DC/Baltimore ACM SIGAda Chapter

Light Refreshments will be served starting at 7:00 PM. The general meeting starts promptly at 7:30 PM and the program will follow shortly afterwards. You are encouraged to network after the meeting.

The presentation will explore the usage of the Unified Modelling Language(TM) (UML) to maintain Ada source code during both forward and reverse engineering. Initially reverse engineering legacy code to highlight the mapping of Ada to UML and then, following the Model Driven Architecture (TM) approach to software engineering, the emphasis of the presentation will shift to forward generation.

Alternative technologies will be demonstrated for both manual (using ARTiSAN's Ada Synchroniser) and automatic code synchronisation (using ARTiSAN's Shadow Technology) and how to customise the mapping from UML to Ada (using ARTiSAN's Shadow TDK Technology) to generate the exact code you require (including SPARK-Ada).

ARTiSAN Studio is used on safety-critical (DO-178B Level A, SIL-4) programmes as well in academic research and education. In combination, the UML and Ada lend themselves to the high-end of safety/mission critical systems development and provide a traceable source of all design information from requirements (captured using SysML(TM)) to source code (not just Ada but also Java, C and C++) within a single tool.

From 1989, after leaving the education system with both a Degree in Physics and Degree in Education, Francis has worked on both surface and sub-surface naval combat systems as both the Technical Authority and as software design engineer (Upholder Class Submarine, Vanguard Class Submarine, Sheffield Class Destroyer and Duke Class Frigate). During this time Francis developed and delivered an Ada training course that was delivered to IBM-UK. Leaving surface vessels Francis worked as both a Team Leader and Software Architect responsible for subsystems on a number of commercial and combat avionics systems (Boeing-777, Hawk-200 Series and Typhoon). Whilst working on combat avionics systems in 1995 [coinciding with the release of the v0.8 Draft UML Specification] Francis wrote a new Process using the UML for avionic systems design, which has now been successfully applied to 5-variants of the same aircraft. In 2000, after three years of using ARTiSAN Studio in industry, Francis joined ARTiSAN as a Consultant Applications Engineer utilising both his educational qualifications and technical experience in providing pre-, and post-sales consultancy to leverage maximum benefit out of the UML and ARTiSAN Studio. Francis is a member of both INCOSE (Systems Engineering) and Ada-Europe (and Ada-UK) and has presented papers and delivered tutorials at annual meetings.

At the DC/Baltimore SIGAda meeting on 22 August 2005 held joint with the DC ACM Chapter, we viewed the webcast of the ACM Turing Award Lecture. Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn, Recipients of the ACM 2004 Turing Award spoke on Assessing the Internet: Lessons Learned, Strategies for Evolution, and Future Possibilities. The lecture was webcast from ACM SIGCOMM 2005 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. ACM has archived the webcast at http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigcomm/sigcomm2005/webcast.html for your viewing pleasure.

Bill Bail gave an excellent presentation on Requirements Engineering for Dependable Systems on 11 October 2005. Slides from his presentation are available online as http://www.acm.org/sigada/locals/dc/200510_Requirement_Engineering_Bill_Bail.ppt (ppt, 330 KB)

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