The Embedded Systems Consortium for Hybrid and Embedded Systems Research (ESCHER) Institute has established a Tool Qualification Criteria that tools must meet in order be considered ESCHER compliant.

Here's what we are doing to insure that the ISIS tools presented here are meeting the high standards set forth by ESCHER:

Intellectual Property (IP) Rules

The ESCHER compliant ISIS tools are open source and licensed under a BSD model (see the license link for each tool under the tools menu) which allows unrestricted use in research and/or in product development.

Tool Dependencies

Tool dependencies, as well as licensing issues are fully documented for each tool. In addition, every effort has been made to reduce or eliminate unnecessary dependencies on outside/commercial tools.

Functional Integrity

ISIS uses nightly autobuilds along with regression tests to insure that our tools and frameworks work properly. We provide historical data for released versions as well as ongoing autobuilds of the active development tree. These ongoing nightly autobuilds give our development teams feedback that individual developers would find hard to do themselves, and allows developers to concentrate on a particular piece of code without having to worry as much about the entire system, since it will be systematically tested during the next autobuild. This reduces the burden on the individual developer and shortens the development cycle, e.g., you find problems almost immediately and can fix them while the change is still fresh in your mind.

Integratability

ESCHER tools are required to contain interfaces that conform to either the Open Tool Integration Framework (OTIF), which is CORBA IDL, or Eclipse, which is Java based. ACE+TAO is used in the development of OTIF, so it's already compliant, as is OTIF itself. The other tools, GME, UDM, GReAT, etc., as well as the tool-chains under development are all OTIF friendly, either directly, via translators provided with the tools, or hooks that allow developers to write new artifacts that will work with OTIF. Also, GME ships with an Eclipse plug-in that allow Eclipse users the ability to view GME projects, though not yet edit them.

All ESCHER compliant ISIS tools are built nightly via our in-house autobuild systems. Initially developed for ACE+TAO, these builds include extensive unit and regression tests, as well as integration tests. Though the GUI nature of the GME, et al, tools makes testing somewhat more difficult, new tests and test techniques are being developed to allow scripting of the major functionality, though much of the GUI testing must still be done by hand.

The autobuild results, including test results, can be viewed online.

Documentation

Documentation is provided both online and as part of the downloadable releases, and includes ...

User Support Criteria

ESCHER's User Support Criteria specifies a long list of processes and artifacts designed to make it easier for users to obtain stable versions of the tools, information about the tools, and mechanisms for communicating with the development teams. ISIS meets these requirements by:

• maintaining source code in CVS and VSS
• providing online access to the source via viewcvs
• providing downloadable versions of releases
• maintaining Bug databases in Bugzilla and JIRA
• news groups and mailing lists
• online documentation, including FAQ's, tutorials, and source code documentation, e.g., doxygen

QA Processes

In order to maintain quality, all ESCHER compliant ISIS tools are built and tested nightly with our in-house autobuild system.