[comp.software-eng] CASE and Development Env. Tools Survey Summary

dph@lanl.gov (David Huelsbeck) (07/19/88)

A few weeks ago I posted a request for information about CASE tools and
other program development environment thingies.  Responses were heavily
weighted on the side of "let me know what you find out".  So here is
what I found out.

	It was suggested that I attend the 3rd Symposium on Software
	Development Environments (SIGSOFT/SIGPLAN), to be held in
	Boston this November.  I've made a request for registration
	materials and I hope to be there.

	A fairly broad survey of commercial tools was disappointing.
	It seemed that about 75+% of the commercial tools were those
	cute little MacDraw(tm?) type things for design automation.
	I guess that's OK if that's what you're into but I have serious
	doubts about their usefulness to us.  (For some interesting 
	comments on the usefulness of such tools see: 
	_Automating_Software:_proceed_with_caution_, IEEE Spectrum, July '88)

	We did find a few commercial tools that looked interesting.
	These all fell into what the IEEE article referred to as
	"Implementation" or "Support" phase tools.  The one draw back
	to these was that for the most part they supported languages
	we are not especially concerned with. (i.e. languages other
	than Fortran)  We did find one commercially available set of
	tools for Fortran that we were genuinely interested in.  It
	turned out that someone else here had already made plans to
	buy this package.  So I guess we'll be getting a first hand 
	look at it.  

In retrospect, none of the above ought to be a big revelation.  I imagine
that plenty of you are reading this and saying "Well, what'd they expect
anyway?"  I can only answer that by saying that I didn't really know what
to expect.  That's exactly why we did this survey.  

However, some good did come of it.  I went ahead and did some more book 
work to augment this survey.  I ran across an NBS Special Publication
titled Software Development Tools.  This was an '81 or '82 publication
I think. (Sorry not to have the exact reference.)  This included quite
a few references to "public domain", Fortran oriented tools.  We're now
looking into the possibility of modifying one of these to meet our own 
specialized needs. (i.e. non-standard Fortran)

This is something I think vendors should take note of.  Outside of the 
Unix/C and Ada camps how many people actually adhere to standards strictly
enough to make using a tool directed toward some ANSI language feasible?
It may be a symptom of my both limited and unusual experience in this area
but it seems to me that most vendors offer extensions and most users use them.
It strikes me that a vendor that offered a set of implementation/support
phase tools directed at a particular brand of Fortran or whatever could 
make a killing.  I would think that as long as the user interface was
slick, the tool did not constrain the users too much (i.e. would work on
existing codes, it didn't require the use of some special CASE methodology),
and it provided a few basic analysis features a market would be almost
guaranteed.

Are there people providing such flavor specific tools?  Is it just that our
particular flavor is so uncommon that no one provides tools for it? 

Are there any tools vendors out there that would care to comment?


Thanks to those who responded.  I hope this is of interest to some of you.

	David Huelsbeck
	Los Alamos National Laboratory
	dph@lanl.gov