How should military Ada software be documented?

Abstract

Many contractors have argued that Data Item Descriptions (DIDs) produce useless deliverable documents at a great cost. They go on to argue that Government reliance on such deliverable data interferes with their engineering efforts and needlessly drives up contract costs. On the other hand, contracting agencies doubt their ability to understand and oversee complex software development projects without the deliverable documents described by the DIDs.

This paper argues that military software should be documented in several ways. Ada source code can be used for part of the needed documentation. Other documentation is best provided by the management and engineering data that resides in contractor's CASE tools or in their engineering notes. A reasonable approach to documenting military Ada software uses contractor data in native form wherever possible and supplements it with deliverable data prepared in accordance with commercial or tailored military DIDs wherever the contractor data is inadequate.