Module Integration Test Stand

Background

Our client was an engineering firm developing a set of highly specialized hardware devices (“modules”) to be used in a proprietary application. These tools needed to be exercised in isolation, under very controlled conditions. To achieve this, they built a Module Integration Test Stand (MITS): a hardware positioning system with standardized connections to these specialized devices.

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.
• Made extensive use of the C++ Standard Library (std::) as early adopters.
• Isolated operating-system specifics for portability to other (non-Win32) platforms.
• Used CORBA as the inter-module communications backbone. CORBA gave us compile-time interface consistency checking and allowed components to run transparently on different PCs.
• Used the CORBA Naming service for location transparency.
• Used the CORBA Event service for efficient producer/consumer data delivery.
• Extracted each specialized device’s configuration from a Microsoft Access database.