The tutorial is directed toward students and educators as well as professional Ada programmers. The techniques presented have the dual advantage of being both useful and fun. We will go beyond the normal introductory course in Ada to explore a number of interesting non-standard ways of using Ada. Many of the techniques have been inspired by the author's experiences with the programming paradigms used by programmers of Lisp and various functional programming languages. The tutorial shows how we can reduce complexity and improve readability of Ada programs by using a number of declarative techniques to replace potentially complex and involved procedural code. These techniques include : declarative techniques for encapsulating control structures, a flexible, data-driven technique that, for want of a better term, I have called "template-driven programming," use of inheritance and iterators to define generalized applications, and a technique based on lazy evaluation for the creation and manipulation of infinite data structures. The tutorial will last a full day and will consist of five sections, followed by the author's conclusions and suggestions for further investigation.


Presenter

Dr. Arthur G. Duncan is an independent consultant, as well as an adjunct professor of Computer Science at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, U.S.A. Dr. Duncan has been involved with the Ada language for 20 years. Before becoming an independent consultant, he was a key member of the Ada group at the G.E. Research and Development Center in Schenectady, New York, where he was a major contributor to the Interactive Ada Workstation, the Interactive VHDL Workstation, and ENCORE (the ENvironment for COde REengineering). When not pursuing computer-language-related activities, Dr. Duncan can generally be found playing big band music on the trombone or Irish dance music on the tin whistle.

The tutorial identifies the special properties of systems intended for use in ultra-reliable domains and the qualitative shift in develop- ment methods that is required to achieve those properties. The advantages (and weaknesses) of Ada are introduced in the context of the ISO HRG report on High-Integrity Ada and the SPARK sublanguage. The demands of common, important development standards are described together with appropriate and cost-effective techniques for meeting them. Finally project experience illustrating successes in meeting the main standards is discussed.


Presenters

The tutorial will be presented by Mr Peter Amey and Dr Rod Chapman of Praxis Critical Systems. Both have extensive teaching and presentation experience mostly obtained in the subject field. Both teach regularly on the 'Software Engineering with SPARK' course run by Praxis Critical Systems. Dr Chapman has been a regular presenter at Ada Europe, Ada Sweden, SIGAda and the World Congress on Formal Methods.

This tutorial introduces basic concepts in software reliability engineering (SRE) and surveys recent developments in SRE. Existing reliability models, including both the time domain software reliability growth models (SRGMs) and input domain reliability models based on repeated random sampling are surveyed. Both these types of models were integrated in the recently developed tree-based reliability models (TBRMs) by the author to analyze product reliability and identify high risk areas for focused reliability improvement. Various practical issues in applying existing SRE techniques and the new TBRMs in large software systems are also discussed, including: environmental constraints, measurement types and availability, SRE implementation strategies, and support tools for analysis, modeling, and SRE implementations. This approach has been used in the testing phase of several large software products developed in the IBM Software Solutions Toronto Laboratory and was demonstrated to be effective and efficient. In addition, other recent work in early measurement of software reliability, integration of SRE and traditional software measurement and analysis activities, and analysis of techniques for reliability assurance and improvement are also covered in this tutorial.


Presenter

Jeff presented a similar tutorial at Ada-Europe 2000 entitled "Tree-Based Reliability Models (TBRMs) for Early Reliability Measurement and Improvement". The tutorial was rated the best by the attendees. Jeff was ranked as one of the "Top Scholars in Systems and Software Engineering" (only top 15 or so ranked) by the Journal of Systems and Software in 1997, 1998, and 1999. Jeff obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 1992 then worked for IBM until 1995 when he became Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Southern Methodist University (SMU) since Fall, 1995. Since then Jeff has developed and taught two closely related courses entitled CSE 8317/8391 Software Reliability and Safety and CSE 6340 Advanced Topics in Software Engineering in 1996-2000 at SMU.

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) has emerged in just a few years as nothing less than a phenomenon in computing. XML is a "meta language": it is a standard for defining descriptions of structure and content in documents. If HTML provides a universal method to display data, XML takes the next step by separating the content of a document from its representation and by providing not only the data itself but also its interpretation. XML transforms data into information. This universal, flexible and extensible approach opens up an almost unlimited range of uses for XML, from word processing through e-business to data archiving. Discussed subjects include : The XML syntax How to define constraints on XML documents DTD's Schema How to parse, traverse and transform XML documents SAX DOM XSLT Some XML standards ebXML Biztalk SOAP An example that illustrates XML's role in Business-to-Business e-commerce


Presenters:

Gregory Neven, Maarten Coene, Roel Adriaensens are all teaching assistants at KU Leuven with extensive XML experience.

Tutorials on Friday May 18