Re: Ada scandal makes front page of Wash. Post business section

[eachus@spectre.mitre.org (Robert I. Eachus)]

In article <C3sFnI.6ws@hawk.cs.ukans.edu> billk@hawk.cs.ukans.edu (Bill Kinnersley) writes:

  > It seems to me that the easiest way to refute this well-publicized example
  > is by giving a counterexample.  Is there a project that you can point to 

  >  a) Of comparable size, complexity and importance
  >  b) Ada was used
  >  c) The programmers were happy
  >  d) The customers were happy
  >  e) Modifications were easily made
  >  f) The project came in on time

    The FAA tower/terminal upgrade involved the same contractor, the
same language, the same tools, and the same client.  It was somewhat
smaller (one million lines of code vs. 1.5 million) but a significant
amount of the code is shared between the two projects.

    I believe that project meets all of your requirements except f).
I'm not sure about completion, but the initial installation was about
three weeks late because the FAA wanted to spend some additional time
on testing and closing bug reports.  (I wasn't there...but I've talked
to people who were.  I don't question the decision to miss the
schedule, but my understanding is that the concern was with "warm
fuzzies" rather than any known serious bugs or any found during the
testing. It could have been deployed on schedule, but everyone was a
lot more cofortable with few more weeks to check things out.))

    As I've pointed out elsewhere there are a lot of other ATC systems
in Ada, which meet all the criteria except size.  (They are about half
the size of the US system or smaller.)


--

					Robert I. Eachus

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