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This issue
This study was originally triggered by a decision by the Japanese to build their Fifth Generation Computer Project around systems based on logic programming rather than on more conventional imperative languages. David Card this month explains how the US Software Engineering Laboratory studied the production of FORTRAN software for spacecraft navigation systems. The paper summarizes test and verification techniques as well as design practices. Software metrics is still a relatively new area with little formal methods or theory attached to it. Norman Fenton and Agnes Kaposi argue in their paper the limitations and use of metrics in general use and offer a theory that a hierarchical decomposition can be used in terms of a tree of prime structures.
Gilles Ampt puts forward a case for the mapping of engineering life cycles on a class of Petri nets. A model of this class can reflect the state of a design at any time during its development. Aimed at software developers and software engineers, the paper provides some elementary configuration management concepts and shows how these can be covered by a data model. Finally, Russell Jones has been investigating commercial integrated project support environments (IPSEs*). His paper offers a brief overview of some IPSEs already available and how one IPSE has been implemented in a commercial environment.
Ministry of Defence opts for ADA
successful project implementations. Two main attempts are being made to develop ADA project support environments (APSEs). In Europe, the ESPRIT funded Portable Common Tools Environment (PCTE) is being analysed and evaluated. In the USA, the DoD is supporting the development of a Common APSE Interface Set (CAIS). PCTE is designed for use with IPSEs. A new version, known as P C T E + is being developed which includes security facilities essential for APSEs. Until now, the US DoD has stated that the PCTE cannot be considered as a standard for Ada development because of its lack of security facilities. Even so, since both standards have been heavily funded at the research stage, it is unlikely that either project will be dropped in favour of the other. This could mean two standards eventually being accepted which could cause confusion for developers and vendors alike. It has been suggested that some interface between the two emerging standards could be possible.
This issue In this summer issue of Information and Software Technology, a new section has been introduced. R and D reports briefly reviews software engineering papers published in other international journals. It aims to offer readers a more comprehensive software service. Programming languages, software evaluation, metrics and commercial IPSEs are the major topics featured in this issue. Chen and Williams investigate the feasibility of translating conventional languages like PASCAL and PROLOG.
The U K Ministry of Defence (MoD) is implementing its mandate to make ADA the preferred language for its computer real-time applications. The MoD's acceptance of ADA from 1 July 1987 is a significant step towards a growing interest in ADA and its development for commercial, technical and military applications. Although it may appear that the M o D was the last military department to accept ADA following the US D o D and all N A T O countries, the U K has always maintained single language validation by its adoption of the language CORAL 66. ADA is more than just a programming language, although its basic specification has similar characteristics to other languages such as c and PASCAL. However, ADA w a s created
282
by the US Department of Defense (DoD) to help improve overall software engineering techniques. Typical commercial applications most suited to ADA are complex realtime projects which give priority to the systems project development efficiency and performance. Typical non-military applications with these characteristics include banking, and financial networks, manufacturing automation, telecommunication networks and continuous process control techniques. Support environments for developers of ADA-based systems must, therefore contain more than just an ADA compiler to handle the ADA language specification. A range of other development and project management tools are also essential for
* Further research into IPSEs will be covered in future issues of Information and Software Technology.
information and software technology
Gilles Ampt puts forward a case for the mapping of engineering life cycles on a class of Petri nets. A model of this class can reflect the state of a design at any time during its development. Aimed at software developers and software engineers, the paper provides some elementary configuration management concepts and shows how these can be covered by a data model. Finally, Russell Jones has been investigating commercial integrated project support environments (IPSEs*). His paper offers a brief overview of some IPSEs already available and how one IPSE has been implemented in a commercial environment.
Ministry of Defence opts for ADA
successful project implementations. Two main attempts are being made to develop ADA project support environments (APSEs). In Europe, the ESPRIT funded Portable Common Tools Environment (PCTE) is being analysed and evaluated. In the USA, the DoD is supporting the development of a Common APSE Interface Set (CAIS). PCTE is designed for use with IPSEs. A new version, known as P C T E + is being developed which includes security facilities essential for APSEs. Until now, the US DoD has stated that the PCTE cannot be considered as a standard for Ada development because of its lack of security facilities. Even so, since both standards have been heavily funded at the research stage, it is unlikely that either project will be dropped in favour of the other. This could mean two standards eventually being accepted which could cause confusion for developers and vendors alike. It has been suggested that some interface between the two emerging standards could be possible.
This issue In this summer issue of Information and Software Technology, a new section has been introduced. R and D reports briefly reviews software engineering papers published in other international journals. It aims to offer readers a more comprehensive software service. Programming languages, software evaluation, metrics and commercial IPSEs are the major topics featured in this issue. Chen and Williams investigate the feasibility of translating conventional languages like PASCAL and PROLOG.
The U K Ministry of Defence (MoD) is implementing its mandate to make ADA the preferred language for its computer real-time applications. The MoD's acceptance of ADA from 1 July 1987 is a significant step towards a growing interest in ADA and its development for commercial, technical and military applications. Although it may appear that the M o D was the last military department to accept ADA following the US D o D and all N A T O countries, the U K has always maintained single language validation by its adoption of the language CORAL 66. ADA is more than just a programming language, although its basic specification has similar characteristics to other languages such as c and PASCAL. However, ADA w a s created
282
by the US Department of Defense (DoD) to help improve overall software engineering techniques. Typical commercial applications most suited to ADA are complex realtime projects which give priority to the systems project development efficiency and performance. Typical non-military applications with these characteristics include banking, and financial networks, manufacturing automation, telecommunication networks and continuous process control techniques. Support environments for developers of ADA-based systems must, therefore contain more than just an ADA compiler to handle the ADA language specification. A range of other development and project management tools are also essential for
* Further research into IPSEs will be covered in future issues of Information and Software Technology.
information and software technology