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6 Conclusion
6 Conclusion
This chapter concludes the thesis with a summary of the results and an outlook to
future work. The goal was a semantic preservative transform from ATLAS test case
descriptions to TestStand sequences. This goal was achieved in this work and was
evaluated by means of a case study. The result is a working prove of concept. The
method greatly simplifies the migration process of two test languages.
At first we developed a grammar to parse the ATLAS test case descriptions into
a parse tree. The grammar is designed in a way, that all program statements are
accepted by the parser and cause no syntax error, even if they are not defined in the
grammar. Consequently it is possible to transform common or important parts of the
test description automatically, while rare statement are preserved in the program for
later transformation by hand.
TestStand is a test management software with a graphical development interface
that saves the source code into binary sequence files. Therefore there is no TestStand
compiler that accepts text files as input. That is why a TestStand Assembler program
had to be developed, that is capable of an automated creation of TestStand sequence
files with the use of macro commands that are specially developed for this purpose.
The parse tree is then converted to macro commands for the TestStand Assembler
using transformation rules. These rules are carefully crafted to preserve the semantics
of the test program. To evaluate the transformation system, the grammar and transformation rules were expanded to transform 100% of an example source program.
Furthermore, multiple additional input test programs were translated with the transformation system, to check the robustness of the parser and to record the amount of
statements the grammar can transform completely.
The evaluation shows promising results, namely that the transformation system is
capable of handling the given task. All tested ATLAS source programs were successful
transformed to TestStand sequences. 70% to 90% of the code lines of each individual
translated program do not subsequently have to be revised by hand. This supports
the assumption, that large parts of the ATLAS test case descriptions are developed
with small amounts of the available features the ATLAS language provides. The face
that after transformation at most 30% of the code lines of the source program need to
be reviewed by hand, promises significant time savings in the migration process. This
can certainly be improved by an extension of the grammar and the transformation
rules.
During the run test we could also identify two weaknesses of the transformation
systems. A major source of error are the descriptions of the ATLAS semantics in
the ARINC specification 626-3 [5]. These have proved to be not as precise as claimed
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