Ada Resource Association

Altran Praxis announced that its SPARK language has been selected by a new, NASA-funded US lunar mission. SPARK will be used to develop the software behind a CubeSat project being developed by a consortium comprising Vermont Technical College, Norwich University, St. Michael’s College, and the University of Vermont.

The ease with which code is analyzable depends of the language type you use. Static analysis is becoming mainstream, with mature bug-finding tools for C and Java, including products such as Coverity Prevent, Grammatech CodeSonar, and Fortify SCA. These products limit the level of “noise” (false warnings) inherent to such tools to a minimum. However, by carefully selecting those cases for which they report a problem, these bug-finders hide the fact that they are largely uncertain about the overall correctness of the program.

Unit Test has been around almost as long as software development itself. It just makes sense to take each application building block, build it in isolation, and execute it with test data to make sure that it does just what it should do without any confusing input from the remainder of the application. In the past, the sting came from not being able to simply lift a software unit from its development environment, compile and run it let alone supply it with test data.

Static analysis tools are becoming more integrated into the software development process. Saving data from the compiler, change history, and error information during the process instead of as a post-code step can make static analysis more productive.

Jack Ganssle at Embedded.com discusses the Sofcheck and AdaCore CodePeer tool in Executing software contracts; in particular he examines the tool’s ability to create contracts for subprograms.

William Wong looks at the Dasher project being developed by Mälardalen University in Sweden.

LDRA has released a security-critical development and certification solution to ensure the company’s tool suite meets the growing demand for security-critical software.

Jack Ganssle at Embedded.com wonders Why aren’t developers more interested in Ada?

A follow-up piece by Jack Ganssle from his original article on the adoption of Ada which appears on Embedded.com.

An article in GCN (Government Computing News) that looks at an NSA-funded project carried out by the U.K.-based Praxis High Integrity Systems and Spre Inc. NSA commissioned the project, which involved writing code for an access control system, to demonstrate high-assurance software engineering.