presentation, I introduce Thoth, a lightweight framework for end-to-end consumer IoT rapid testing, designed to overcome these limitations. Thoth integrates multiple test categories – including performance, reliability, recovery, security, and load testing – to enable holistic evaluation of IoT systems. The framework further incorporates standardized, quantifiable metrics aligned with real-world performance indicators, ensuring objective, transparent, and reproducible assessments of device behaviour. A distinctive feature of Thoth is the inclusion of cascading failure test cases to evaluate system resilience under failure propagation, an aspect largely overlooked in prior work.