Next Generation Ada95 Solutions

Using Ada for commercial product development

The customer

JEOL USA, Inc. designs and manufactures scientific instruments. Their product lines include analytical instruments (mass spectrometers, nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers), electron microscopes (scanning, transmission), and semiconductor manufacturing equipment (electron beam lithography systems, wafer defect inspection systems).

Their problem

The group developing the software to control the NMR spectrometer was experiencing unacceptable increases in development costs. The software and hardware development environment they were using did little to reverse declining usability of the product. The code complexity was limiting the feature set they could offer. Product reliability was undermined by persistent bugs. Code size was growing dramatically. The JEOL sales force was demanding next generation products for their customers:

Easy to use windowed, graphical interface
Interactive 2D and 3D graphics
Multithreaded Processing
Distributed operation for better productivity
Faster, less expensive products

The decision

John Malcolmson, Manager of Software Development for the Analytical Instruments Division, was instrumental in making the decision to switch to Silicon Graphics workstations with built-in 3D graphics and Ada83. He researched the special features of Ada (strong types and constraint checking, exception handling, dynamic tasking, packages and information hiding, readable code). Malcolmson felt these qualities would enhance the ability of his small team of developers to focus on the complex problems they were solving. He chose Silicon Graphics as his platform because of the quality of the 3D interactive graphics, the commitment to Ada, the exceptional performance of the hardware, and the advanced operating systems.

The result

Malcolmson admits his judgement was questioned during the learning curve while his programmers made the transition. Silicon Graphics supported him through the process and the investment in Ada paid off.

His boss was impressed by the tremendous productivity improvement of his team.
The engineers were thrilled by their ability to develop error free code and to catch bugs early in the development cycle. Ada easily handled the complex requirements.
Sales was delighted because Malcolmson's group delivered on the mission critical requirements of their customers and new features produced few unexpected side effects.
Service and Production were pleased because within JEOL the group had exceptionally fast turnaround time (hours to days) for the few, minor bugs that were found; fast turn around time for new features, and few customer complaints.

Malcolmson enthusiastically signed on as one of the first beta sites for ProDev Ada95. After ten months of use, his team is even more committed to Silicon Graphics' Ada95 solutions. "We've expanded the capabilities of our product. We've increased the number of instruments. We've included interactive collaboration, simultaneous multiple human languages, and found we can make much better use of the distributed resources on the customer's network. JEOL intends to expand the number of Ada products we develop."

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