Object Oriented Software Technologies Applied to Switching System Architectures and Software Development Processes (4-19)

This paper describes a switching system architecture and an associated software development process which establishes a foundation for increased software productivity and quality. The software architecture is based upon plug-compatible software components which can be implemented independently of one another. The degree of independence between components is such that an individual component can be edited, compiled, and loaded on a target system independently of all other components. To achieve this independence the system runtime environment has been designed to make components insensitive to runtime data in other components and to eliminate the need for a compile time definition of component interfaces. This has been accomplished by using a Lisp language environment with object oriented extensions (Flavors) and a distributed processor operating system which is capable of routing messages to components addressed by symbolic names.