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From: jgautier@deimos.ads.com (Jorge Gautier)
Subject: Re: CASE, the Little Red Hen, and Stone Soup
In-Reply-To: dlw@Atherton.COM's message of 17 Aug 90 21:31:38 GMT
Message-ID: <JGAUTIER.90Aug21153208@deimos.ads.com>
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Organization: Advanced Decision Systems, Mountain View, CA 94043, +1 (415)
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References: <JGAUTIER.90Aug15151317@deimos.ads.com>
	<28596@athertn.Atherton.COM> <28966@athertn.Atherton.COM>
Date: 21 Aug 90 15:32:08
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In article <28966@athertn.Atherton.COM> dlw@Atherton.COM (David Williams) writes:
> It is not a matter of thinking that CASE is one tool or methodology; it
> is that when people try and take specific CASE tools and have them work
> TOGETHER that
> everything falls apart. In most circumstances you want all the tools you
> have to be able to share data and you hope this happens via a repository
> such as the one our company provides as an IPSE.  

Do you really think that data sharing (and/or "control" sharing for
that matter) is sufficient to make disparate tools work together?

> But, most CASE tools
> are by *design* HOSTILE to data sharing or having their data stored in
> an OODB rather than in a native file system proprietary file/DB
> format. 

They are hostile to working with tools of different design.  Data
sharing by itself won't solve the problem of different design and data
semantics.  

> When surveys are conducted about what people want out of CASE tools an
> ultimate goal is for the tools to share (or hey REUSE) their information
> as the engineer(s) move thru the lifecycle.  

Well, what I really want is something that helps me create more
software faster and better.  But that aside :-), for tools to work
together they have to be designed to do so.  You might be able to
patch them up with tape and glue, but it is usually awkward, error
prone and unreliable.  Why do some people think that it is easy to
"integrate" tools that were designed with different requirements in
mind?

> If CASE tools/environments would actually cooperate these folks would
> probably be beating down CASE vendor doors to get them.

You seem to assume that cooperating tools implies a useful system.  As
a potential customer, I don't care if "tools cooperate" or not,
because to me, the partitioning and interfaces are arbitrary.  Just
show me what it does for me.  Does it do something useful for me,
better than what I do today?  If not, I won't buy it.

--
Jorge A. Gautier| "The enemy is at the gate.  And the enemy is the human mind
jgautier@ads.com|  itself--or lack of it--on this planet."  -General Boy
