Situation recognition is an important problem within the surveillance domain, which addresses the problem of recognizing a priori defined patterns of interesting situations that may be of concurrent and temporal nature, and which possibly are occurring in the present flow of data and information. There may be many viable approaches, with different properties, for addressing this problem however, something they must have in common is good efficiency and high performance. In order to determine if a potential solution has these properties, it is a necessity to have access to test and development environments. In this paper we present DESIRER, a development environment for working with situation recognition, and for evaluating and comparing different approaches.