primary design tool is the Activity, Channel, and Pool (ACP) diagram. ACP diagrams provide a graphical description of system structure and offer a way for designers and developers to reason about a system’s runtime behaviour. The vocabulary, symbology, and structure of ACP diagrams assumes the existence of a MASCOT machine that supports the synchronization and inter-process communication implicit in MASCOT systems. MASCOT machines come in many flavours from kernel executives to operating system interfaces (depending on the underlying hardware and software) but in all cases they implement a small set of primitives and a consistent deployment target. MASCOT machines provide a virtual platform for MASCOT systems and preserve the implementation independence of ACP diagrams; in essence, any ACP diagram should run on any MASCOT machine.

System Element Templates (SETs) provide the bridge between ACP diagrams and MASCOT machines. SETs documents are simple files generated from ACP diagrams that capture their content and structure. A MASCOT machine reads and parses SET documents, configures itself according to their content, and then ‘executes’ the MASCOT system described by the SET.

Through these three components MASCOT defines a methodology that not only supports design but also a direct path to deployment. Anyone who has experienced the trauma of chasing obscure bugs during integration and delivery will appreciate the gains MASCOT can bring to the development process.