CASE tools

CASE tools

[Ralph Curtis]

I'm investigating using CADRE's Teamwork tools for ADA development on a SUN
network. I would appreciate hearing from anyone with experience of this
product. For example:

	- Is it suitable for a large development effort (say 20 to 40
	  person team)? eg. configuration control etc.
	  
	- How good is the code generation? ie. does 50% of the coding job,
	  is effcient, etc.

	- How difficult is it to maintain the structure graphs etc.? Is
	  the code injector easy or difficult to use?

	- General gripes and accolades.

I would also like to hear from anyone using a competitive product or anyone
having experience using CASE tools in general (pros and cons).

TIA.


***--------------------------------------------------------------***
* DISCLAIMER:                                                      *
* ==========:                                                      *
*    The opinions expressed are solely of the author and do not    *
*    necessarily reflect the opinions of Canadian Marconi Company. *
***--------------------------------------------------------------***

Re: CASE tools

[MILLS,JOHN M.]

In article <1371@fudd.dataco.UUCP> curtis@dataco.UUCP (Ralph Curtis) writes:
 >
 >I'm investigating using CADRE's Teamwork tools for ADA development on a SUN
 >network. I would appreciate hearing from anyone with experience of this
 >product. For example:

I hope you will post a summary of the responses you receive.  I would be
interested.

>TIA.

Me too.

-- 
John M. Mills, SRE; Georgia Tech/GTRI/TSDL, Atlanta, GA 30332
uucp: ...!{decvax,hplabs,ncar,purdue,rutgers}!gatech!prism!jm59
Internet: jm59@prism.gatech.edu
 "f U cn rd dis, U mst uz Unix!!!"  ...jaw

case tools

[alpha]

are there any free CASE tools for commercial use ???

Szymon

case tools

[alpha]

where can I find a free for commercial use case tool that can generate code
in Ada ???

Szymon Guz

Re: case tools

[Simon Wright]

dia with the dia2code add-on.

Check on google for dia2code ..

Re: case tools

[Michal Nowak]

On 2003-03-23 at 19:13 alpha wrote:

>where can I find a free for commercial use case tool that can generate
>code in Ada ???

Hi,

   I'm aware about UMLStudio from Pragsoft (http://www.pragsoft.com/).
Here is a screenshot of use case diagram:
http://www.pragsoft.com/gifs/UseCaseDiag.gif
However it's not free (price varies from license type: 125$ - 500$).
BTW, do you want to generate code from use case diagram?

As I remember there was a similar discussion on CLA last year. 
Do a search on google on thread "Free Ada UML tools Available"
from May 2002.

Hope this was helpful,
   Michal


-- -----------------------------------------------------------------
--   ___        _
--  / _ \      | |                      I Choose Ada:
-- | |_| |  ___| |   _____   The Most Trusted Name in Software (TM)
-- |  _  | | __  |  | __  | 
-- |_| |_| |_____|_ |_____|_ http://www.adaic.org/whyada/choose.html
--
-- -----------------------------------------------------------------

Re: case tools

[Stephen Leake]

"alpha" <alpha@skynet.org.pl> writes:

> where can I find a free for commercial use case tool that can generate code
> in Ada ???

Strictly speaking, no tool can generate code given only "use cases".
So you must mean more than that; perhaps a full UML tool? Even there,
UML is not well enough defined to fully generate code; you have to add
some architecture/design information.

-- 
-- Stephe

Re: case tools

[Larry Kilgallen]

In article <uvfy8zrvf.fsf@nasa.gov>, Stephen Leake <Stephen.A.Leake@nasa.gov> writes:
> "alpha" <alpha@skynet.org.pl> writes:
> 
>> where can I find a free for commercial use case tool that can generate code
>> in Ada ???
> 
> Strictly speaking, no tool can generate code given only "use cases".

I had read that as "(free for commercial use) case tools".

Re: case tools

[Martin Dowie]

> Strictly speaking, no tool can generate code given only "use cases".
> So you must mean more than that; perhaps a full UML tool? Even there,
> UML is not well enough defined to fully generate code; you have to add
> some architecture/design information.

There is a move within the AdaUK and led by Artisan (www.artisansw.com)
to come up with standard UML<->Ada mappings, perhaps analogous to the
mapping between IDL and Ada.

I have looked at their UML->Ada95 generator and it has matured nicely over
the last year. Shame it wasn't available a year ago, or I wouldn't be now
using the UML->C tool ;-)

Re: case tools

[Simon Wright]

martin.dowie@btopenworld.com (Martin Dowie) writes:

> There is a move within the AdaUK and led by Artisan
> (www.artisansw.com) to come up with standard UML<->Ada mappings,
> perhaps analogous to the mapping between IDL and Ada.

I have probably said this before .. although I can see the value of an
out-of-the-box mapping, to get projects started, I don't believe that
the mapping appropriate to "my" project is necessarily appropriate to
"yours".

I also think that the UML<-Ada part will prove challenging .. the Ada
package is quite a hard concept to express in UML, and the idea of a
generic signature is even more fun. To some extend this depends on the
tool concerned .. UML allows, I think, the concept of a parameterised
collaboration (generic package to you and me, I think) but Rose
doesn't.

I think it is highly questionable whether every Ada construct should
be representable in UML. For a start, it allows individual developers
a lot of licence as to what architectural features they use, and you
don't always want that; anyone who has seen the amazing code
generation property sheets available in Rose and, I think, Rhapsody
(don't know Artisan) will know what I mean.

Re: case tools

[Colin Paul Gloster]

Martin Dowie said:
  
"There is a move within the AdaUK and led by Artisan
(www.artisansw.com) to come up with standard UML<->Ada mappings,
perhaps analogous to the mapping between IDL and Ada."

Perhaps HRT-HOOD would be more useful than UML, or given the lamented
prevalence of that fruit of Grady Booch's, Intecs HRT has been working on
upgrading realtime UML specifications to be close to HRT-HOOD. It is not
as if mapping between HOOD and Ada is hard!

Simon Wright wrote:
  
"I have probably said this before .. although I can see the value of an
out-of-the-box mapping, to get projects started, I don't believe that
the mapping appropriate to "my" project is necessarily appropriate to
"yours"."

Simon Wright may find some consolation in these statements from a
fairly recent document on UML and Ada entitled "What are Ada Mapping rules
& What is a Profile?" attributed to Derek Russell:

"It would be na�ve however to assume that the mapping rules would be
sufficient to cover all possible implementation requirements.  There will
be model specific mappings such as active class priorities, entry point
semantics, etc.  To accommodate such requirements, language specific
annotations should be added to the model to allow specifics to be
identified and enhance code generation.  These annotations shall be in the
form of stereotypes and tags and are known as the [bold bagan]profile[bold
ended] (or [bold began]Ada profile[bold ended] in the case of the Ada
community).  The profile should override the mapping rules if applied to
any modelling element."

Simon Wright wrote:
  
"I also think that the UML<-Ada part will prove challenging .. the Ada
package is quite a hard concept to express in UML, and the idea of a
generic signature is even more fun. To some extend this depends on the
tool concerned .. UML allows, I think, the concept of a parameterised
collaboration (generic package to you and me, I think) but Rose
doesn't."

From the document attributed to Derek Russell:

"The mapping from a UML design to an Ada implementation is not as obvious
as some would think. The size of the Ada language leads to many different
ways of implementing even a simple UML model.  In addition, the UML
notation (1.4) is often not rich enough to fully specify the designers
intentions.

[..]

[..] In addition, it should be an aim that standard UML notation be
applied wherever possible."
  
"I think it is highly questionable whether every Ada construct should
be representable in UML. For a start, it allows individual developers
a lot of licence as to what architectural features they use, and you
don't always want that; anyone who has seen the amazing code
generation property sheets available in Rose and, I think, Rhapsody
(don't know Artisan) will know what I mean."

To some extent this might be okay with the "language specific
annotations" mentioned earlier (but you do not want to spend forever
banning almost everything from the COTS inital setup!) and with the
dialects of Ada supported. From that document:

"To avoid excessive model annotations, organisations (or toolset
vendors) should define a set of rules for mapping UML modelling elements
to the target language (SPARK, Ada83, Ada95 etc).  These are termed
mapping rules; a set of mapping rules should exist for each flavour of the
target language.  These mapping rules should provide the general, and most
common, set of mappings."

Re: case tools

[Martin Dowie]

Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org> wrote in message news:<x7vbs00eyr8.fsf@smaug.pushface.org>...
> I have probably said this before .. although I can see the value of an
> out-of-the-box mapping, to get projects started, I don't believe that
> the mapping appropriate to "my" project is necessarily appropriate to
> "yours".

Quite true - but hopefully the defaults will be "good enough" 9 times
out of 10.


> I also think that the UML<-Ada part will prove challenging .. the Ada
> package is quite a hard concept to express in UML, and the idea of a
> generic signature is even more fun. To some extend this depends on the
> tool concerned .. UML allows, I think, the concept of a parameterised
> collaboration (generic package to you and me, I think) but Rose
> doesn't.

I believe the effort is primarily UML -> SPARK95 and UML -> Ada95.

The reversing is always more of a problem no matter what the language.


> I think it is highly questionable whether every Ada construct should
> be representable in UML. For a start, it allows individual developers
> a lot of licence as to what architectural features they use, and you
> don't always want that; anyone who has seen the amazing code
> generation property sheets available in Rose and, I think, Rhapsody
> (don't know Artisan) will know what I mean.

what do you mean by "architectural features"?

Re: case tools

[Martin Dowie]

"Colin Paul Gloster" <Colin_Paul_Gloster@ACM.org> wrote in message
news:slrnb80bid.d8a.Colin_Paul_Gloster@camac.dcu.ie...
> upgrading realtime UML specifications to be close to HRT-HOOD. It is not
> as if mapping between HOOD and Ada is hard!

Just horrible! ;-)

Re: case tools

[Simon Wright]

martin.dowie@btopenworld.com (Martin Dowie) writes:

> what do you mean by "architectural features"?

I guess I meant "code generation features".

As I remember Rose Ada, you could specfy for an individual class --
amongst many other features -- whether you wanted a
pointer-to-instance type, what it was to be called, and what an
automatically-generated parameter of this type was to be called
(defaults project-selectable, eg yes, Handle and This).

This is "architectural" in the sense that if you're to be easily able
to write code to access structures generated from my part of the
model, it's a great help if you can _know_ what the code generation
rules are, without the possibility of my changing my part of the
mapping on a whim.

Re: case tools

[Martin Dowie]

Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org> wrote in message news:<x7vllz1x4wa.fsf@smaug.pushface.org>...
> martin.dowie@btopenworld.com (Martin Dowie) writes:
> 
> I guess I meant "code generation features".
> 
> As I remember Rose Ada, you could specfy for an individual class --
> amongst many other features -- whether you wanted a
> pointer-to-instance type, what it was to be called, and what an
> automatically-generated parameter of this type was to be called
> (defaults project-selectable, eg yes, Handle and This).
> 
> This is "architectural" in the sense that if you're to be easily able
> to write code to access structures generated from my part of the
> model, it's a great help if you can _know_ what the code generation
> rules are, without the possibility of my changing my part of the
> mapping on a whim.

Ah, ok, to me this a management thing rather than anything to
do with any UML<=>Ada mapping. If you have a process that says
"use the default tool settings" and someone doesn't then you
take them outside and shoot them!

And if you don't have a process, well, nuff said. :-)

Re: case tools

[Simon Wright]

martin.dowie@btopenworld.com (Martin Dowie) writes:

> Ah, ok, to me this a management thing rather than anything to do
> with any UML<=>Ada mapping. If you have a process that says "use the
> default tool settings" and someone doesn't then you take them
> outside and shoot them!
> 
> And if you don't have a process, well, nuff said. :-)

Mappings, tools, policies, process definition .. all part of the
scene, best if they all fit together. Things like what a <handle> is
mapped to need to be project-wide, a tool that thinks differently was
produced by someone who just didn't understand building anything with
a team size greater than 1.

Re: case tools

[Jeffrey Carter]

Martin Dowie wrote:
> 
> Ah, ok, to me this a management thing rather than anything to
> do with any UML<=>Ada mapping. If you have a process that says
> "use the default tool settings" and someone doesn't then you
> take them outside and shoot them!

No, no, all problems are process problems, not people problems. You 
never blame a person for anything, no matter how incompetent he is. You 
fix your process for getting people to use your processes.

Do I really need to put a smiley on this?

-- 
Jeff Carter
"Now look, Col. Batguano, if that really is your name."
Dr. Strangelove

Re: case tools

[Martin Dowie]

"Simon Wright" <simon@pushface.org> wrote in message
news:x7v65q4bn4t.fsf@smaug.pushface.org...
> Mappings, tools, policies, process definition .. all part of the
> scene, best if they all fit together. Things like what a <handle> is
> mapped to need to be project-wide, a tool that thinks differently was
> produced by someone who just didn't understand building anything with
> a team size greater than 1.

here, here.

case tools

[Oliver Kellogg]

On 2003-03-23 10:58:08 PST, Simon Wright wrote:

> dia with the dia2code add-on.
> 
> Check on google for dia2code ..

If you want support for UML packages, CORBA stereotypes,
and many other improvements, I recommend pulling the CVS
version. For details, see

http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=15307

The same goes for KDE-Umbrello, the Ada generator is
being improved these days, see

http://webcvs.kde.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/kdesdk/umbrello/umbrello/codegenerators/

But wait another day or two, I have a couple checkins
coming.

HTH,

Oliver Kellogg