Robots' Windows Software Tests Can Lie — Here's the Fix

ROS 2 is a popular toolkit for programming robots — from warehouse arms to self-driving research vehicles. Before this software ships, developers rely on CI (automated testing that runs in the cloud) to catch bugs. Many projects use GitHub Actions, a service that runs these checks. The trouble: on Windows, some of the most common testing tools quietly fail to do their job.

A developer tried three approaches. One popular tool, action-ros-ci, deliberately skips running tests on Windows. Another, setup-ros, looked like it ran everything but actually reported “0 tests, 0 errors, 0 failures” — a green light that meant nothing. That’s a false green: the robot’s code could be broken while the dashboard says everything is fine.

The fix that worked: download a known Windows version of ROS 2, then use Pixi (a tool that recreates the same software environment reliably), and explicitly run the build and test commands. The key safeguard is to make the CI system fail if it finds no tests — so a “successful” run really did run something.

This matters because robots are already in our hospitals, farms, and factories. If their software tests are fake, bugs can slip through — leading to crashes, wasted money, or even safety risks. For now, the developer’s method is a workaround rather than an official standard, but it’s a step toward honest, reliable testing on Windows.