What on earth is the software development process? Which tasks in this process can be automated? These are two key problems to software development automation. Taking them as the heart of matter this paper sttempts to advance some ideas so as to improve the past researches. It is worth pointing out that on the basis of these ideas a support system to develop Ada programs has been implemented. Experiments have shown that under the support of the system developers can semiautomatically implement the transformation from description of problems in natural language to package specification in Ada with the least interference.