From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.5-pre1 (2020-06-20) on ip-172-31-74-118.ec2.internal X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.8 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_50 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.5-pre1 Date: 22 Apr 93 21:43:47 GMT From: news.byu.edu!cwis.isu.edu!fcom.cc.utah.edu!csulx.weber.edu!bnelson@gatech .edu (Bert Nelson) Subject: Report from the Software Technology Conference in SLC, Utah Message-ID: <1993Apr22.214347.27756@fcom.cc.utah.edu> List-Id: The following is a copy of my draft report of my expereince at the Software Technology Conference. This conference has an emphasis towards Ada usage and software engineering within the defense industry and the military. Bert Nelson bnelson@csulx.weber.edu with the_usual_disclaimers; DRAFT Trip Report Software Technology Conference Salt Lake City, Utah April 19 - 21 Bert Nelson On April 19, 20, 21 I attended the Software Technology Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. This report is a summary of the events that I attended and participated in. The actual details of the papers presented will be forthcoming in the proceedings of the conference that will be mailed out in a few weeks. The Software Technology Conference was attended by nearly 1800 people. These people consisted of representatives from all branches of the armed forces and the defense industry. The larger contractors such as GE and Lockheed had a visible presence at the conference. The conference consisted of eight concurrent tracks including such topics as software engineering and process improvement. About 130 papers were presented at the conference, which were taken from a pool of 500 papers that were considered for the conference. A new twist on the conference was its sponsorship. This conference was jointly sponsored by the Air Force, Army, and Navy. In years previous the Air Force was the lone sponsor of the conference. The theme of the conference was "Software -- The Force Multiplier". The keynote address on the theme was given by Lt. General Albert J. Edmonds, Acting J-6 the Joint Staff. The bulk of his comments was a proclamation of the continued support of Ada as the primary language for Department of Defense software. He said that "Ada is crucial" and that the military is still committed to the use of the language. Prior to General Edmonds address Lt. General Peter Kind from the U.S. Army had a few remarks. He thought that software productivity is the challenge that we need to face up to. To illustrate his concept he told the audience about a study done on software productivity that included many countries. The formula used in this study for software productivity was Software Productivity = Cost / Function Points. There were three areas included in this study: management information systems, systems software and military software. From this study it was concluded that in management information systems software the United States was the leader with a ranking of first in the world. In systems software Japan was number one followed by the USA, which was ranked second. And in military software France was number one followed by the likes of Germany and Japan. The United States was ranked eighth just above Egypt and Brazil, who were ranked ninth and tenth respectively. In addition to the presentation tracks and the speeches there were over seventy exhibits by defense contractors and software companies. The largest number of displays were in the area of Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools. Most of these software packages are designed for the workstation environment running under Unix and X windows. The largest problem I see with these tools that if you do use them then you have to make a large investment in money and time to use them. Another problem that comes up is that if a particular package is purchased you may be locked into a software and the hardware platform it requires for a long period of time. The most useful tool I saw was an Ada sensitive editor. This editor will check for syntax errors and automatically format the data according the industry standard, which can be adjusted to add or take away from that standard. In one example I saw how the word "goto" was entered on a line. After pressing the return key the software inserted commented lines that warned the user that using the goto was against the standard and should be avoided. The user has two choices at this point. He can ignore the warning and the software will compile since the warning was in the form of an Ada comment or he can tell the software to remove the goto will a click on his mouse. On the whole the conference was very good. The organization of the conference and the presentations were done in a first class manner. Buzzwords at the Conference Object Oriented Ancient Artifacts Real Time Embedded Systems Domain Engineering Domain Analysis Reengineering Software Reuse Component Reuse Reuse Ada X Windows POSIX Rightsizing Summary of a few notes from the tutorials, tracks, and speeches. >>From the tutorial, "A Reengineering Tutorial" by Evan Lock. One of the goals of reengineering is the quest to understand how the software works. You to facilitate understanding by continually breaking down the software into manageable pieces everyone can understand. And there needs to be a facility (preferably an automated one) that allows you to retrieve this information graphically. Another issue is when you translate old existing code in another language such as Fortran into Ada. Do you maintain the code to fulfill new requirements in the old language or do you go straight to Ada. Mr. Lock suggest that "you bite the bullet" and translate immediately to Ada. "Software Reuse" by James A. Hess, who works for the U.S. Army The motivation for software reuse is simple -- the Army currently has about 43 million lines of code in production and the number of lines is growing. There needs to be a method to reduce code and their associate costs through reuse. The three driving principles of software reuse are 1) Be Domain Specific Focus the software to the task at hand 2) Process Driven Reuse should be part and parcel of software development; not an afterthought 3) Life Cycle Component Reusable objects are not limited only to code, but can include designs, requirements, test plans, etc. Marie Riggs from the Army Reuse Office A question from the audience was raised as to the quality of software in the Army Reuse repository. She pointed out that in the Army there are four levels of software integrity involved in classifying software. The lowest level is level 1, which are Ada packages that are provided "as is" and may have syntax errors in them. The highest level is level 4, which includes a fully tested Ada package, along with test suites, and documentation for reuse in the form a reuse manual. The issue of whether we can we have a central Ada (and other life cycle components) repository was brought up. Ms. Riggs answered by saying that the technical problems to overcome in running a repository are simple compared to the political and economic obstacles that come up. Vice Admiral Jerry Tuttle, United States Navy One of his main topics was the electronic super highway. He said our challenge is to create software to facilitate the newer, faster technology. He mentioned that in the last 20 years it has gone from 10 to 7 to 3 years to get an order of magnitude of increased performance in computer hardware. He mentioned the importance of software in military hardware. For example, the new Advanced Tactical fighter will have about 80% of its functions control through the software and it will take an estimated 10 million lines of code to accomplish. His next topic was how to improve the code in system. He said that most errors in the code are a result of the requirements phase, but that only 5% of the errors are caught at this stage. There is a need to use tools up front to trap errors, which saves costs. The further along you are in the life of a software project the harder and more expensive it is to fix bugs in the code. He mentioned that effective specifications are necessary for good software. Some of his final words were that "only software will unlock the potential of this new hardware". Phillip Gould from Lockheed Mr. Gould mentioned there is a large issue in the F22 project. The largest challenge for the F22 project is to get hardware and software for the life of the project, which is expected to run to the year 2033, or about 30 years. He said that it may be impossible to support a given software/hardware platform for a number of reasons, but he thinks there might be an answer. The answer is to define clearly the functionality that you want the software/hardware to accomplish. By doing this you get what you want without being tied to a particular software or hardware platform. Robert E. Johnson Jr. "Army Ada Technology Insertion Program". The goal of the Army Ada Technology Insertion Program is to develop software that would go over and beyond current project needs and would be available for reuse by other projects within the services, not just the Army. The idea is to share code that has already been developed and tested. "Status of Ada 9X", Chris Anderson, Ada 9X Project Manager Ms. Anderson gave a very brief overview of the status of the Ada 9X project. She said that there has been unanimous international approval of pieces of the Ada 9X project, which has been made easier by the fact that Ada 83 is an ANSI, Military, and ISO standard. Timetable for the completion of Ada 9X Event Projected Date Draft 9X September 1993 Final Approved 9X December 1994 Validated Commercial First Quarter 1995 9X compilers available Ms. Anderson also commented on the growing acceptance by the object oriented community of Ada 9X. At one of the big objected orient conferences later this year an entire section of presentations will be devoted to Ada 9X.