JAVS was developed as a tool to assist developers and testers of JOVIAL software in determining the extent to which their programs have been tested, and in deriving additional test cases to further verify them. Testing has often been without an orderly approach and without accurate means of determining exactly what portions of code have actually been exercised. JAVS is an automated tool for quantifying the effectiveness of test data in exercising a program's control structures. In addition, JAVS can be used to generate descriptive program documentation, provide dynamic execution traces of modules and DD-paths (described later), assist in generation of additional test cases, and flag unexpected execution behavior through the use of computation directives.