Audience

• Software Design and Structure- Discusses analysis of an Ada program's overall structure and its content, including unit partitioning and dependencies, subsystem partitioning and dependencies, dynamic analysis, key construct location, and metrics collection. These objectives might be pursued most often when the user is unfamiliar with the code and requires an overview of its content. Maintenance projects or any effort that requires some form of reverse engineering would likely employ these techniques as well.
• Code Correctness / Defect Identification - Addresses methods for locating potential program-ming errors through both static and dynamic (interpretive) analysis techniques. Static analysis locates constructs that, merely because of their existence, pose a high risk of error. In dynamic analysis, a simple interpreter walks through the execution paths of a program and recognize problems specific to one or more combinations of code segments and branch decisions.
• Code Optimization - Describes several techniques for improving the efficiency and/or performance of Ada programs, including inlining, object references, object size, use of generics, redundancy, expensive constructs, operator selection, loop nesting, object initialization, and compiler dependencies. Software optimization is not a high-priority task for all phases of the life cycle, but every project arrives at the point where the software works but it is too slow or too big.
• Software Documentation Support - Discusses information generation capabilities that are useful as reference material or for project and customer docu-mentation. Information about Ada units and their inter-dependencies is one example of information that can be useful to all project members. Location of all key programming constructs such as tasks, generics, exceptions, and subprograms is another. Cross-referenced lists of declarations and their dependencies are a third example. Finally, counting and metrics information can be useful at the management level to estimate project-completion milestones.
• Readability, Portability, and Reuse - Discusses objectives for improving the readability, understandability, and thus maintainability of Ada software. Specific analysis objectives include: name selection; use of use clauses; program complexity; unit/subpro-gram partitioning; target-dependent constructs; host-development dependencies; and recognizing reusable units.
• Standards Conformance - Addresses the available standards-conformance libraries and the addition of new, custom checks into the library. Naming standards are also addressed.
• Test Generation Support - Focuses on identifying each possible path through a subprogram and computing the objects that are set and used along each path. This information can be used to help create unit tests for a subprogram. Coverage tests-that is, a set of tests that execute all paths in a program can also be developed from this information.
• Support for Code Reviews - Discusses the ways in which the Ada Analyzer can be used to support the code-review process. Analysis output can be used by reviewers before the review meeting to prepare their analysis and comments. Reviewers usually have not written the code that they are reviewing and thus are likely to be unfamiliar with its detail. Structural analysis can be used to locate key constructs and increase the reviewers' overall understanding of the code and its design. Other commands can be used to reduce the time required to find potential problems or areas in the code that deserve more attention. This table lists each analysis objective, the phase of the software life cycle to which it most likely applies, and the course time allotted to that objective.

• Customizable, two- to four-day course in analysis techniques using the Ada Analyzer.
• Customers can select from independent analysis objectives to fill desired course length.
• Real project software can be used for analysis exercises.

Materials

• A comprehensive course notebook including copies of all slides, explanatory notes and exercises.
• Hard copy of the Ada Analyzer User's Guide for use in planning an analysis approach for the local project.