PART I
ATAC &
ATAC
Testing is an essential part of software development. However, testing software can be both complex and expensive. Automated support for effective testing techniques makes it easier and cheaper to do a better job of testing and to produce higher quality software.
ATAC (Automatic Test Analysis for C) is a coverage analysis tool that allows testers to measure how thoroughly a program has been exercised by a set of tests. ATAC uses data flow coverage techniques to provide automated support for ``white-box'' testing. That is, ATAC allows testing based upon a program's structure, in addition to its requirements. ATAC measures how well a set of tests exercise a program by how well it covers flow control and data flow relationships within the program's code. Test sets that yield higher coverage do a better job of testing. ATAC provides a feedback mechanism to measure and guide the user to improve test coverage. Such feedback is very difficult, if not impossible, to obtain without a tool like ATAC.
ATAC (X-based Automatic Test Analysis for C) extends the functionality of ATAC by using state of the art color graphical interfaces. The ease of use improvement of ATAC over ATAC is dramatic. Test cases are easy to create and coverage testing is a pleasure rather than a chore. Notwithstanding the marked superiority of ATAC, ATAC is a valuable tool when only an ASCII terminal is available. Moreover, much of the functionality of ATAC and ATAC are the same, so knowledge of one is valuable in understanding the other. For these reasons, this manual is as much about ATAC as it is about ATAC.
ATAC and ATAC have many useful features, some of which are: