[Sigia-l] CASE Tools (was Word HTML - money were my mouth is (was When Should a Manual be Web-based?))

[John O'Donovan-INTERNET]

There has been a lot of movement in the marketplace lately with IBM buying
Rational, Borland buying Togethersoft and Starbase and Sun buying into
Embarcadero. Expect Microsoft to be buying a product in this area soon,
especially now Rational has soured it's relationship with Microsoft. 

There are a number of premium products and very little that is very good at
the lower end of the market. Summary below...

All of the big players are realising that their Integrated Development
Environments (IDE) did not link back far enough down the chain into
requirements management. To get the most from such tools they have to be
linked across the whole chain.

The products have a different focus (Togethersoft for example provides a
very capable and well integrated IDE, linking between design and code and
allowing your programmers to work in the same tool as your Analaysts but it
is lacking in requiremetns gathering - this is why Borland also bought
Starbase).

Programmers can find  CASE tools difficult because CASE tools try to
generate code from designs and this can be a little disconcerting for
someone who is used to writing code. The quality of code generated can be
questionable in a programmers eyes.

The biggest hurdle with CASE tools can be the cost if you want to play with
the big boys, as licence costs are expensive. The major players in the
market are really:

System Architect
Rational Rose
Togethersoft
Embarcadero

If you currently work in Word and Visio these tools will blow you away and
possibly save your life. Not cheap though - these are premium products.

At the other end of the scale I would highly recommend Enterprise Architect.
Cheap and still powerful. Allows you to capture requirements and analysis
and attach properties to elements so that all your data is stored in the
tools and cross referenced. EG. user scenarios, requirements and test cases
can be attached to modelling elements. Produces acceptable documentation and
superb clickable HTML diagrams and reference sites. It could be a bit more
usable though...

The thing to not get confused with is just plain UML drawing tools - you
need more than this to capture your requirements and follow through to basic
wireframes and eventually implementation. It is the way these prodcuts link
and cross reference your information that is the key to saving time.

Cheers

jod
 



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