In the ever-evolving world of embedded systems, firmware teams are under constant pressure to deliver high-quality products more quickly and more efficiently. However, unlike web or mobile software development, firmware engineering has seen some resistance to the modern automation practices that drive speed and reliability elsewhere. This could be due to technical challenges, such as limitations in the toolchain and test environment, or aging infrastructure, or organizational challenges, like a risk-averse culture or legacy processes. Nonetheless, CI/CD can significantly improve your organization and technical team’s ability to deliver high-quality firmware.
In this blog post, we’ll explore how Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) principles apply to the firmware development process, and how embedding these into your engineering culture can streamline firmware workflows, increase quality, and dramatically reduce time-to-market.
Why Firmware Needs CI/CD
Imagine managing a firmware project with a common traditional firmware deployment process, which is often tedious, manual, and error-prone. Developers push changes into monolithic codebases, build environments are inconsistent, and testing (if any) is sporadic. This leads to integration headaches, delayed releases, and increased defect rates in production.
This is where CI/CD breaks this cycle. A well-structured firmware CI/CD pipeline can automate build, test, and delivery steps, allowing your project to catch issues early and ensure every change is production-ready. This approach, which is widely adopted in cloud and app development, is now increasingly feasible (and necessary!) for embedded systems.
The Components of a Modern Firmware CI/CD Pipeline
Implementing CI/CD for firmware involves the careful adaptation of established DevOps concepts to the unique challenges of embedded systems:
Version control as the Foundation
Modern CI/CD begins with firmware version control. Git is the de facto standard and enables:
- Branching workflows for isolating features, bug fixes, and releases
- Pull requests that serve as quality checkpoints with code reviews and automated testing triggers
- Tagging and semantic versioning to track releases across builds and deployments
- A full history of every change included in each release, allowing traceability for regulatory requirements
This discipline in managing code ensures traceability and supports automated workflows further down the pipeline.
Automated Builds with Consistency
Automated builds are the cornerstone of any firmware CI/CD pipeline. At a predefined time, such as every time code is committed or a pull request is opened, a CI system should trigger a clean, repeatable build. You can choose between a wide variety of CI systems depending on your needs, such as GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Jenkins. This eliminates manual steps, reduces human error, and ensures every firmware image is produced under consistent conditions.
For embedded development, automated builds could include:
- Cross compilation using vendor-specific toolchains (e.g., ARM GCC, IAR, etc), which enables compiling code for the target architecture from a different architecture in the development environment (useful for running unit tests in CI)
- Support for different target boards or MCUs for potential support of multiple hardware revisions and backwards compatibility
- Declarative build scripts using systems like CMake or Makefiles
A best practice that dramatically improves your project’s consistency is the use of containerized build environments. By encapsulating compilers, SDKs, and supporting tools in a Docker image, teams avoid the “it works on my machine” problem and ensure builds are reproducible across different hosts and over time. This also allows teams to pin specific toolchain versions, especially important when supporting legacy code or hardware.
By adopting automated builds, build failures are detected immediately and can be resolved before merging code into the main branch, keeping your firmware development process clean and agile.
Static Analysis and Quality Gates in CI
Static analysis plays a crucial role in enforcing quality early in the firmware development process and is best utilized as part of the CI/CD pipeline. By integrating static analysis tools into your automated builds, you can detect a wide range of issues before they ever make it to testing or deployment.
Typical quality gates you should consider include:
- Static analyzers like Cppcheck or Clang-Tidy to detect memory errors, race conditions, and platform-specific quirks at compile-time.
- Linters to enforce consistent code style and readability, reducing friction during reviews and maintenance.
- Code coverage tools to keep track of which parts of the codebase are exercised by automated tests, which helps you focus future test efforts where they matter most.
In a CI/CD workflow, these tools run on every commit or pull request. If thresholds aren’t met (e.g., coverage drops or new warnings appear), the CI pipeline blocks the branch from being merged into the main branch. This ensures that only high-quality firmware can be deployed, which is especially critical for safety-sensitive or regulated environments.
Automated Testing for Firmware
This is where many firmware teams struggle. But test automation is possible with the right infrastructure. When properly implemented, automated testing for firmware ensures that every code change is validated continuously, directly within the CI pipeline. This allows you to catch regressions early, reduce manual verification, and confidently ship updates as part of a streamlined firmware workflow. Testing layers that you can put in place in your embedded project include:
- Unit Tests – executed quickly during CI jobs, these tests validate low-level logic and functions using frameworks like Unity, Google Tests, or Ceedling. They are ideal for early feedback.
- Integration Tests – these confirm that subsystems work together correctly, often leveraging fakes, mocks, or even software simulators to mimic hardware behaviour during CI runs.
- Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) Tests – the CI/CD system can deploy builds to actual hardware for real-world validation, using debug probes, GPIO scripting, or automated test rigs.
By embedding these layers into CI, your team can build trust in every commit. The result is faster iterations, fewer bugs, and a production-grade testing safety net that scales with your team.
Deployment and Artifact Management
Once firmware has passed all builds, tests, and quality gates, it can enter the final stages of the CI/CD pipeline: packaging and delivery.
This part of the workflow converts validated code into deployable firmware or artifacts, manages them securely, and distributes them with confidence. Key steps can include:
- Artifact generation – compiled firmware files (.hex, .elf, .bin) are created and tagged with metadata (version, commit hash, target board).
- Secure storage – artifacts can be published to centralized artifact repositories (e.g., AWS S3, Artifactory), ensuring traceability and integrity across builds.
- Checksum validation and signing – firmware images are validated or cryptographically signed to prevent tampering, especially for devices with Over-The-Air (OTA) update capabilities.
From here, continuous delivery for firmware takes over. Depending on your process maturity and regulations, this could include:
- Manual approval gates for production deployment (especially in medical, industrial, or automotive contexts).
- Staged rollouts to test groups or specific hardware batches.
- OTA updates are pushed automatically once the firmware clears all checks.
By automating the path from source code to deployable artifact, you drastically reduce the overhead and risk traditionally associated with firmware releases while setting the stage for faster iterations in the future.
Benefits of CI/CD in the Firmware Development Process
To summarize, implementing proper CI/CD pipelines can unlock powerful benefits such as:
- Faster Iteration Cycles – reduce feedback time from days to minutes
- Improved Code Quality – catch regressions early with automated tests
- Consistent Builds – eliminate manual errors with repeatable automation
- Team Scalability – new developers onboard faster with clear build/test pipelines and containerized environments
- Product Stability – confidence in releases means fewer production issues
Ready to Level Up Your Firmware Team?
The embedded world is changing, and the gap between those who adopt CI/CD and those who don’t is growing. If you are ready to streamline your firmware workflow, accelerate delivery, and reduce risk, we’re here to help. Book a call with Dojo Five to get the conversation started! Or, to start increasing your team’s productivity by using EmbedOps, our free DevOps and CI/CD platform for Device Teams.
