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Ada evolved from a desire within the Department of Defense to have a standard language for the development of real-time and large scale systems . In addition to providing features needed by those types of systems, Ada supports structured programming, data abstraction, modularity, and information hiding . Research with these techniques indicates that their use should improve the quality of the software developmen t process and its product . While, programmers who are most familiar with various assembly languages and FORTRAN may use structured programming, generally they are no t familiar with the other concepts. The problems with training programmers in Ada an d its associated design and programming methods and then redeveloping current systems in Ada is unknown.In order to understand the effect of using Ada, the University of Maryland and th e General Electric Company began a joint project . The purpose of the project is to monitor the use of Ada in an industrial software development project. In particular, w e identify areas of success and difficulty in learning and using Ada as both a design an d coding language . Our results indicate where emphasis should be placed in Ada trainin g and in the development of tools and techniques for use with Ada . We also identif y metrics used to evaluate and predict the cost, quality, and maintainability of Ada programs.

Acquisition and retention of a list of paired associates were measured either by cued recall or by multiple-choice recognition. The method of testing used during original learning was combined factorially with the type of test administered after a 1-week interval. Speed of learning to criterion under the two procedures was comparable. Long-term recognition was substantially higher than recall. This difference did not interact significantly with the method of learning. Recall benefited substantially from a prior test of recognition, but there was little effect when the order of tests was reversed. It is concluded that (a) both occurrence and retrieval information were stored under each condition of learning, and (b) occurrence information is less subject to forgetting than retrieval information.