US Air Force

F-16 Data Entry Cockpit Interface (DECIS)

J3 JOVIAL to C++

History: Legacy JOVIAL is gradually being replaced across Air Force weapon systems. Computer Resources Support Improvement Center (CRSIP) provided software engineering support to acquire, develop, and manage mission-critical software systems. The CRSIP office selected the Data Entry Cockpit Interface Set (DECIS) to test the effectiveness of Automated Software Modernization (ASM) technologies. DECIS Block-30 was used as the control because cost data was available for its recently completed manual modernization. It had taken several engineers over a year to manually modernize the 50,000 lines of JOVIAL code in this sub-system. CRSIP, in coordination with the YPVO F-16 Program Office, contracted with TSRI to perform an automated transformation of this same block of DECIS J73 JOVIAL into C++. This study would directly compare automated and manual software modernization processes.

Challenge: The United States Air Force developed J73 JOVIAL for its real time requirements and tight hardware tolerances. JOVIAL language complexities include dynamic overlays of data structures, bit-sizable fields, bit-level operators, flexible macro processing and embedded sub-languages. CRSIP contracted with TSRI for an "integrator-ready" transformation of DECIS Block-30 into modern C++.

Result: TSRI delivered the modernized DECIS C++ subsystem to the YPVO F-16 Program Office. This deliverable was 100% accurate and compilation and link error free. A qualitative analysis of the manually converted code and the automatically converted code found that both were of comparably high quality.

TSRI dramatically demonstrated its economy of scale by transforming a 2nd block of DECIS code (Block-50), similar in size and complexity to the control code, Block-30. The accurate transformation of DECIS Block-50 was automatically completed in less than 15 minutes by one TSRI engineer without tool adjustment.