An Interactive Test Support for Stand-alone Environments

Developing software for stand-alone environments requires the availability of an interactive test support at a very early stage of work. But the rough conditions at bare hardware forces the test support to have to be content with only a minimal assistance by its environment. This of course limits its functionality. Nevertheless, primitive command line-oriented interaction with the developer should work at least. This paper presents a simple command interpreter called sash (stand-alone shell) that forms the interaction counterpart of the developer in the running stand-alone package. The interpreter was designed to require a minimum of assistance by its environment.