MONITORING AN ADA SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

This newsletter is the second in a series development process. As a result, we are describing a collaborative effort by research collecting detailed information from this teams from General Electric and the University software development to characterize both the of Maryland. The purpose of this research effort underlying process and the evolving product. is to monitor the use of Ada on a realistically This gives us the immediate benefit of having a large and complex software development complete record for gaining insight into the project within industry. In particular, we are project's successes and failures. We also view interested in investigating areas of success and this as a step toward selecting a general set of areas of difficulty in designing and coding with measures and measurement procedures that will Ada so that proper emphasis will be placed upon be useful for any software development project. these areas in future Ada training courses. We area also interested in identifying metrics that There is an increasing awareness in the are useful for evaluating and predicting the software engineering community of the need for complexity, quality, or cost of Ada programs., systematic measurement. However, there has T n r lbeen little agreement of what characteristics t