Help!......Is it possible to perform automatic code validation for Teststand?

[John F]

I work for a UK Aerospace company supplying a Control Module for use in a Computer used on a modern fighter aircraft.

My main role is in the design of the Control Module, however I have recently taken an interest in exactly how the board is tested by the ATE.

The ATE is used to sequence Production Acceptance Testing, and we have been asked by our customers, both internal and external, to perform a 'Code Walkthrough' of the Teststand code  ......Tedioussss!!!!!

The 'Code walkthrough' is required to check that the Teststand software and associated hardware, is doing what it should do.

As a company, we produce Level A control software to DO178B, Level A, however we don't have much experience in Code Validation of Test Software.

We have Teststand ver 2.0 running on the ATE, and want to know if there are any auotmatic code validation techniques, either for this version of Teststand or any of the updated versions. Specifically we need to perform a 'Code walkthrough' of the software.

Any help would be appreciated, since we have an iminent delivery deadline.

Thanks,

John

[RayFarmer]

John,

I dont believe there is such a tools.

I have before suggested the use of the documentation tool to help with peer reviews when the TestStand Sequence Editor is not available on the reviewer system.

The later Teststands help during the edit stages with prodictive text as you enter your expressions in the Expression Browser so this reduces the errors generating expression. But you still have the problem if you change the parameter list of a sequence but forget to reedit the steps that call sequence. Usually no errors are generated at runtime.

If you have used NI Gateway during your development, this will help to show you have captured your requirements.

The use of a UML sequence diagram would help in your walk through if you have done one of those during your design phase.

Regards

Ray Farmer

[Bob_Y.]

John and Ray,

I talked to some TestStand developers the other day and mentioned that I would love to have a tool to run to perform a check of the parameters for each step.  You can presently step through them and they will each show any parameter problems.  I mentioned that in LabVIEW, this automatically happend when you open the VI and the run arrow breaks if there is a connector pane change or a datatype change (if it is no longer compatible).  I would like to see a tool in TestStand to run an analysis on a sequence that would show these problems at edit-time, instead of run-time.  I think such a tool would be a good start toward what you are looking for.

Just a thought.

Bob Young

P.S.  If you want a feature, be sure to tell NI or they won't know!

[icastillejos]

What I did was :

a) To perform a check at runtime I created and alternate HTML report that prints the step properties at runtime instead of the actual test step results, you can do this modifying the ...TSX.X\Components\NI\Models\TestStandModels\reportgen_html.seq

b) To perform a check in the sequence file code I modified these two sequences to validate 'static' properties of my steps (i.e. limits, naming, VIs paths,etc)

...TSX.X\Components\NI\Tools\DocGen\docgen.seq (I translated this to a VI)

...TSX.X\Components\NI\Tools\DocGen\docgen_html.seq (I put the validation for the steps properties here)

Hope this helps...

[Erik_Crank]

Consider upgrading to TestStand 2010 which comes with a Sequence Analyzer that helps you find problems, such as parameter incompatibilities, in sequences before you execute them.