Design, implementation, and case study of a function level unit test environment

The continuing focus on reduction of software development cycle time, while maintaining ever increasing standards of quality, has caused renewed emphasis to be placed on software testing technology as innovative strategies are sought. Existing development processes have generally been refined to the point where little wasted time remains to be removed. This is particularly true in the development of older, well established software. A function level unit test environment (FLUTE) provides a method for reorganizing the early stages of code development and test into a more efficient development model. The goal of this approach is to reduce the time spent on early testing, yet increase the value of such testing to the overall software quality. Following a statement of the relative issues, this paper defines what is meant by a function level unit test environment and moves on to describe an actual implementation of this methodology within a large scale, systems software development project. A case study summarizes the results which were achieved.<>