Re: Is the "Ada mandate" being reconsidered?

[pp000166@interramp.com (Robert Munck)]

On Wed, 08 May 1996 20:12:19 -0400, Theodore E. Dennison
<dennison@escmail.orl.mmc.com> wrote:
>I just read through the descripion of their review. Important points:
>  o   They seem to be taking a fair amount of care to prevent the 
>      committee from being "stacked" one way or the other.

Except, of course, that there's hardly anyone on the committee
who has come within a mile of developing applications software
for the DoD in the last decade.  They lean heavily toward university
types and vendors of development software, the kind of people who
believe "common knowledge" fairy tales about reuse, COTS, rapid
prototyping, and O-O.

Just once, I'd like to see a committee like this have a substantial
number of people who have been grunt programmers, line managers,
and second-level managers on real multi-year, multi-contractor DoD
development projects. The professorial types can do brilliant work,
and quite a few of these have made important advances in the state
of the art, but there seems to be a huge difference between the 
state of the art in which they work and the state of the practice in
which real DoD software gets written.  It's not just that one lags the
other; they seem to be going off in different directions.

For example, this group is apt to be quite taken with the 
wonderful logic of COTS and know nothing about the practical
nightmares of frequent package, OS, and platform upgrades,
user "support," and vendor instability.

I was involve in some work years ago at NRL where they brought
in the kind of real-world experienced people I'm talking about to
do some work on development environments.  It was fantastic;
they really knew what works and what doesn't from painful
experience.  Unfortunately, that kind of person is much too 
valuable doing the real work to spend time sitting on committees.

Bob Munck@acm.org