I have been involved in a running gun battle with another organization
for some time now. The latest salvo fired in my direction involves the
"time" savings for doing things their way. They are doing development
in C++, even after being asked to develop in Ada In their latest
report, they say that they spend 20% of their time writing the initial
code. 80% of their time debugging their code. The scale of the code
is <500k LOC.

After seeing the quote from a C++ developers log that was posted last
week, I would like to rebut their figures.

Assume that the 20% is a figure that gets the code through compile and
link to execution the first time.

My questions are these:

1. If they were using "good" software development practices and C++,
what ratio should I expect them to use?

2. What ratio do you see in typical Ada development efforts?

3. Given the following table, can you draw any conclusions about their
process? I have a description in mind, but it is unkind...

        Typical Debug Cycle

   Debugger               6.5 min
   Code Modification     30.0 min
   Code Generator         0.5 min
   Recompile             23.0 min

   TOTAL                 60.0 min


Please respond directly to me, if there is enough interest I will
summarize for the list.

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Daniel McDonough                                 HQ AFOTEC/SAN
(505)846-2837                                    8500 Gibson Blvd SE
Mathemagician Extraordinaire                     Kirtland AFB, NM 87117-5558
Member Team Ada                                  [log in to unmask]
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