Original Date: 03/01/1993
Revision Date: 01/18/2007

Naval Aviation Depot (NADEP), Jacksonville has been designated as a Test Integration Facility (TIF) for the Consolidated Automated Support System (CASS). The CASS is a suite of general purpose automatic test equipment designed to perform functional tests, fault detection, and isolation of Naval airborne avionics, repairable weapon assemblies and shop repairable assemblies. The federal government is attempting to contract with various military hardware contractors to provide engineering and development of Operational Test Program Sets (TPSs) to implement these tests. As the TIF, NADEP, Jacksonville is striving to become the Navy's TPSs expert to assist Naval Air Systems Command in placing these contracts.

In pursuit of this goal, the NADEP, Jacksonville Hardware/Software Engineering Division has a technical staff dedicated to Operational TPSs development, realizing that only peer status will allow them to adequately review the work of other programmers in a technology this complex. These test engineers then create tools to enhance the development of the Operational TPSs. Boilerplate ATLAS programs (the analog test language of the CASS) were written to save programming start-up time and to establish a standard style guide for the program packages. A Technical Risk Assessment Guide (TRAG) was developed to support the consistent, accurate generation of cost and work load estimates. An automatic TPSs process flowcharting program was implemented to perform a task considered tedious by many programmers. Graphics conversion software was also developed to automatically import mechanical artwork into the Operational TPSs documentation. Boilerplate Operational TPSs documentation was created as a configuration control, and to minimize unnecessary rewriting. Personal computers were networked to the VAXs hosting the test program generation software, giving all of the programmers convenient yet economical access.

The Engineering Division has created a working environment for itself and potential contractors that should accelerate the completion of program sets for introduction into the fleet. A shop is even provided for building, debugging, or repairing the interface devices being developed by the contractor to electrically connect the avionics equipment to the CASS interface.

For more information see the Point of Contact for this survey.