The US strategic defense initiative office (SDIO) recognizes that software will play a critical role in the development and deployment of the strategic defense system (SDS). Proper SDS software development will require attention in the following three areas: technology utilization, education, and policy. Several major efforts designed to reduce the risk associated with development and deployment of SDS software are described. These efforts include the SDS software policy, the SDS software center, and the software annex of the SDS capstone testing and evaluation master plan (TEMP).>

A standard relational database interface for the Ada programming language is presented. By accessing databases through this standard interface, Ada programs may be written in a consistent and transportable fashion, regardless of which underlying database management system (DBMS) ultimately provides actual database support. The Data Definition Language (DDL) serves three purposes, with all transformations automated to ensure consistency across uses: (1) it is standard Ada, so that data types defined therein may be "with'ed" into application programs, (2) it may be transformed into the DDL required by an underlying DBMS to define an application's database, and (3) it contains augmented information that enables it to be used to generate test data. The Data Manipulation Language (DML), while being standard Ada, is also as similar to SQL as permitted by Ada syntax, to provide all the power and flexibility of the language proposed as the ANSI relational standard. Major portions of the system described have actually been implemented on a prototype basis to prove the feasibility of the approach.