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This newsletter is the second in a series describing a collaborative effort by research teams from General Electric and the University of Maryland. The purpose of this research effort is to monitor the use of Ada on a realistically large and complex software development project within industry. In particular, we are interested in investigating areas of success and areas of difficulty in designing and coding with Ada so that proper emphasis will be placed upon these areas in future Ada training courses. We are also interested in identifying metrics that are useful for evaluating and predicting the complexity, quality, or cost of Ada programs. This newsletter briefly describes our approach to data collection follwed by a description of the software development project that we are monitoring. We then address several central issues related to the use of Ada in the design phase of this project.

The Department of Defense has spent a considerable amount of money and resources on the development of the new programming language Ada. To develop a better understanding of the nature of this language, it is necessary to pull it out of the research arena and use it in an industrial environment where one must deal with issues such as training, budgets and support facilities. To gain insight into the use of this new language, the University of Maryland and General Electric have jointly undertaken a study of the development of a software project written in Ada. A set of goals and questions was established at the beginning of the project. These include generic goals for any software development project, goals relating to Ada as a design and implementation language, and goals relating to metrics for the Ada Programming Support Environment (APSE). Data collected from the project were analyzed. This paper describes the observations which provide answers to a subset of the goals and questions. While some of the answers are relevant only to our particular environment, others apply to any group wishing to use Ada for the first time, and still others apply to any Ada environment. More specifically, this paper addresses those goals that are related to effort, changes, errors and programmer characteristics.

The emergence of Ada provides the opportunity and necessity for measurement, analysis, and experimentation in software development. Over the past several months, we have been studying a software project developed in Ada. One of the goals of the study is to identify metrics which are useful for evaluating and predicting the complexity, quality, and cost of Ada programs. This reprint defines a set of metrics for use with software development in Ada. The metrics are gathered into six categories: effort, changes, dimension, langauge use, data use, and execution. They are described further using formula generators, distributions, and formulas. Examples of each metric, as well as specific uses, are also included. Finally, our continuing research in this area is described. (Author)

This article examines the use of Ada in a software project developed by the General Electric Company. The project was monitored by the University of Maryland and GE to identify areas of success and difficulty in learning and using Ada as both a design and a coding language. Since production-quality Ada translators were not readily available, the study focused on training and early software development. Our study also presents the major factors to consider before using Ada in software development, particularly when training in Ada is necessary. Our study attempts to meet several goals. The first focuses on characterization of the effort, the changes, and the errors of the project. The second considers how Ada was used on the project. The third concerns evaluation of the data collection and validation process, while the fourth concentrates on the development of measures for the Ada Programming Support Environment.

Ada evolved from a desire within the Department of Defense to have a standard language for the development of real-time and large scale systems. In addition to providing features needed by those types of systems, Ada supports structured programming, data abstraction, modularity, and information hiding. Research with these techniques indicates that their use should improve the quality of the software development process and its product. While, programmers who are most familiar with various assembly languages and FORTRAN may use structured programming, generally they are not familiar with the other concepts. The problems with training programmers in Ada and its associated design and programming methods and then redeveloping current systems in Ada is unknown. In order to understand the effect of using Ada, the University of Maryland and the General Electric Company began a joint project. The purpose of the project is to monitor the use of Ada in an industrial software development project. In particular, we identify areas of success and difficulty in learning and using Ada as both a design and coding language. Our results indicate where emphasis should be placed in Ada training and in the development of tools and techniques for use with Ada. We also identify metrics used to evaluate and predict the cost, quality, and maintainability of Ada programs. (Author)

As any science matures, the role of measurement, analysis and experimentation grows. The software engineering community has seen the continued development of new software development methods and tools and their use in various environments. The evaluation of methods and tools began with subjective criteria and has been developing toward more objective data collection, measurement and controlled experiments. While this trend is encouraging, these evaluation studies have largely been on a one-shot basis. What has been missing is a systematic approach which defines a longe-range program for the study, analysis and evaluation of a specific method or tool. The emergence of Ada provides a focal point for developing such a systematic study. As a first step, research teams from the University of Maryland and General Electric have embarked upon an eighteen-month collaborative effort. The purpose of this effort is to monitor the use of Ada on a realistically large and complex software development project within industry.