Fortran Testing and Refactoring Infrastructure

Tech-X proposes to develop a comprehensive Fortran testing and refactoring infrastructure that allows developers and scientists to leverage the benefits of a comprehensive Integrated Developer Environment (IDE). An intriguing aspect of the infrastructure is the integration of performance measurement and monitoring from within the IDE that allows developers to get immediate feedback about tests, the overall application and modifications due to refactoring. Our goal isto promote modern software engineering methodology to a broad spectrum ofFortran users. The infrastructure will facilitate refactoring newly developed and legacy codes correctly and accurately for single and multi-processor applications and will provide facility for both unit and regression testing. Major benefits to refactoring include creating robust codes that are more easily ported to different hardware and software platforms and promoting extensibility and collaboration. For example, refactoring code to remove common blocks allows porting to multi-core architectures with increased thread safety while promoting best software engineering practices. By leveraging the existing capabilities of pFUnit (an xUnit variant that supports Fortran) and Photran (a Fortran Integrated Development Environment and Eclipse plugin) we will be able to quickly contribute to the Fortrandeveloper community, whos feedback we hope to use to guide our product development.