Fortran Testing and Refactoring Infrastructure, Phase II

Tech-X proposes to develop a comprehensive Fortran testing and refactoring infrastructure that allows developers and scientists to leverage the benefits of comprehensive Integrated Developer Environment (IDE) tools. An intriguing aspect of the infrastructure is the integration of performance measurement, unit testing, and refactoring tools with the many other features of an IDE, which will allow developers to get immediate feedback about the overall application and reduce their development cycle time. Our goal is to promote modern software engineering methodology to a broad spectrum of Fortran users. The infrastructure will facilitate refactoring newly developed and legacy codes correctly and accurately for single and multi-processor applications. Major benefits to refactoring include creating robust codes that are more easily ported to different hardware and software platforms, promoting extensibility, facilitating better collaboration, and encouraging best software engineering practices. For example, refactoring code to remove common blocks allows porting to multi-core architectures with increased thread safety. By packaging pFUnit (Fortran Unit Test Tool) into the Eclipse, combining with improved versions of Photran IDE and the Parallel Tools Platform plugins, the proposed integration we will be able to quickly contribute to the Fortran developer community, whose feedback we hope to use to guide our product development. More »