An alternative to traditional software rehosting

This paper describes one alternative to rehosting TPS software to newer computer platforms. It describes the solution that Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) used to solve a problem with re-engineering legacy software into a modern object-oriented language. The advantages gained by this method are more advanced instruction to the operator (such as pictures and movies), flexible reporting scheme to diagnose system problems, and ease of software maintenance. This solution uses commercially available products including National Instruments^™ TestStand^™ and LabVIEW^™ and Microsoft® Visual Basic®. The system is a four-tiered architecture to drive all test execution. The user interface is written in Visual Basic and allows the user to interact with the test execution when needed. This user interface in turn calls tests that are written in TestStand, and finally the individual tests call driver functions written in LabVIEW. A database serves as a repository for all test results, displays, and test limits. The use of this database allows for easy querying of measurement data to analyze trends in failures that help diagnose specific problems. By using this database, all test limits and test displays are contained in one central location that enables engineers to change these displays and limits on the fly without needing to change or even understand any test code. One other benefit of this data containment is that all government classified data is separated out of the code and stored as one file, instead of in various locations as it was in the original source code.