An ate and language independent, extensible integrated development environment for test program set development

摘要

Much like the proliferation of different Automatic Test Equipment (ATE) within the DoD Services, there has been a similar proliferation of various programming languages for developing Test Program Sets (TPS) to be used on those same ATE. The use of multiple languages leads to a variety of unfavorable situations, including, among others: · Complexity of re-hosting software to new ATE · Difficulty transitioning TPS engineers to new workload with different platform requirements · Inconsistency in standards, styles and reporting between workloads This paper discusses the benefits of an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for TPS that utilizes a single TPS specific programming language, is based on industry standard IDEs, takes advantage of IEEE SCC20/Automatic Test Markup Language (ATML) standards, and can be extended to accommodate various ATE and programming languages. Further, as a case study, this paper explores the features, architecture and roadmap of VIPER - a TPS IDE developed and successfully deployed by the Software Maintenance Group at Tinker AFB.