TEAM: a support environment for testing, evaluation, and analysis

Current research indicates that software reliability needs to be achieved through the careful integration of a number of diverse testing and analysis techniques. To address this need, the TEAM environment has been designed to support the integration of and experimentation with an ever growing number of software testing and analysis tools. To achieve this flexibility, we exploit three design principles: component technology so that common underlying functionality is recognized; generic realizations so that these common functions can be instantiated as diversely as possible; and language independence so that tools can work on multiple languages, even allowing some tools to be applicable to different phases of the software lifecycle. The result is an environment that contains building blocks for easily constructing and experimenting with new testing and analysis techniques. Although the first prototype has just recently been implemented, we feel it demonstrates how modularity, genericity, and language independence further extensibility and integration.