SoftCost-Ada: user experiences and lessons learned at the age of three

• Authors: Donald J. Reifer
• Venue: TRI-Ada '90 Proceedings of the conference on TRI-ADA '90
• Year: 1990

This paper debunks the myth that there is no hard data proving Ada's cost-effectiveness. SoftCost- Ada is a modern estimating package used to predict costs and schedules for software-intensive projects which employ the Ada programming language, object-oriented methods, new development paradigms, workstation-based environments, and modern software engineering techniques. The package's underlying model is based upon an extensive analysis of 75 completed projects within the United States which have delivered in excess of 30 million lines of Ada source code for a variety of military and commercial applications. The purpose of this paper is to communicate the lessons that we have learned since we introduced the package in 1987 so that others within the community can benefit from our experiences and economic analyses. To achieve this goal, the paper first briefly introduces the reader to the SoftCost-Ada estimating model, the database upon which it is built, and the tradeoff laws which it employs to investigate Ada costs, schedules, and risks. The paper then focuses on the economic issues related to Ada identified by industry leaders and users of the SoftCost-Ada package. Finally, the paper concludes by exploring the lessons learned relative to Ada economics by investigating the actual data collected from 15 firms.