PROJECT “X” RESULTS

  • Productivity rates for both Ada and C (SLOC per staff month)

    • - 300: Includes time spent writing code, unit and string testing
    - 200: Including design and CDR time
    - 160: Including integration time
    - 150: Including system test time

  • 11 defects observed per KSLOC, regardless of language

  • C defects took 4 times longer to fix than Ada defects

    • - C fix rate may have been impacted by low-level nature of services (communication code) implemented in C

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From the Script: SLIDE 47 - Project "X" Results

As you can see, the results of Project "X" are slightly different from what we've been hearing.

Productivity and error rates were similar, regardless of the programming language being used. Certainly this doesn't indicate that Ada causes a project like this to fail. The most you could say based on this data is that Ada isn't helping any. But wait, there's more:

The major difference was that it took much longer to fix the C defects than those in Ada. However, it's not conclusive that this difference was due to language. The C code was low-level communication code and therefore may be expected to take longer to fix. But 400% longer…?