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

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.