An on-line test program for peripheral devices
Akira Taneda, Hikaru Oku, Daiji Namba · 1976
An on-line test program is a program to detect troubles in devices being used in service or to assure correctness of their operation. Therefore, it is required that the on-line test program is able to safely certify device functions without any disturbance to the service. That is, since the on-line test program interrupts usual guards of an operating system, it may cause disturbances to the service, for example, by breaking contents of media used in the service. Therefore, the requirement to the on-line test program is not only to satisfy test functions but also to remove each disturbance cause which seems to affect the service. In addition, it is necessary to test automatically to improve the capability of the program and to avoid disturbances resulting from misoperations.This paper describes design objectives, service interruption countermeasures and automatic test techniques for an on-line test program designed mainly to test peripheral devices of DIPS (Dendenkosha Information Processing System), that is a standard data communication system in NTTPC (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation).The fault detection ability of this program was confirmed at a satisfactory level, according to experiments involving artificial device troubles.