Design Specification for Test and Evaluation of the NATO Common Ada Programming Support Environment (APSE) Interface Set (CAIS) Implementation

Abstract

Abstract : A North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Special Working Group ( SWG) on Ada Programming Support Environments (APSEs) was established in October 1986. Its charter is to develop a tool set that constitutes an APSE, to evaluate the APSE on both an individual component basis and on a holistic level, and to define a NATO interface standard for APSEs. A specific task within the associated MITRE work program is to develop the design to perform test and evaluation of SWG Common APSE Interface Set (CAIS) implementations. The SWG CAIS is the agreed-upon tool interface set for the NATO effort and is a variant of the CAIS standard, DOD-STD-1838. CAIS provides a standard set of kernel interfaces for APSE tools, thus promoting portability of tools across disparate architectures. The SWG CAIS is complex; there are over 500 unique interfaces defined in 29 Ada packages with over 1,600 possible error conditions. This report outlines an approach and specifies the design for the development of the test and evaluation environment. The design outlines the tests to be developed and discusses attributes of the test environment that influence the design of the test suite.