- What is GNAT PRO?
- How does the GNAT Pro pricing model work?
- What do customers receive?
- What Quality Assurance procedures does GNAT Pro go through?
- How do customers affect GNAT Pro technical developments?
1) What is GNAT Pro?
AdaCore provides GNAT Pro, the native, embedded, and safety-critical software development solution for Ada and mixed-language Ada, C, and C++ systems. GNAT Pro integrates Ada, C, and C++ in a visual development environment including:
- Toolset support directly from the AdaCore development team;
- Online consulting for Ada software development directly from the AdaCore experts.
GNAT Pro is the first Ada development environment to support all three ISO standards for the Ada programming language (Ada 83, Ada 95, and Ada 2005).
GNAT Pro and its add-ons are provided with support and online consulting for Ada software development as a yearly subscription. A subscription can cover several groups of developers working on any number of projects in one or more sites.
GNAT Pro is lock-free. All the developers covered by the AdaCore subscription have constant access to the full solution: the toolset and the experts.
2) How does the GNAT Pro pricing model work?
The price of the yearly GNAT Pro subscription is based on the number of developers in the teams using GNAT Pro. To select the appropriate GNAT Pro subscription level AdaCore offers several predefined team sizes based on the maximum number of developers covered by the GNAT Pro subscription: up to 5, 15, 25, 35, 50, 100, and 200 developers overall.
These different team sizes allow for easy personnel adjustments during the course of a GNAT Pro subscription year.
How do we check that users do not exceed the subscription level they purchased? We don’t, we trust our customers. Trust builds trust.
To request a price quote or apply for a free evaluation of GNAT Pro please visit the sales information page.
3) What do customers receive?
As noted above, AdaCore provides the GNAT Pro package as a yearly subscription including access to the latest versions of the technology with upgrades and high-quality toolset support services and online consulting provided by the developers of GNAT Pro themselves.
GNAT Pro customers receive a high-quality product with a high-quality support service. This allows customers to develop sophisticated systems where they can leverage on GNAT Pro and its software components (as if they had developed it themselves) since they have direct access to the toolset sources and the expertise of the GNAT Pro developers. The GNAT Pro experts serve as partners to the customer development team. They work closely with the customer team to help them make optimal use of AdaCore’s products and to assist them with all aspects of software development. As part of that dialogue our engineers regularly address issues such as code optimization, programming language semantics, multi-language systems, and code organization. The net result for the project is reduced risk, higher productivity, and shorter time to delivery.
AdaCore has implemented a customer web server - GNAT Tracker - that provides to all supported developers a rapid, permanent access to the AdaCore team of experts. All requests, submitted via GNAT Tracker or electronic mail, are logged in the AdaCore tracking system. A senior engineer responds in detail to the query, typical response time is within a couple of hours.
4) What Quality Assurance procedures does GNAT Pro go through?
As described above, it is imperative for AdaCore to provide their customers with highly reliable, stable and robust technology. AdaCore is dedicated to ensuring the highest possible quality in both the technology and related support services.
To this end, many of the procedures of formal ISO 9001 certification are followed, and in some instances surpassed. AdaCore has built a sophisticated QA infrastructure comprising over 10,000 real-life test cases (a total of over 7 million lines of Ada source code) and automated capabilities for execution and evaluation of the tests, supporting nightly integration, regression testing and analysis on multiple platforms. Other test suites are also used such as the ACATS conformance test suite and tool specific test suites.
Customers report issues through an advanced tracking system. AdaCore also regularly receives questions, suggestions, and even patches from the wider GNAT user community (Free Software developers and academics). The issues are dispatched internally and dealt with by the appropriate member of the AdaCore team. 80% of questions and reports, many of them on the use of Ada and the GNAT Pro technology, are addressed in less than a day of the issues being reported. The AdaCore support team has provided answers to over 32,000 issues that have been raised by the overall user community.
5) How do customers affect GNAT Pro technical developments?
GNAT Pro technical development is very strongly influenced by customer input. Thanks to the GNAT Tracker system, all issues raised concerning the toolset are dealt with by the AdaCore support team and the fixes included in a later release of GNAT Pro. The user community is also influential in the development of new features and the porting of the technology to new platforms. Most of AdaCore product development is a direct result of interaction with customers