A Refactoring Environment for Ada

The problem of supporting millions of lines of Ada code is of critical importance to the DoD and the missile defense community. The decline in the use of Ada has led to a fall in the supply of trained personnel, and a reduction in tool vendor support. Migration to a new language is usually technically and economically infeasible, so programs such as THAAD have a huge legacy code problem. A common problem with such systems is how to make modifications so as to adapt them to changing requirements in a way that poses little risk to the integrity of the code. We propose a tool based on refactoring --- the disciplined transformation of code to improve its design while retaining its essential semantics. In Phase I we implemented a proof-of-concept prototype capable of performing transformations important for safety-critical code, and demonstrated it to potential customers at Boeing and Lockheed Martin. We have secured an agreement with Boeing for its use and evaluation during Phase II. The prospects for commercial success are excellent, as our initial market research indicates strong demand. We will exploit our existing Ada tools customer base to market the proposed tool to DoD contractors and beyond.