Great point about architecture, this is most definitely a major issue and is not specific to what language is used. I've just been reassigned to oversee develop

Great point about architecture, this is most definitely a major issue and is not specific to what language is used. I've just been reassigned to oversee development in this area and am hoping to fix both these issues. Over time the manufacturing software has evolved. Originally everything was written in C, it was a single C file to test all products. It was fast but from a maintenance standpoint it grew to be too large and this approach was abandoned as a result. In practice we've found writing low level tests in C that only do one thing and then use bash as glue logic seemed to work well. Some hardware tests must be implemented in C(low level register accesses where timing is critical). We currently interface with USB printers(the board under test) to print a serial number corresponding to a MAC. address. I found maintaining this utility on all boards became a major issue(udev, devfs, busybox - eabi, oabi...) so I implemented it in Python and from a maintenance standpoint it's been a huge improvement. The problem is it's slow on some products(30 seconds or more to print a label and log to a file via NFS) and I have to admit I haven't yet dug in to understand why.