No. 4 ESS: Program Administration, Test, and Evaluation

A large development undertaking like No. 4 ESS--one that spans years, involves several organizations, and is built by the combined efforts of many people--is seldom described solely in terms of the final mar1239 keted product. Numerous supporting activities must exist to assist the project through its design, implementation, testing, evaluation, and production of official releases. A number of support tools that were developed to meet the demands of producing quality software in No. 4 ESS in a systematic and efficient fashion evolved to be systems of significant sizes themselves. A common objective behind these support systems was to provide their users, viz., the community of No. 4 ESS programmers, with powerful yet easy-to-use tools to assist in the development of a quality product. Four such systems of diverse scope, content, and applicability but linked by the common objective above are described herein. The Program Administration System (PAS) provides management facilities for the sources, object modules, listings, and other data entities associated with the many programs constituting the No. 4 ESS software package. PAS is described in Section II. In Section III, the 1A Processor Utility System that enables program testing and debugging to be done in the controlled environment of the System Laboratories is described. A novel testing concept and its application methodology and component tools, collectively known as the Automated Testing and Load Analysis System (ATLAS), is described in Section IV.