Customers weigh in on 25th anniversary of ATEasy commercial availability

ATEasy, the test-executive and test-development software suite from Marvin Test Solutions, in July reached its 25th anniversary of commercial availability, as noted in an earlier blog post and our September special report on military/aerospace test.

ATEasy was commercially released in 1991 under the corporate banner of Geotest, which was subsequently acquired by The Marvin Group and which officially became Marvin Test Solutions in 2013.

Geotest itself was founded in 1988, and according to Loofie Gutterman, cofounder and now president of Marvin Test Solutions, ATEasy was on the company’s roadmap from the beginning. He said that despite 25 years of evolution, the overall concept for ATEasy remains the same: a single integrated environment that supports development, debug, implementation, and maintenance. The latest release is version 9, which features comprehensive simulation capabilities for both the test system resources and the UUT.

In a phone interview, Gutterman and Ron Yazma, vice president of software engineering for Marvin Test Solutions and the architect of ATEasy, elaborated on the software suite’s evolution. In addition, early customers have weighed in on their experiences with the software and have commented on what they would like to see going forward.

Gutterman said that before ATEasy, engineers were struggling with each new test system and the software needed to program it—most likely written in Pascal at the time. You would need software engineers to do the programming while hardware engineers were designing the ITAs, he said, and “…you had a lot of finger-pointing during the integration phase.”

The finger-pointing could be reduced, he said, with a tool that was easy enough for hardware engineers to use but robust enough to be useful to software engineers. And indeed the suite’s distribution of customers includes dedicated programmers as well as hardware engineers.

Although ATEasy offers a single integrated environment, it’s also extensible. “You can expand your capability beyond the ones provided with ATEasy,” said Yazma. “We always had this idea of an open architecture.” That architecture let users create components like DLLs or leverage .NET or LabVIEW. In addition, he said that ATEasy from the beginning has provided a framework for creating reusable software components like drivers that can be used from system from system, with code reuse boosting productivity.

Gutterman said ATEasy was well received by customers. The company demonstrated a beta version at a trade show in 1991 and has orders before the official release. Gutterman added that one customer was able to quadruple engineering productivity.

When ATEasy development began in 1989, Microsoft was not a big player. Nevertheless, said Gutterman, “Ron was adamant that we have to go with Windows, because that’s the wave of the future, and he was right.”

Customer viewpoints

Via email, several early customers have summarized their experiences with ATEasy and their plans for the future. For example, Mordechai Margalit began using ATEasy with version 2 to augment Basic and assembly-language programming. ATEasy, he said, provided the power to write infrastructure drivers that could be used in verity of ATE systems all over the world. As for the future, he would like additional support of C# generics.

Cyril Parrot, a test engineer at MSL Circuits, is also a longtime customer for ATEasy. He said, “More than twenty years ago, our test guys come from many companies with different tools and habits”—including C, LabVIEW, and different custom high-level languages. The plant where he was working, he said, served a very high growth automotive market and was operating three shifts and on weekends. “We need to go to a standard test solution to be more efficient,” he said, with regard to development, training, and maintenance.

In 1995, he said, the test team chose ATEasy “…because it was the most advanced test sequencer at this time, the language was easy, it looked to be more reliable for the industry, and it worked under Windows 3.11.” ATEasy, he added, “…provides a way to have our test core sequencer standardized, and it’s easy to maintain by test technicians and engineers.”

Because the team was trained on ATEasy and because of the software’s licensing system and price, the team continued with ATEasy 4 for 32-bit systems and now uses ATEasy 8. “In fact we are still using the three versions as we still have old testers running ATEasy 2 under Win 3.11,” he added.

“With the current ATEasy 8, we can test several UUTs, in sequential or parallel mode, and this is a great feature that we use more and more now to be more competitive,” he said.

He noted that the parallel mode works with a “batch model,” with all UUT tests started at the same time. In the future, he said, he would like to see functionality allowing each UUT test to run independently from each other.

Jon Feetham, now a senior test equipment engineer at Esterline Control Systems, Korry Electronics, said, “In 1991 I was a test manager for a large avionics firm. I inherited a number of diverse test-equipment projects that were in various states of redesign. One such project had just undergone a third design cycle of both hardware and software. The test equipment still did not work. The software was written in C, and the hardware consisted of two PC-ISA interface cards.”

Alluding to the finger-pointing that Gutterman referenced, he said, “At the time my group started with it, no one knew if the problems lay with the hardware or software. Our group had been looking for a test environment that would provide a usable standard and reduce development cost through re-use.”

Consequently, he said, “We started to work with Geotest using ATEasy 1.1 and MS Windows 3 OS. Using ATEasy for the PC-ISA tester project, we were able to lift the veil of obscurity from the software and fix about 20 hardware design issues.”

Based on this success, he said, “Our group ported ATEasy to all other test equipment projects. Within three years we had five major ATE platforms running ATEasy, testing hundreds of product configurations. Our group doubled its efficiency over this time frame.”

Feetham continued, “I also had occasion to use the next generation of ATEasy on a number of complex avionics devices for another company. Again, the elimination of obscurity is the primary benefit of ATEasy. Using other test languages or programming languages it is very easy to end up with poor programs that cannot be re-used and are difficult to debug. With ATEasy, the more it is used, the more it can be re-used.”

He concluded by noting, “ATEasy provides a highly structured intuitive test environment that allows for rapid integration of test systems.” He praised Marvin Test System’s support, and as for what he would like to see from ATEasy in the future: “More of the same.”