Co-chaired by Mr. Currie Colket, Chairman ASIS Working Group/Chairman ASIS Rapporteur Group and Dr. Sergey Rybin, Moscow State University. The panel is co-chaired as both will be speaking. The two slides for introducing the ASIS 95 panel are available in in PostScript form (42 Kbytes).
Panelists: Mr. Pascal Leroy, Rational Software Corporation
Mr. Bertrand Petitprez, Sema Group Grenoble
Mr. Clyde Roby, Institute for Defense Analyses
Mr. Jesper Jorgensen, DDC-I
Mr. Tom Strelich, GRC
Mr. Bill Thomas, MITRE
Keywords: ASIS, Tools, Software Quality, Quality Assurance,
Software Engineering Environments, Software
Development Environments, Safety-Critical Systems
Topics/Subtopics:
Ada 95 Language and Tools; Tools; Software
Quality; Safety-Critical Systems
The ASIS Panel will address the new ASIS specification to support Ada 95, its use in developing CASE tools, and ASIS resources available. The Ada Semantic Interface Specification (ASIS) is an interface between an Ada environment as defined by ISO/IEC 8652:1995 (the Ada95 Reference Manual) and any tool requiring information from this environment. The panel will be presented in two 90 minute sessions with a break in between. The first session will focus on what is ASIS; the second session will provide ASIS usage experience for a variety of CASE tools.
ASIS is an excellent interface for the tool builder in that it provides a cost-effective and portable way to access valuable syntactic and static semantic information from the Ada compilation environment. ASIS is an open and published callable interface which gives CASE tool and application developers access to this information. ASIS has been designed to be independent of underlying Ada environment implementations, thus supporting portability of software engineering tools while relieving tool developers from having to understand the complexities of an Ada environment's proprietary internal representation.
Examples of tools that benefit from the ASIS interface include: code restructuring tools, code browsing and navigation tools, coding style and standards compliance tools, cross-reference tools, data flow analysis tools, dependency tree analysis tools, design tools, document generation tools, invocation (call) tree analysis tools, language-sensitive editing and pretty-printing tools, language translation tools, quality assessment tools, reverse engineering tools, re-engineering tools, safety and security compliance tools, static correctness verifiers, tasking analysis tools, test-case generation and coverage analysis tools, and usage, quality, and complexity metrics tools. In fact most of these have already been developed using the ASIS interfaces by people in Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Usage experience will address use of ASIS for building coding style and standards compliance tools, code restructuring tools, re-engineering tools, safety and security compliance tools, quality assessment tools, metrics analysis tools, and applications. Approaches for using the recently developed ASIS for GNAT for CASE tools will be addressed. This will be an opportunity to discuss issues and technical solutions concerning the building of CASE tools using ASIS with those who have already done so.
ASIS was initiated as a Software Technology for Adaptable, Reliable Systems (STARS) program activity in 1989. It became unfunded for FY90 when the STARS program decided not to fund standardization activities. Several vendors continued work on ASIS on their own. In 1992 the Ada Board recognized the potential benefits to the Ada community of an ASIS standard and recommended that the Ada Joint Program Office (AJPO) director support by whatever means possible the development of an ASIS standard and its submission to ISO/WG9 for publication. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM's) Special Interest Group on Ada (SIGAda) is now continuing this important work though volunteer effort in the ASIS Working Group (ASISWG). An ASIS Rapporteur Group (ASISRG) was established on 28 April 1995 by ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22 WG9 to standardize ASIS as an international standard for Ada95 [ISO/IEC 8652.1995 (15 February 1995)].
An ASIS for Ada95 is in process. A rather complete draft for the ASIS 95 specification was released last November at Tri-Ada'95. A Committee Draft may be approved by WG9 this summer. An ASIS95 implementation to the Free Software Foundation Ada95 GNAT compiler is being developed by Dr. Sergey Rybin from Moscow State University in conjunction with Professor Alfred Strohmeier of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. A prototype ASIS 95 implementation is available by anonymous ftp on the lglftp.epfl.ch host in the pub/ASIS directory. It is currently limited to processing only one Compilation Unit at a time, and as a prototype, has components that are far from being completed. By Ada-Europe'96, ASIS for GNAT is expected to process all the Ada source files contained in the current directory. Several Ada95 compiler vendors will have an ASIS95 implementation in the near future.
This panel will address the new ASIS specification to support the Ada 95 ISO standard, its use in developing CASE tools for an Ada environment, its use for supporting application requirements, ASIS resources including available tutorials, and the ASIS 95 implementation for the GNAT compiler. ASIS resources are available on the World Wide Web =>
The panel will be presented in two 90 minute sessions with a break in between. The first session will focus on what is ASIS; the second session will provide ASIS usage experience. Times identified in the first session include time for questions.
Mr. Currie Colket Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command SPAWAR PMW 133 2451 Crystal Drive Arlington, VA 22245-5200 - USA Phone: +1 (703) 602-1483 Fax: +1 (703) 602-6805 Email: Colket@ACM.Org Dr. Sergey Rybin Scientific Research Computer Center Moscow State University c/o Swiss Federal Institute of Technology CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland Phone: +41 21 693 42 31 [c/o Professor Strohmeier] FAX: +41 21 693 50 79 Email: Rybin@Alex.SRCC.MSU.SU Mr. Jesper Jorgensen DDC-I A/ Lundtoftevej 1 B DK-2800 Lyngby, Denmark Phone: +45 45 87 11 44 FAX: +45 45 87 22 17 Email: JJ@DDCI.DK Mr. Pascal Leroy Rational Software Corporation Immeuble de la Gare F-78180 Montigny le Bretonneux - France Phone: +33 (1) 30 12 09 68 FAX: +33 (1) 30 12 09 66 Email: PLeroy@Rational.Com Mr. Bertrand Petitprez Sema Group Grenoble ZIRST BP 104 F-38243 Meylan Cedex - France Phone: +33 76 41 46 00 FAX: +33 76 41 47 47 Email: BPT@SEMA-Grenoble.FR Mr. Clyde Roby Institute for Defense Analyses 1801 N. Beauregard Street Alexandria, VA 22311 - USA Phone: +1 (703) 845-6666 FAX: +1 (703) 845-6788 Email: CRoby@IDA.Org Mr. Tom Strelich General Research Corporation P.O. Box 6770 Santa Barbara, California 93160-6770 - USA Phone: +1 (805) 964-7724 FAX: +1 (805) 967-7094 Email: TStrelich@SB.GRCI.Com Mr. Bill Thomas The MITRE Corporation 1820 Dolley Madison Blvd., M/S W624 McLean, VA 22102 - USA Phone: +1 (703) 883-6159 FAX: +1 (703) 883-1339 Email: BThomas@MITRE.Org
Last update 7 July 1997. Questions, comments to Clyde Roby (CRoby@IDA.Org)