Rod Chapman
Rod Chapman is a Principal Engineer with Altran Praxis, specializing in the design and implementation of safety and security-critical systems. He currently leads the development of the SPARK language and its associated analysis tools.
Rod is a well-known conference speaker and has presented papers, tutorials, and workshops at many international events including STC, NSA HCSS, SIGAda, Ada-Europe and the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) World Congress. In addition to SPARK, Rod has been the key contributor to many of Altran Praxis’ major projects such as SHOLIS, MULTOS CA, Tokeneer and Software verification tools. He received a MEng in Computer Systems and Software Engineering and a DPhil in Computer Science from the University of York, England, in 1991 and 1995 respectively. He is a Chartered Engineer, a Fellow of the British Computer Society, and also an SEI-Certified PSP Instructor.
What does “Frontline Support” mean to you?
For me, it’s all about the responsiveness and depth of support that we can provide to our customers. I also like the way we can offer a service where the support team really are the same people who develop the technology and deliver the training courses – this gives us a real personal connection with the user community.
What drew you to SPARK/Ada?
I was initially drawn to SPARK through my PhD research work, but later became both a user and then a developer of the technology. I am still amazed at how often the SPARK tools can catch me out and find bugs in code that defy other verification techniques and tools. I still find programming in SPARK to be a creative and rewarding experience, even given the language’s rigorous nature.
What’s your favorite feature of SPARK Pro Technology
The facility for proving the absence of run-time errors – I am still amazed by the corner-cases and subtle bugs that it finds.
