An Incremental Development System for Axiom Specified Objects (IDAX)

Abstract

Incremental Development System for Axiom Specified Objects (IDAX) is a prototype tool for the generation of test plans for objects in an OOPS environment. It is based on the concepts of up/down axiom specification of objects and is a continuation of the work performed by Dr. B. P. Zeigler in the software tool AXClass. IDAX extends AXClass to work with all of the objects in a given Hierarchical tree in parallel, rather than singly. On top of this, IDAX moves up one level of abstraction to allow for the incremental development of objects as well as the hierarchy. The final improvement made by IDAX is the introduction of a consistent and uniform user interface. This thesis first provides ample background for the concepts introduced by the paper and IDAX, a complete discussion on the contributions and limitations of the previous work, AXClass, and introduces the IDAX tool through a discussion of the new concepts, data abstraction, and a sample session. This makes the work a stand alone reference for the IDAX tool and the concepts from which it was derived.