Reducing the cost of test through reuse

As the length of time between design and production decreases, the demand for timely and cost effective testing increases. One way to reduce the cost of test development is through the reuse of applications and components. This approach includes designing and implementing reusable components as well as leveraging off of existing tools and utilities. This paper describes a set of test applications that were designed for reuse and that, in turn, facilitate the creation of reusable components. These applications provide a common set of runtime services to a test system. In addition, their open architecture supports variety of test development environments and integration with third party or custom utilities. Descriptions of the applications are augmented by design discussions and implementation details.