Distributed and concurrent test environments on popular COTS platforms

Today's automatic test system implementations likely require some aspect of real-time performance, concurrency, and network connectivity. Users expect responsive, efficient operation, both at the local operator interface as well as remotely via a LAN or the Internet. Distributed, concurrent COTS software systems, such as Sun Microsystem's Java and Microsoft's Win32 are a natural fit to these requirements. Based on real-world experience developing distributed, concurrent test systems, this paper reviews some of the unexpected obstacles implementers might encounter. We discuss the creation of threads, thread scheduling, and the use of thread synchronization constructs. We compare these mechanisms to those available in IEEE Standard ATLAS and test-specific programming frameworks.