Undergraduate courses needed in Ada and software engineering

More than a decade ago, data processing professionals began to realize a software crisis. Although Barry Boehe's figures show the United States" software cost in 1980 was approximately 2 percent of the gross ~atlo~a~ #roeuet (GHP}, Dolotta et al have estimated this cost to rise to 8.5 percent of the OMP by 1985 and Steel's projections show the same cost rising to 13 percent of the GNP. Rising software costs happens to be an international trend which has raised many concerns. These concerns prompted ~he US Department of Defense (DoD) to launch development of the Ada language several years ago. Recently, USAw European Economic Community (EEC), United Kingdom and Japan have also launched major national software engineering projects. The old approaches, methods and techniques are being superseded by new technological developments. Development of various Ada Programming Support Environments (APSEs) and adoption of these APSEs by large employers, e.g., various services within DoD, other government agencies and many large corporations, is opening up the doors for college graduates in numbers that do not exist now. Many undergraduate programs in computer science, information science and related fields have not yet integrated these developments and realities into their curriculum. This paper presents research ideas for such needed integration. Ada i s a reg is te red trademark o4 the United States Government, Department o4 Defense (Ada Jo in t Pro jec t O f f i ce ) . The de4 in i t i ons fo r the technica l terms used in t h i s paper may be found in the IEEE document Std 729-1983: JEEE Standa rd Glossary of S o f t w a r e Engineering Terminology EISJ. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial 'advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its dale appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Association for Computing Machinery. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and /o r specific permission. © 1985 A C M 0 8 9 7 9 1 1 5 2 0 / 8 5 / 0 0 3 / 0 2 6 6 $ 0 0 . 7 5