Migrating legacy AdaTEST projects

Many safety-critical projects are looking to upgrade from AdaTEST to a modern testing tool as AdaTEST offers limited support and only supports testing code up to Ada 95.

This post demonstrates how RapiTest supports the migration of AdaTEST projects, and the benefits of migrating your AdaTEST project to RapiTest.

Running AdaTEST tests through RapiTest

RapiTest can run AdaTEST tests and report results for them as though they were written in RapiTest formats, letting you produce certification evidence from your existing tests without needing to modify them or perform additional reviews.

To run AdaTEST tests, RapiTest links source code and AdaTEST ATH files with a custom compatibility library, and runs the resulting test executables. The compatibility library produces test results in the same way as AdaTEST, but exports them to an RVS report database (RVD file) rather than an AdaTEST ATR file. You can view these results in the RVS Project Manager.

The overall process is shown in Figure 1.

Getting more from your testing

As a modern testing tool, RapiTest offers many benefits over AdaTEST, which increase testing efficiency and ensure the safety of your test project for years to come.  

• Support for all versions of Ada, unlike AdaTEST, which does not support versions later than Ada95.
• Reduced effort writing, debugging, maintaining and reviewing tests through RapiTest's powerful test formats, which aren't protected by IP and don't lock you into using RapiTest.
• With RapiTest's flexible stubbing mechanism, there's no need to write your subprograms in separate files to stub them.
• Tool automation support, including support for continuous integration systems like Jenkins.
• By using RapiTest along with RapiCover and/or RapiTime, you can produce easily viewable reports that include coverage and/or timing data as well as unit test results and get more from your testing.
• Continuous updates from a company you can trust - unlike AdaTEST, RapiTest is under continuous development, and maintenance and support, including frozen version support, is available.

When you run both AdaTEST and RapiTest tests in the same project, you can automatically merge your results into a combined report, which you can view, export, and use for certification evidence.

Want to migrate your AdaTEST project?

If you have an AdaTEST project that you want to migrate, contact us to see how we can help. 

To get the most from RapiTest and increase the efficiency of your testing, you can follow RapiTest's in-depth tutorials and take advantage of our detailed tool training courses. 

If you need to edit your existing AdaTEST tests, you'll likely save future effort debugging, maintaining and reviewing them by converting them to RapiTest formats. We offer a service to run this conversion – for more information, contact us.

Dr. Daniel Wright