Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) - Part II

How CASE Tools are useful in practical environments?

Case tools (Computer Aided Software Engineering) are software, which helps to automate or
assist any part of the development life cycle Eg:- MS VB, MS Access, Rational Rose, Visio,
MS-Project etc. The features those are available in the CASE Tools.

Prototyping:
ls used to quickly build a functional model of the system. To create a prototype tools such as
MS Access, MS VB are used.

Testing:
Testing is done to assure there are no error (error free) in the system. It is done by a process
call debugging. To automate and provide quick and accurate results we can use case tools.
Some IDE(Integrated Development Environment) such as MS VB 6.0, Visual Studio.NET are
providing a very good support for testing.

Report generation:
Case tools such as MS Access, Crystal Reports provides very good support in creations of
reports. These help to connect to the data base and retrieve data. Further data are shown
using a very user friendly and understandable method.

Syntax verifier:
Certain case tools such as Visual Studio provides syntax sensitive editors which will highlight
the syntactic errors in the coding. If there are errors the compilation will be aborted until they
are corrected by the programmer. If these case tools are not available programmer has to
get a print out of the coding and check by himself .

Code generation:
Certain case tools are there such as VB 6.0 IDE, Visual Studio.NET IDE provides code
generation tool to automatically generate codes when certain terms are placed in the
interface; coding for that is automatically generated is reducing the time of development.

Document management:
Certain case tools help to document the requirements or design. Case tools such as
MS Access helps to provide certain documents of databases. Further "Rational Rose"
provides help to document certain features of the diagrams drawn. For an example
description for Use cases, Actors etc. and can be documented.

Version control:
A software program has several versions. A version is a modification of the existing system.
Therefore these versions should be separately documented with the version numbers.
Certain case tools such as Visual Studio IDE provides version management tools

Diagrammatic tool:
Case tools such as Visio, "Rational Rose" enables drawing of necessary diagrams. Rational
Rose supports almost all the diagrams (use-case diagrams, sequence diagrams,
collaboration diagrams, component and deployment diagrams etc.) in UML. Visio can be
use to draw DFD's.

Quality control s tools:
Quality should be included in a product before it is completed. Quality measured in Quality
attributes. Quality control tools provides much help to document and to control quality in an
Information Systems.

All the above mentioned features can be called as functionalities or factors

Forces For and Against CASE Adoption

Driving forces:

1. Short development time
2. Improved productivity
3. Improved system quality
4. Improved worker skills
5. Improved portability
6. Improved management

Resisting forces:

1. High purchase cost
2. High training cost
3. Low organizational confidence
4. Lack of standards
5. Perceived threat to job security