by United States Department of Defense

“ A separately identifiable collection of information in the database is known as an object in this document. An object has a name by which it may be uniquely identified in the database, it has attributes and it contains information. Typically, an object may contain a separately compilable Ada program unit, a fragment of Ada text, a separable definition, a file of test data, a project requirements specification, an aggregation of other object names (i.e., a configuration; see below) , a documentation file, etc. ”

“ For any configuration of software, it is necessary to be able to determine the origin and purpose of each component of the configuration and to control the process of further development and maintenance of the configuration.
2.B.6 The user interface offered by an APSE is independent of the host machine.
2.B.7 At all stages of the development of a program—design, coding, testing, maintenance—an APSE encourages the programmer to work in Ada source terms, rather than in terms of the assembly language of the particular host or target machine. ”

“ Every object within a version group shall always be accessible by providing the complete object name.
4.A.5 The database shall support the generation and control of configuration objects; that is, objects which are themselves groupings of other objects in the database. The configuration control facilities shall allow access to the objects in a version group by the use of an incomplete name. ”

“ The practice is developing whereby the hardware/software system used during development is contracted as a deliverable and shipped with the product, enabling fault correcting and system upgrading to continue much as described under TESTING above. The system typically continues to undergo change throughout the lifecycle and the annual extent of changes may well be of the same order of magnitude as that of the original system. ”

“ Many embedded computer applications require software that will continue to operate in the presence of faults.... The applications may require the monitoring of sensors, control of equipment displays or operator input processing. They must interface to special peripheral equipment.... Software must sometimes be able to respond at periodic (real time) intervals, to service interrupts within limited times, and to predict computation times.... In many applications..it is necessary to access, manipulate and display large quantities of data. ”

“ An APSE shall provide a program development and maintenance environment for embedded computer system projects involving Ada programs, with the intent of improving long-term cost effective software reliability.
3.B QUALITY: An APSE shall reflect the priorities for software quality in military embedded computer applications; that is, reliability, performance, evolution, maintenance and responsiveness to changing requirements. ”

“ An APSE will be a highly robust system that can protect itself from user and system errors, that can recover from unforseen situations and that can provide meaningful diagnostic information to its users. ”

“ For some projects there is no host computer and implementation is directly on the target machine with minimal support facilities.
2.A.6 TESTING:
(a) Syntactic and static semantic errors are resolved simply at source code level by the compiler;
(b) The next stage of module testing may be done in the host if an instruction level simulator for the target exists; this is more likely if some simplified environment simulator is available on the host to provide test data input;
(c) The real testing takes place in the "software test lab." ”

“ A tool is required to assist in long term configuration control of projects. As minimal functions this tool will enable interrogation of history attributes and will offer managerial control over the persistence of objects in the database.
6.B MAPSE TOOLSET NOTES 6.B.1 The most common action in a programming environment is the manipulation of objects. In a complex APSE, much of this manipulation is done automatically by many of its advanced tools. ”

“ An APSE may provide an editor specifically for Ada source programs. This will assist in the preparation of syntactically correct programs by providing templates for language constructs and by checking input for consistency as appropriate.
7.A.3 DOCUMENTATION SYSTEM: A substantial part of the effort of developing a system is devoted to its associated documentation; for example in specifications, design documents, user manuals and educational material, and so on. An APSE may provide a tool to support the production and control of documentation for a project. ”

“ CreationIt is possible to create database objects which contain specifications, design documentation, program source text, program documentation, test data, and so on. (2) ModificationA database object can be modified to produce a new object (or a new version of the same object) , for example, by editing. (3) AnalysisThe entities in a database object can be analyzed, producing a new object which records the results of this analysis. ”

“ The testing phase of a project is often more expensive than development. 2.A.7 DATA HANDLING: Typically about half the embedded computer memory may contain data, partially fixed and partially mission-dependent, e.g., flight performance details and maps respectively. Although code is rarely classified, data is often classified and can only be loaded in a secure environment. ”

“ The attributes which record history, categorization and access rights are mandatory. The list of possible attributes is open-ended and some APSEs may provide further attributes.
5.B.2 CATEGORIZATIONS: Every object has a category attribute. In general, a tool will only access objects of an appropriate category. Other tools, however, may need to access objects regardless of their category; one such tool is a general copying tool. ”

“ Wherever possible, the concepts of the Ada language will be used in the APSE.
3.D LIFE CYCLE SUPPORT: Support shall be provided to projects throughout the software life cycle from requirements and design through implementation to long term maintenance and modifications.
3.E PROJECT TEAM SUPPORT: An APSE shall support all functions required by a project team. These functions include project management control, documentation and recording, and long-term configuration and release control.
3.F USER HELPFULNESS: High priority will be given to human engineering requirements in the design. ”

“ Various special purpose tools are built in a somewhat project specific way, either by building from scratch or by modifying other tools; these may include overlay optimisers for discs or drums, load tape builders, patch override consolidators, etc.
2.A.13 An environment simulator is of particular importance as a project- specific tool which is always required and may well require as much effort to design and build as a major component of the system. ”

“ The evolving nature of the requirements, where an initial general specification is made more precise as the project proceeds. This produces rapid iterations between design and experiment. Typically, in many cases less time is spent in coding than in interacting with the system designers and other component designers such as hardware engineers. ”

“ For example, highly-integrated top-down development systems may be produced in some programming research establishments, meeting the APSE requirements but not reflecting the KAPSE/MAPSE structure.
2.C.4 All such systems, of course, represent entirely valid approaches to use of the Ada language. A further intent of the Stoneman, however, is to propose a way forward towards the goal of portability. APSEs will address this requirement where relevant by making explicit a KAPSE portability level. ”

“ Linkers are required in a MAPSE for both the host and target machines. The facilities needed are:
Partial linking of program units in conformance with language specifications Creation of an executable program from program units (perhaps partially linked) with the following options: Logical to physical mapping Overlay management Omission of unused compilation units Creation of a single load file Linkage map including variable types and unit cross reference Elimination of redundant generic code bodies. ”

“ Such interface definitions shall be given in the form of package specifications in the Ada language.
5.E.2 Interface definitions provided by the KAPSE shall encompass
(i) the primitive operations that the KAPSE makes available to APSE tools; these include any operations that may be necessary to supplement the facilities of package INPUT_OUTPUT (see 5.A.10) in order to allow an APSE tool access to all the functional capabilities of the database, (ii) the abstract data types (type declarations plus operations) that are required to interface the various stages of compilation ”

“ It exists primarily for managerial purposes as a means of applying broad access and budgetary control to large collections of information associated with projects. It can also play a part in implementation strategies designed to improve access to specifically important partitions in large data bases.
4.B.6 ACCESS CONTROLS: The access control requirements on APSEs are expected to be highly specific to the applications area and methodology of each APSE. Some areas will require very detailed controls whereas others will require only a few broad classes of protection. ”

“ Some configurations are long-lived, such as major system releases, and others may be temporary test-beds for development purposes. The relationships between objects in different configurations are in general complex, partially overlapping and not well-structured. ”

“ Particularly substantial contributions have been made by R.F. Brender, T.E. Cheatham. R.A. Converse, L.E. Druffel, R. Firth, H. Fischer, D.A. Fisher, R.L. Glass, H. Hart, D.S. Johnson, N.M. Lehman, L. MacLaren, D. Notkin, I.C. Pyle, D.F. Roberts, P. Santoni, E. Satterthwaite, T.A. Standish, S.L. Squires, J.A. Townley and P. Wegner. ”