Improvement of test program set development and customer compliance using the interactive test step generator (ITSG)

Due to increasing complexity of test programs, changing customer requirements, high test program development costs, and expertise needed to generate test programs, the interactive test step generator (ITSG) philosophy was created to attack these problematic areas and increase development efficiency. ITSG is actually a collection of software tools that allow a test program set developer to create, simulate, and interactively debug test programs without the traditional compile and link cycle. With immediate feedback and interactive use of a test station, complex program issues are rapidly resolved. In addition, very little software language expertise is required to develop these programs due to ITSG´s easy to use menu formats thereby reducing the need for software expertise. Upon successful completion of test program development, the resulting ITSG database is automatically converted to the required customer language (e.g. ATLAS) for customer acceptance