Ada (Trademark) Development Environments

This paper reports on the findings of a software development group on the state of two specific Ada software development environments. The report first goes into a little background on the project and people involved. Next, the overall goals we had established for using an Ada software development environment are described. It was basically envisioned that a set of integrated tools would allow us to be more productive, produce a more reliable product, and easily, but effectively, control our software configuration. The next section describes the process used to identify and select our environments. We started out to use the SofTech ALS system for the primary development environment, and the Alsys PC AT Ada environment for final testing and integration. Because of numerous problems with the ALS environment, we ended up almost exclusively using the IBM PC AT environment for all the work. After problems and advantages for each of the environments are discussed, we then make some specific recommendations for other groups starting out with Ada software development. Finally, the paper gives some sources for obtaining additional information on Ada software development tools and environments.