XMM-Newton Science Analysis System


omvariability (omvariability-1.6) [xmmsas_20230412_1735-21.0.0]

Testing

The aim of the test is to demonstrate that omvariability correctly computes variability parameters for each common source in the list of input SWS source-list files and correctly adds the data in the correct positions in the given output file.

The test directory for omvariability contains a shell program that performs the following:

• Runs the program createfiles that produces-
  • A master source list file (masterfile.fits that contains celestial coordinates, corrected count-rates and errors, source extension, confusion and quality flags. This file has a similar structure to that of an observation source-list file produced by the SAS task omsrclistcomb.

  • Four source-list files each containing a list of sources taken randomly from the master source-list file. Each source has a random small error added to the corrected count-rate. These files would be the input source-lists to omsrclistcomb that would produce the output file masterfile.fits.

  • A reference source-list file (checkfile.fits, first copied from masterfile.fits, and then having variability columns V_CHI2 and V_NSTD added. These columns are computed using the corrected count-rates for each source in a SWS file that corresponds to a given source in masterfile.fits.

• Runs omvariability with the parameter srclistsets set to the list of SWS files and the parameter outset set to the file masterfile.fits

• Runs the program checkoutput that compares the celestial-coordinates and variability parameters stored in the SRCLIST tables masterfile.fits with those stored in checkfile.fits. For any column (eg RA or V_CHI2 the values in each row of the two tables are compared, and any difference in the quantities that exceeds a tolerance of 1e-6 is considered to be an error and the test-harness fails outputting details where the failure occurred.

  checkoutput also checks that the variability parameters are computed properly by computing the parameters for 10 unique sources, each having a hard-wired list of multiply-detected sources, and comparing the computed and hard-wired values. Any difference greater than 1e-6 is reported as an error.

For more thorough development testing, the number of SWS files can be set to any number by editing the program createfiles.