by Debbie Blankenship
UHCLIDIAN STAFF

As one of the pioneers of Ada and software engineering language, McKay was asked to be the keynote speaker and to highlight his perception of Ada's past, present and future.

The Ada language has become the premiere language for supporting the software engineering development and evolution of embedded, mission and safety critical computing systems. It is the primary computing language used in the Space Station at NASA and Johnson Space Center.

McKay has been with UH-Clear Lake for 29 years and in his present position as dean for the last eight years. He initiated the software-engineering program for this university.

"I can't tell you what a wonderful experience it was to be able to take what we were learning in our research and evaluate and be able to bring it back into our classroom to share with our students," McKay said.

McKay's team was one of several who competed for the new engineering language by placing contract bids. International reviewers selected the winners and the 10 Beta test sites around the world.

"I thought what a perfect opportunity for us to go out and become one of those 10 Beta test sites, to rigorously evaluate the language and see if it's appropriate for our application," McKay said.

Under McKay's direction, JSC selected his team to be the world's first Beta test site, which was done on the UH-Clear Lake campus. The Beta test site continued to be the most visible test site throughout the 10 years of its creation.

"Here we were working with people from prestigious universities throughout the world and an international team of almost 100 researchers who contributed 30 companies to one common goal," McKay said. "And that was to evaluate this language and to do everything in our power to make it as good as we possibly could, and that's exactly what we did."

The Ada language and support environment became an international standard in 1983 and set the baseline for all world standards. These standards are subject to review and revision every 10 years. It is important to carefully evaluate the standards to see what other improvements are needed to make it better. The first standard update occurred in 1995. The next revision is not scheduled until 2005.

"It's extensive, it's challenging, it's complex and it deserves the best," McKay said. "Fortunately, this is a community that provides some of the best. UH-Clear Lake's "Mission and Safety Critical Computing" attracts students from around the world."

McKay's achievements include team leader and co-principal investigator of "Mission and Safety Critical Computing Research Project;" team leader and co-principal investigator of "Safety, Reliability, Maintainability, and Quality Assurance Oversight;" team leader and principal investigator of the "Joint NASA/JSC APSE (Ada Programming Support Environment) Beta Test Site Team;" and chief scientist of the "Repository Based Software Engineering (RBSE) Program."

McKay is a distinguished member of the NASA Johnson Space Center Advisory Committee on Safety, Reliability, Maintainability and Quality Assurance. He has more than 25 years of experience in research, development and teaching of computer automated systems. He has authored three books, numerous papers, reports and video taped lectures.

"This community is the world's premiere high-tech community for mission and safety critical systems," McKay said. "Safety critical means four things and it means four things in order. In addition to being critical to the mission of the organization and computing systems, it's also critical to the preservation of life, health, property and the environment."

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