Re: DoD and NIST undermining commercial CASE industry

[olivea!gossip.pyramid.com!pyramid!athertn!usenet@uunet.uu.net (Ed White)]

In article <ByM75t.2s6@world.std.com> srctran@world.std.com (Gregory Aharonian)
  
writes:
>  
>      The November 30, 1992 issue of Computerworld, page 73, contains the
> following article on how the DoD and the NIST are undermining the commercial
> CASE industry in America.  Another example of socialist bureacrats trying to

The article in Computerworld was based on the following letter from Ed White of
  
Atherton to Bill Wong at NIST. 

November 14, 1992

Mr. William Wong
Senior Computer Scientist
National Institute of Standards & Technology
Technology Building, Room B266
Gaithersburg, MD 20899

Dear Bill:

The User Forum of the Integrated Software Engineering Environments held on  
November 9, 1992 at NIST was informative, but raised the following concerns by 
 
Atherton and its customers who are developing ISEE's.

1.  Although more development is being done in the U.S. on ISEE's based on ATIS
  
than PCTE, the leadership and User Forum agendas of NIST ISEE are dominated by 
 
PCTE interests.  In the U.S. the major ISEE builders utilizing ATIS are Loral  
(CORCASE), Verdix (VADS APSE), GTE (PSE), and Boeing (CAPE).  

In Europe, CRI, with Life*Cycle, an ISEE based on ATIS technology from  
Atherton, has been the leading ISEE supplier for two consecutive years.  

These ATIS ISEE's were not represented in the agenda of the November 9, 1992  
ISEE User Forum.  

2.  Based on presentations by PCTE supporters at the ISEE User Forum, it is  
clear that implementations of PCTE do not have the maturity of ATIS  
implementations.  The time required to produce mature PCTE implementations and 
 
to build industrial strength ISEE's based on PCTE is estimated to be 3-5 years.
 

3.  At the User Forum, organizations implementing PCTE and PCTE ISEE's  
expressed a desire for PCTE to support: (1) objects types with methods and  
method inheritance to improve ISEE development productivity, and (2)  
fine-grained objects types - enabling PCTE to store records as well as files.  
 
Performance is not acceptable for applications like metrics or change  
management if every record is a file.  ATIS has these object-oriented features 
 
today.  There are no ECMA PCTE plans to support these features. 

Based on the above information, Atherton recommends support by NIST and NAPI  
for a merger of ATIS and PCTE interests and technologies in the U.S. with the  
following actions:

	a. Change the name of NAPI to NAISEE.

	b. Include ATIS representatives in the management and agendas of  
	your programs.  

	c. Sponsor a merger of PCTE and ATIS specifications into an object- 
	oriented specification.  ATIS has the specifications for object types  
	which includes fine grained and coarse grained object types, methods  
	in object types, inheritance of methods in object types, and a 	message
  
	interface to the methods in object types.  ATIS ISEE's have 	 
	complete integrations for IDE's, Cadre's, McCabe's, CenterLine's, HP's,
  
	Interleaf's, Verilog's, Frame's and many other vendors' products as  
	well as processes like 2167A that are based on real objects with  
	inherited methods and messages.  	

	d. Support the activities of ANSI X3H4 and X3H6 committees, which  
	are establishing advanced U.S. standards for ISEE repositories and  
	Tool Integration Services.    

Bill, we appreciate the work of NIST and NAPI in advancing ISEE technology in  
the U.S. and look forward to working with both organizations to implement the  
above recommendations.  To do otherwise will result in a 3-5 year program to  
implement PCTE followed by another 3-5 year program to change it to an  
object-oriented technology like ATIS.      

Sincerely,



W. Edward White
Vice President 
--