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The Evaluation & Validation (E&V) Task has been established by the AJPO to develop technology necessary to assess the quality of software tools that will be included in an Ada Programming Support Environment (APSE). An E&V Workshop convened April 2-6, 1984, consisted of government and industry representatives who developed draft documents in three E&V subject areas--Task Recommendations, Task Requirements, and the APSE Evaluation Reference Manual. This report contains an account of the plenary sessions and the papers that address the three subject areas under discussion during this workshop.

This report describes the requirements, design, and implementation of a software package that can be used to perform quantitative studies on certain aspects of the programming task. Of specific interest will be experienced with the level of interactiveness of the human-computer interface relating to identifier scope-rules. The software package for the conduct of those experiments is an interactive programming-environment called PEEP. Its base language is Pascal and its design is based on a semantic model of computation. Storage representations and the implementation of these semantic models are described. The model depicts the compile-time structure, run-time structure, and realization of the static and the dynamic scoping-rules. (Author)

The results of many human-computer interaction studies are often not generalizable because the task environment in which they are run does not posssess characteristics common to other interfaces. In this paper we describe a generalized task environment that is directly applicable to several interesting real-world tasks, and that contains elements appearing in almost every system having a human-computer interface. The environment is implemented through a software system called GENIE (Generic Environment for Interactive Experiments), and is based on controlling the motion of vehicle through three-dimensional space. Aside from providing a task with common characteristics, GENIE's implementation was designed to allow for adaptation to a variety of studies. The user's interface to the system has been constructed in such a way as to minimize the effort necessary for change. The paper first describes the development of the GENIE software system and then presents its structure. The user's view of the system is discussed followed by a presentation of the facilities available to the experimenter. Software components of the system are described from a functional level, and finally, three example experiments that use the system are described. (Author)

This report demonstrates an approach to specifying kernel Ada support environment interface components. The objectives are to provide a mechanism which allows building a complete enough specification for validation, an understandable specification, and one that is relatively easy to construct. In meeting these objectives, an Abstract Machine approach has been modified and applied to functional description of kernel operations. After motivating an explaining the approach, the paper exemplifies its utility. Interactions among kernel operations and pragmatic implementation limits, which are other needed parts of a specification, are also discussed. (Author)