J. C. Bell & Associates

Module Integration Test Stand

Background

Our client is an engineering firm developing a set of highly specialized hardware devices ("modules") to be used in a proprietary application. These tools need to be exercised in isolation, under very controlled conditions. To achieve this, they built a Module Integration Test Stand (MITS).

Our Contribution

We took the software technical leadership role, hammering out the architecture and component design, and implementing several components.

Key Features

• Supervisory control and communications.
• Written in C++ and Java for Win32.
• We extract data from a Microsoft Access database.
• We make extensive use of the C++ Standard Template Library.
• We isolate operating-system specifics for portability to other (non-Win32) platforms.
• We use CORBA as the inter-module communications backbone. CORBA gives us compile-time interface consistency checking and allows components to run transparently on different PCs.
• We use the CORBA Naming service for location transparency.
• We use the CORBA Event service for efficient producer/consumer data delivery.