Tracking the Use of Ada in Commercial Applications; Case Studies and Summary Report. Revision.

Four case studies were conducted in support of an Ada Joint Program Office AJPO effort to assist key managers in the evaluation of Adas appropriateness as az technology for developing management information systems MIS. This report describes the allocations studied as well as some of the dynamics involved with their development. The report seeks to qualitatively describe the costs, risks, and benefits present in these applications. The descriptive method provides sufficient detail for the manager to better relate the studies to his or her own situation and experience. Our research builds on a comprehensive independent study to develop accurate methods of quantifying the costs, benefits, and risks of an Ada project. Even though this comprehensive study was based on non-MIS applications, our case study questions were designed to test the correlation of their conclusions with our results. Applications were selected which would contribute important areas of understanding to the consideration of ADA for MIS. One case study was a complete branch banking system, including data base, office automation, and communications software. Another, a relational data base system complete with application generator and related tools, gave insights into portability, reliability, and maintainability issues. A third imposed the performance, reliability, and failure recovery requirements of a financial transaction system. The fourth integrated off-the-shelf components into reusable Ada subsystems.