Although computer-aided software engineering (CASE) technology has taken a beating in the past, don't consider it down for the count.
Leading industry watchers say CASE is crawling away from its shadow of broken promises.
According to Robert Parker, vice president of marketing for Atria Software, which provides software configuration management tools for CASE developers, CASE is not dead.
"The whole notion of CASE is still a very accepted, valuable one, and companies really don't want to throw it away," he said. "They really want it to materialize, and therefore, it hangs on. I think there is an awful lot of promise over time for CASE products."
Dave McAllister, product manager for enabling technologies for Silicon Graphics Inc., said CASE technology is gaining positive ground.
"We are beginning to see a lot of new companies with fresh ideas coming into the picture that are doing some pretty remarkable work," he said.
Looking at the big picture of the market, the trends seem to center around growing complexity, according to John Brewer, director of marketing communications for Atria Software.
He said the teams of software developers are growing in size because there are more lines of code involved in today's major products. In addition to incorporating more developers, the development organization is spread out geographically, he said. Developers also are focusing on higher quality products as well as the process needed to create high-quality results.
"Software development in the past has had a high component of inventiveness in it," he said. "When you are in an inventor's shop, whether it is a software developers group or a garage, there's going to be a certain amount of chaos and thinking going on. But over time, as the industry matures, this real need for a high-quality, dependable process has emerged and touches on the need for software asset management tools to manage the complexity that is arising."
Developer demands for specialized tools for specific functions also is on the rise, according to Michele Chambers Turner, SGI's manager of developer tools marketing. She said the tools are moving toward integration, but Parker said the move isn't fast enough.
"What people really need in the software development role is not a whole set of individual tools that work independently but a set that is very closely integrated together," Parker said. "One of the biggest weaknesses of these tools is that they are point solutions at best and not part of an integrated fabric of a solution."
John McCall, telephony marketing manager for 4Seasons Software, providers of 4GL development environments, predicted stronger integration between 4GL products and CASE tools.
"The whole industry is trying to get away from the IBM glass-house type situation," McCall said. "So you are trying to get to an open environment. The products that are open and the products that provide easy integration are going to be the products that really survive."
Developers, on the other hand, are finding creative ways to survive the challenges they face with today's CASE technology.
With the advent of multimedia, developers find themselves juggling new functionalities, McAllister said.
"The hardware and the capabilities of the hardware have grown so fast, that all of a sudden, they [developers] have these new capabilities like audio, video, virtual reality, all thrown at them at once," he said. "They are living with legacy code and are expected to map that application into all these sets. And there's not a clean way to go through and even figure out what's been done in the code much less bring in new features and functionalities easily."
McAllister said developers are finding tools to aid in this process, which tends to be a piecemeal approach.
"They almost rewrite their application from scratch, but they'll add the capability of doing sound to it, and usually, they use the higher level application programming interfaces to access these new features," he said.
Turner said that as these new multimedia technologies start becoming more prevalent, people need to start developing with them to remain competitive.
"The types of applications that people are going to be developing in the future will naturally take advantage of things like multimedia, graphics and imaging, and people are going to need to learn how to incorporate those technologies into their applications to remain competitive. And as that happens, there are going to be more and more tools developed by companies that make it easier to develop and test those types of applications," she said.
Competitive factors have led some companies to downsize, which brings certain disadvantages, according to McCall.
"When you downsize the equipment, it downplays the structure necessary to create a complex application," he said. "So what happens is there are all of these productivity tools, and people immediately begin programming. And boom, all of a sudden there's a tendency to lose the structure that the CASE environment and the design and the entire development life cycle used to provide."
The emphasis on rapid development and rapid prototyping has led to "building something quickly and showing it to the user. If you make a mistake, you throw it away and make another version of it. So a lot of the rigor that was associated with CASE tools originally, especially with using prototyping as a methodology, has gotten beaten up to a certain degree," he said.
McCall expects CASE to make a comeback, especially in the client-server arena.
"Companies that come out with CASE-specific client-server products are going to win because those mission-critical applications are going to start to get downsized into the client-server world, and that's going to have a real impact," he said.
Although the future looks bright to some, it is not perfect.
CASE is still missing some pieces, such as effective code reuse, McAllister said. Too, developers can get locked into a methodology that may not solve their problem, he said.
One way to avoid that, Turner said, is by education. A common method used in smaller companies is "the white board approach."
"They don't use a design methodology at all," Turner said. "They get 10 programmers in a room and figure out what they are going to do and lay it out on a white board. They lock themselves in a room for a week and come out with a plan."
McAllister said that process can yield some of the best results.
"Because, like anything else, a program designed by committee is going to have all the flaws a committee can bring to it," he said. "Whereas a tightly knit team can build you a very tight, integrated product that does exactly what they mean for it to do."
What backers of CASE technology mean to do these days is promote CASE as an effective tool.
"We are in the business of creating intellectual property," Brewer said. "And the human component is never going to be replaced. I think people should remember that it is computer-automated or computer-assisted -- that's what the acronym is all about, and that's what we've got to keep our eyes on. We are trying to help people do a better job of what they do best, not replace them or what they do."
McAllister reminded developers that CASE is just a tool.
"There is now a recognition in the programmer community that CASE does not mean you lose the creativity. It's a tool that makes you more of an artist than you were before," he said.