A novel environment for test program development will be introduced that supports automatic specification-driven and computer-assisted test parameter acquisition, automatic test program generation and automatic documentation generation. Test parameter and test pattern acquisition, main portion of test program generation and documentation generation have been designed to be tester-independent by means of automatic technology file access and simulation-to-test signal conversion. A built-in rule checker guarantees for test parameter consistency and completeness. Runtimeoptimization of test programs, and test document generation can be done upon user request.