TEAMS: Testability Engineering and Maintenance System

TEAMS, Testability Engineering and Maintenance System, is a software package for testability analysis, automatic test sequencing, and design for testability of complex, hierarchically-described, modular systems. It consists of algorithms based on information theory, heuristic search, and graph theory to optimize design, diagnosis and maintenance of integrated systems and thereby reduce the life-cycle cost. A system is modeled as a hierarchical directed dependency graph with special nodes to denote modules, test points, modes of operation and redundancy. Links in the graph denote first order functional dependencies. TEAMS supports hierarchical testing in accordance with the field maintenance procedures; a failure source may be isolated to a component or a module at any level. Other practical features include options to integrate diagnosis with rectification, and to optimize diagnostic time and/or cost. An interactive menu-mouse graphical interface serves as a high-level front-end to these algorithms and enables the user to graphically enter, modify and integrate hierarchical functional models of systems. TEAMS presents concise testability reports consisting of important detection and isolation figures of merit, testability shortcomings and design for testability recommendations.