Hi Vijay,
To answer your question no. 5: We recently performed a CASE-tool evaluation in our company, where we looked at both teh real-time embedded- and the IS development support. Of the tools we eveluated for the real-time embedded team, was: - Rational Rose RT (www.rational.com) - Telelogic Tau SDL Suite (www.telelogic.com) - Artisan Realtime Studio (www.artisan.com) A short summary of our findings: Rose RT: Formaly known as ObjectTime. Has a very sound approach to encapsulation through the notion of Capsuels (with ports and signals/messages). They use standard OO-mechanisms and UML to define a capsule as a "traditional" design pattern, and throug the use of stereotyping and scripts in Rose RT, the design-pattern is applied "automatic". I.e. you design a diagram putting capsuels on it, defining ports on the capsules and define the signals to be accepted in- and out of the ports. When code is generated, the capsules are generated as C++ classes according to the design pattern (which by the way is described in RUP). A capsule is a typical result of the need for a process or thread in the application (a <<controller>>-type of analysis class will typically be a candidate for a capsule). The capsule also has full support for both asychroneous- and synchrouneus messageing through the ports, making it very suitable for multithreaded real-time applications. However, the tool is so focused on the notion of capsules, that you are left with very little flexibility to model "active classes" (threads etc.) in other ways then by the means of Capsules. The biggest challange with the whole capsule thing is to make your SW-developers not only turn from good old C to an OO-paradigm and C++, but also introduce the notion of Capsules. If you have an embedded SW-organisation experienced with OO and componentbased development, Capsules are probably a very sensible next step to go. Another drawback was that there is no integration between Rose RT and Rose (mostly true...). You can export and import between them, but only the parts of the model that does not use capsules.... Personally I fell in love with the idea of capsules, and the way it is defined and solved in Rose RT. Telelogic Tau SDL Suite: One of the big suppliers of very high quality real-time developer tools. Has been around for a long while and have had the majority of the market within the Telecom-industry, at least in Europe. Telelogic bases its tool on the Specification and Description Language (SDL), which in many ways does the same as Capsules in Rose RT. However SDL is a language and a methodology on it's own, not coupled to UML (yet). Then again SDL was defined many years before the first release of UML (or even UM). SDL togehter with MSC (Message Sequence Charts) is a very strong modeling techiques for realtime systems. SDL specifies a Process (which has states and state-trasnitions) as beeing the equivalent to the Capsule in Rose RT. The Process can communicate with other Processes through Gates by sending/recieving Signals on the Gate(s) (not Bill...). The tool comes with a completely implemented State Machine in C/C++ for all known platforms (both UNIX, Windows and all the major realtime OS'es), which enabels a near 100% code generation (and I mean 100%) with very high Quality. I used to work for Siemens in Norway a couple of years ago, and they decided in 1992 that from then on, all application-logic/code should be modelled completely in SDL and be codegenerated 100%. The only "handwritten" code was the coded needed to tie the application to the HW (i.e. HW drivers). The result was very good !!! The major drawback of this great methodology and tool, is that it isn't UML (yet). Our SW-developers were very sceptical to having to learn SDL, when the rest of the market is crying out UML as beeing the right notation. Hence the current version of the tool is not quite up-to-date in this respect. However, both Telelogic and Rational are mebmers of the UML 2.0 comitee that are working on the next version of UML, where the main focus is to include better support for real-time SW. Probably the result (I'm just guessing here) will be a new standard which includes the best from both worlds. I.e. the strong syntactical language in SDL with the notation of UML. As soon as UML 2.0 is defined, Telelogic will release a brand new version of both their SDL-tool and their UML-tool as one tool, covering both Realtime and IS-applications. When this will happen, is however not defined (as far as I know...) Another very good thing about Telelogic is the support-tools. It is very strong on simulation of the SW both on the development platform, and on the target. Far, far better than Rose RT. Also they have a very good database-oriented repository to store the models and model-elements in, with very good support for both versioning and CM. In Rose RT, they have chosen the "everything-thrown-into-a-large-big-file-in-clear-ASCII-format"-approach that is used in Rose. A hopeless approach if your system grows big (which it does, eventually). Artisan Realtime Studio: Now, this is an interesting little company. Based in the UK, beeing just a fraction in size of Rational, they have developed a UML-based tool that I personally found very interesting. It has it's roots in the old Select Enterprise, but has evolved A LOT from that origin. The tool has a very good repository, with great support for team development (no problem for 2 or more SW-engineers to actually update the same class simultaneously (even though this is not a good idea in the first place....)). A model that took me 60 long seconds to open in Rational Rose, took 1,5 seconds to open in Artisan (thats one of the reasons why I hate the Rose-file format....), and it didn't use more than a fraction of my system memory compared to Rose. Anyway. The current version of the tool does have some serious limitations. It does not support stereotypes (at all), for one thing. This does create a problem in the analysis- and early design phases, if you are using a use-case driven development process (like RUP), since you are not able to define candidates for classes/subsystems etc. by using stereotyped classes like <<boundary>>, <<entity>> and <<controller>>. Also it is nice to be able to stereotype packages to indicate wether a package is to be a subsystem, or a logical layer etc. However, all this and more, will be in place in the next release of the tool (they have promised). Artisan has no defined mechanism for modelling threads and processes like Rose RT and Telelogic. This is good if your team wants to stick to "pure" UML, but it does require a stronger in-house focus on how we model concurrency and threads etc. There are some good design-patterns around describing how to implement a state-machine, and more effort must be put into selecting one and implementing according to one. One feature that our SW-people fond handy, was thet the tool enabels you to model the HW (logically). I.e. you can defince a board, with processor(s) and I/O ports, and assigne properties to these (like an RS232 port with 9600 kbps bandwidth etc.), and then map your SW-components to the logical HW-components. I'm not an embedded guy myself, but I got the impression that this was an interesting feature.... The most exiting thing with Artisan (in my oppinion) is their thoughts around the support of patterns in the upcomming release. I had a long talk to one of the gurus in Artisan (who also is a member of the UML2.0 comitee), and the way they plan to support design-patters was very, very interesting and very flexible. However, it remains to be seen what will be the final result.... To your question no. 6: OVUM (www.ovum.com) did perform a CASE tool evaluation in 2000. We decided to buy this, even though a lot has changed within the CASE-tool market since then. The report was very thorow, and gave us some good hints on what to look for when evaluating. Also some of the conclusions made then, turned out to be just as validin Aug-2001 (we found). I'll leave it here for the moment, and hope some of the information supplied here can be of some help in your evaluation. Good luck with the job! Regards Arne Styve PS! We ended up with the following choices: Embedded SW: Artisan, Windows SW/IS: Rational Rose > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > Sent: Thursday, January 31, 2002 8:47 AM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: (ROSE) Evaluating CASE tools > > > > Dear Rational users, > Ours is a telecom equipment manufacturing company. Presently, we are > evaluating CASE tools for use in our company. Our software > systems largely > comprise of real-time software and embedded systems. > 1. Do we have any other similar telecom companies on this list who are > using Rational tools for software development within their > organizations? > 2. Have they used OO in development? > 3. Has anyone achieved significant benifits? > 4. What is the success rate with implementation of CASE tools? > 5. Where can i find more information about other rival CASE tools for > modeling realtime software and how do they compare with > Rational products? > 6. Has there been a survey conducted recently about OO and > CASE tool usage > in organizations worldwide? > We would be indeed grateful if we can have the above > questions answered. In > turn, we can share more thoughts about our development practices. > Thanks in advance > Vijay > > > ************************************************************** > ********** > * Rose Forum is a public venue for ideas and discussions. > * For technical support, visit http://www.rational.com/support > * > * Post or Reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > * Subscription Requests: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > * Archive of messages: > * http://www.rational.com/support/usergroups/rose/rose_forum.jsp > * Other Requests: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > * > * To unsubscribe from the list, please send email > * To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > * Subject: <BLANK> > * Body: unsubscribe rose_forum > ************************************************************** > *********** > This email, its content and any attachments is PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL to TANDBERG Television. 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