APEX - WAS: Case Tools for OO (was Re: What is wrong with OO ?)

[nigel@access4.digex.net (Nigel Tzeng)]

In article <32CC40F6.1FBC@ssd.neca.nec.com.au>,
Mark Smith  <mark@ssd.neca.nec.com.au> wrote:

[snip]

>I will probably get flamed for doing this, but we are beginning to use
>Rational ROSE/C++,

Okay, we aim to serve ;)

>and I _like_ it. If you buy Apex, ROSE, and SoDA, you get the case tool,
>editor, compiler, documentation,debugger all in one. The test plan
>generator could be wangled from SoDA & use cases. The browse through
>diagrams, double click to code works. 
 
[snip]

I like Rose too...but Apex is really horrid.  It literally cost us a
man year of development time.  The underlying paradigm of Apex is
flawed (imports) and I discovered today that the source code control
software (RCS) can't do tags because of the utterly braindead Apex
layer between us and RCS.  

Multiplatform development is possible but hardly fun and requires
massive duplication of source code...and some fancy rsh script
development...which if you have to write you could simply be using
normal makefiles.

The debugger may or may not be thread safe...I don't recall but there is
a reason we aren't using it.  That's sort of okay since GDB isn't really
supporting threads.  Sun's IDE does...

The editor isn't any better than emacs and not as good as lemacs.
Sniff++ has a much better editor and allows browsing of inheritance
trees.

And Apex is very expensive.

SoDA is based on Framemaker (?) and isn't even vaguely intuitive.
Powerful perhaps but not easy to use.  There are some very amusing
artifacts when you generate using SoDA as well.  You should also plan
on running SoDA overnight when trying to generate a new document.

[snip]

>However, you need to put a fairly disciplined process around it. We've
>had problems with 
>multiple solutions to the one problem, and how to combine them all into
>the 'repository' model. It's a process thing, not a tool thing
>necessarily.
>
>It also does change management, which is very impressive.

It does change management poorly...see the lack of TAG above.  DONT
use Rose with CVS.  Rose files cannot be merged and CVS does not lock.
You will clobber each other and end up with a mess (been there...done
that).

Oh, and Rose and Apex does not seem to really mesh together for CMVC.  I used
Rose to make my properties file (.prp) file writable and Apex simply ignored
it so when I did a save it failed...too bad I was exiting at the time.

Whee.

Don't select Apex as your CM tool...SCCS has more features as a
version control tool.  There's also no built in problem report tracking
or metrics tools.

>> >Such a system maintain traceability between requirements, use cases, design
>> >artifacts and modules.  It would maintain lists of programmer and analysts
>Ah, ok. Traceability is a process thing with 3.0.6. I don't know about
>4.0.

You can do some tracability with Rose and SoDA but it requires a bit of
hoop jumping.  You basically add text tags to your class descriptions 
and scenarios to associate them with requirement numbers.  Then someone
does some magic in SoDA (we had a Rational guy do this for us) to use the
tags in our document.

This hardly works all that well for multiple projects using the same
code base but it kinda sorta does the job if you're only dealing with
one set of requirements.

>> >No such tool exists today.  I think it will be a long time before such
>> >a tool does exist.  But I can dream.
>> 
>Give it a try...
>
>Anybody else got comments?

Yeah...don't use Apex unless you intent to slip 2-3 months on top of
the month you allocated for the change over.  For our next project
we're going back to Rose/SoDA, CVS/TkCVS, emacs/gmake and adding
either Visual C++ or SparcWorks Impact C++ depending on platform.

You are much better off spending money on Purify and Quantify than
Apex and if you really lack things to spend money on you're better off
hiring a temporary CM person than pouring money into Apex.

Nigel Tzeng