Programming Language

Status, Costs, and Issues Associated With Defense's Implementation of Ada Gao ID: IMTEC-89-9 March 24, 1989

In response to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Department of Defense's (DOD) use of its Ada programming language, focusing on: (1) the cost to implement Ada; and (2) Ada technical issues.

GAO evaluated 100 Ada projects and found that: (1) 87 percent of the projects were either planned or in developmental stages; (2) the Air Force and the Army issued Ada procedures; (3) DOD inventories on Ada projects were incomplete and DOD could not assess whether Ada's use would achieve its intended objectives; (4) DOD has not designed projects to assess long-term Ada cost-effectiveness; (5) DOD expended about $201 million on three organizations to implement Ada or develop new software engineering techniques; (6) 23 of the 100 Ada projects focused on studies and demonstrations using Ada in certain applications and developing related software; and (7) there were technical issues concerning DOD use of Ada, including software availability, compiler quality, useability in real-time systems, and applicability of Ada to data-base management systems.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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