Software Design with Visual Thought

With its free-form, editable drag-and-drop palette libraries and rubberbanding connections, Visual Thought lets you create software diagrams using any of a variety of notations, including Booch, Rumbaugh, Objectory, HP Fusion, Entity-Relationship, Gane & Sarson, and more.

Visual Thought lets you mix-and-match methodologies or even create your own custom methodologies on your own palettes.

If you are interested in CASE but are concerned about the expense of the typical CASE tool, consider what Confluent's customers have found about Visual Thought:

• Visual Thought is optimized for diagramming

  This makes Visual Thought very fast to learn (reduces start-up time) and to use (results in a productivity gain). Most CASE tools aren't optimized this way.

• Visual Thought is flexible

  CASE tools are sometimes excessively rigid in forcing the user to input too much information before giving usable results back. CASE tools also typically don't adapt to multiple or in-house methodologies, whereas Visual Thought can.

• Visual Thought is much less expensive

  VT doesn't give you all the neat CASE features like code generation and reverse engineering, but you can often buy 10 Visual Thought licenses for the price of 1 CASE tool license. If your primary need is rapid design communication between and among members of a design team, Visual Thought can allow all members of your group to be productive simultaneously, whereas spending the same amount on a CASE tool might force everybody to share just one or two copies of that tool.

Here are some of the methodologies and notations that Visual Thought supports, and example images created with Visual Thought:

• Unified Modeling Language (UML) [as of Visual Thought 1.3 commercial]
• Booch example [15 kb]
• Rumbaugh (OMT)
• HP Fusion
• Objectory
• Gane & Sarson (dataflow) drag-and-drop palette
• Entity-Relationship drag-and-drop palette

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800-780-2838 and 415-764-1000 tel * 415-764-1008 fax * info@confluent.com

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