"Bill (McCaffrey) and I were doing hourly programming in California on a US Navy submarine weapons system," recalls Paliotta. This project required extensive unit testing, which was incredibly time-consuming due to the lack of efficient tools. "There were no language-sensitive editors, and compilation on VAX / VMS was slow. For example, it took all night to build the software for our 40-person team, and it often failed with compile errors."

Frustrated with the inefficiencies, Paliotta took matters into his own hands. "I created a terminal-based test bed that I could use to run integration tests. Basically, it showed a menu of all the messages, you picked one, and it showed the list of fields, you picked one and set the value, etc. Then you could send the message, and the tool would print the result."

After moving back to Rhode Island and working at Raytheon, the idea of a "module acceptance test tool" emerged. "This was similar to what I had built in California, and I worked on that for 18 months or so with a group of four," says Paliotta. When this contract ended, they decided to build what would become VectorCAST.

"I found a recursive descent parser for Ada that was open source and, not knowing anything about parsers, started stripping it down until I understood it. At the end, basically using the tokenizer and a bit of other stuff, that is still in the VectorCAST/Ada tool. Then I started building a code generator on top of this to auto-generate test harnesses. This was in mid-1993."

While Paliotta worked on the prototype, his partner Bill McCaffrey began pitching the idea of automated unit testing for Ada to companies. "He got an overwhelming positive response, almost everyone said they would be interested … people hated unit testing. We had no idea that a normal positive response to cold calling was 5%."

After about nine months, they had a beta version running on Windows and SunOS. Their initial plan was to OEM the tool to compiler companies. "We demoed it to Alsys (later called Aonix), Verdix (soon to be acquired by Rational), and Intermetrics. These three companies were the 'winners' of the DoD Ada design competition."

The big break came when Alsys mentioned their tool to Lockheed in Marietta, GA. "We brought a small Sun workstation down to Marietta and did a demo for them with their code using the Verdix Ada compiler, and somehow the tool worked on their code. It was far from complete, but on the basis of this demo and some additional discussion, they sent us a PO for about $100k for 5 'native' licenses and 4 target licenses, 2 for PPC and 2 for MIPS."