INTRODUCTION

Software Engineering is broadly associated with the development of quality

software with increasing use of software preparation standards and guidelines.
Software is the single most expensive item in a computer system as the cost of
software during the life time of a machine is equivalent to more than 95% of the
total cost (including hardware). Software Engineering requires a lot of data
collection and information generation. Since the computer itself is a very useful
device as the information processor, it may be a good idea to automate software
engineering tasks. Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools instill
many software engineering tasks with the help of information created using
computer. CASE tools support software engineering tasks and are available for
different tasks of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).

OBJECTIVES
After going through this unit, you should be able to:
 define different kinds of CASE tools and the needs of the CASE tools;
 describe the features of analysis, design, tools use in Software
Engineering; and
 identify software configuration management, and project
management tool.

WHAT ARE CASE TOOLS?

Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools are gradually becoming

popular for the development of software as they are improving in the capabilities
and functionalities and are proving to be beneficial for the development of
quality software. But, what are the CASE tools? And how do they support the
process of development of software?
CASE tools are the software engineering tools that permit collaborative
software development and maintenance. CASE tools support almost all the
phases of the software development life cycle such as analysis, design, etc.,
including umbrella activities such as project management, configuration
management etc. The CASE tools in general, support standard software
development methods such as Jackson Structure programming or structured
system analysis and design method. The CASE tools follow a typical process for
the development of the system, for example, for developing data base
application, CASE tools may support the following development steps:
 Creation of data flow and entity models
 Establishing a relationship between requirements and models
 Development of top-level design
 Development of functional and process description
 Development of test cases.

The CASE tools on the basis of the above specifications can help in automatically
generating data base tables, forms and reports, and user documentation.
Thus, the CASE tools –
  support contemporary development of software systems, they may
improve the quality of the software
 help in automating the software development life cycles by use of
certain standard methods
 create an organsiation wide environment that minimizes repetitive
work
 help developers to concentrate more on top level and more creative
problem-solving tasks
 support and improve the quality of documentation (Completeness
and non- ambiguity), testing process (provides automated checking),
project management and software maintenance.

Most of the CASE tools include one or more of the following types of tools:
 Analysis tools
 Repository to store all diagrams, forms, models and report
definitions etc.
 Diagramming tools
 Screen and report generators
 Code generators
 Documentation generators
 Reverse Engineering tools (that take source code as input and
produce graphical and textual representations of program design-level
information)
 Re-engineering tools (that take source code as the input analyse it
and interactively alters an existing system to improve quality and/or
performance).
Some necessary features that must be supported by CASE tools in addition to
the above are:
 It should have Security of information. The information may be
visible/ changeable by authorised users only.
 Version Control for various products
 A utility to Import/Export information from various external
resources in a compatible fashion
 The process of Backup and Recovery as it contains very precious
data.

An environment having CASE.

Categories of CASE Tools

On the basis of their activities, sometimes CASE tools are classified into the
following categories:
1. Upper CASE tools
2. Lower CASE tools
3. Integrated CASE tools.

Upper CASE: Upper CASE tools mainly focus on the analysis and design phases
of software development. They include tools for analysis modeling, reports and
forms generation.

Lower CASE: Lower CASE tools support implementation of system development.

They include tools for coding, configuration management, etc.

Integrated CASE Tools: Integrated CASE tools help in providing linkages between
the lower and upper CASE tools. Thus creating a cohesive environment for
software development where programming by lower CASE tools may
automatically be generated for the design that has been developed in an upper
CASE tool.
The positioning of CASE tools in a Software Application development.
Need of CASE Tools
The software development process is expensive and as the projects become
more complex in nature, the project implementations become more demanding
and expensive. The CASE tools provide the integrated homogenous environment
for the development of complex projects. They allow creating a shared repository
of information that can be utilised to minimise the software development time.
The CASE tools also provide the environment for monitoring and controlling
projects such that team leaders are able to manage the complex projects.
Specifically, the CASE tools are normally deployed to –
 Reduce the cost as they automate many repetitive manual tasks.
 Reduce development time of the project as they support
standardisation and avoid repetition and reuse.
 Develop better quality complex projects as they provide greater
consistency and coordination.
 Create good quality documentation
 Create systems that are maintainable because of proper control of
configuration item that support traceability requirements.

But please note that CASE tools cannot do the following:

 Automatic development of functionally relevant system

 Force system analysts to follow a prescribed methodology
 Change the system analysis and design process.

There are certain disadvantages of CASE tools. These are:

 Complex functionality
  Many project management problems are not amenable to
automation. Hence, CASE tools cannot be used in such cases.

Factors that affect deployment of CASE Tools in an organisation

A successful CASE implementation requires the following considerations in an

organisation:
1. Training all the users in typical CASE environment that is being
deployed, also giving benefits of CASE tools.
2. Compulsory use of CASE initially by the developers.
3. Closeness of CASE tools methodology to the Software
Development Life Cycle
4. Compatibility of CASE tools with other development platforms
that are being used in an organisation.
5. Timely support of vendor with respect to various issues relating
to CASE tools:
 Low cost support.
 Easy to use and learn CASE tools having low complexity and
online help.
 Good graphic support and multiple users support.
6. Reverse Engineering support by the CASE tools: It is important
that a CASE tool supports complicated nature of reverse engineering.

Characteristics of a successful CASE Tools

A CASE tool must have the following characteristics in order to be used
efficiently:
A standard methodology: A CASE tool must support a standard software
development methodology and standard modeling techniques. In the
present scenario most of the CASE tools are moving towards UML.
Flexibility: Flexibility in use of editors and other tools. The CASE tool
must offer flexibility and the choice for the user of editors’ development
environments.
Strong Integration: The CASE tools should be integrated to support all
the stages. This implies that if a change is made at any stage, for example,
in the model, it should get reflected in the code documentation and all
related design and other documents, thus providing a cohesive environment
for software development.
Integration with testing software: The CASE tools must provide interfaces
for automatic testing tools that take care of regression and other kinds of
testing software under the changing requirements.
Support for reverse engineering: A CASE tools must be able to generate
complex models from already generated code.
On-line help: The CASE tools provide an online tutorial.

SOFTWARE PROJECT MANAGEMENT AND CASE TOOLS

Developing commercial software is not a single-player activity. It is invariably a
collaborative team activity. The development of business-critical systems are
also too risky, or are too large for a single developer to deliver the product in a
stipulated time and quality frame.

A software team involves designers, developers, and testers who work together
for delivering the best solution in the shortest time. Sometimes, these teams
can be geographically dispersed. Managing such a team may be a major change
requests, and task management.

The CASE tools help in effective management of teams and projects. Let us look
into some of the features of CASE in this respect:

 Sharing and securing the project using the user name and
passwords.
 Allowing reading of project related documents
 Allowing exclusive editing of documents
 Linking the documents for sharing
 Automatically communicative change requests to approver and all
the persons who are sharing the document.
 You can read change requests for yourself and act on them
accordingly.
 Setting of revision labels so that versioning can be done.
 Any addition or deletion of files from the repository is indicated.
 Any updating of files in repository is automatically made available
to users.
 Conflicts among versions are reported and avoided
 Differences among versions can be visualized.
 The linked folder, topics, and change requests to an item can be
created and these items if needed can be accessed.
 It should have reporting capabilities of information

The project management tools provide the following benefits:

 They allow control of projects through tasks so control complexity.
 They allow tracking of project events and milestones.
 The progress can be monitored using Gantt chart.
 Web based project related information can be provided.
 Automatic notifications and mails can be generated.

Some of the features that you should look into project management software are:

 It should support drawing of schedules using PERT and Gantt chart.

 It should be easy to use such that tasks can be entered easily, the
links among the tasks should be easily desirable.
 Milestones and critical path should be highlighted.
 It should support editing capabilities for adding/deleting/moving
tasks.
  Should map timeline information against a calendar.
 Should allow marking of durations for each task graphically.
 It should provide views tasks, resources, or resource usage by task.
 Should be useable on network and should be able to share
information through network.

CASE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT

CASE tools support extensive activities during the software development

process. Some of the functional features that are provided by CASE tools for the
software development process are:
1. Creating software requirements specifications
2. Creation of design specifications
3. Creation of cross references.
4. Verifying/Analysing the relationship between requirement and
design
5. Performing project and configuration management
6. Building system prototypes
7. Containing code and accompanying documents.
8. Validation and verification, interfacing with external environment.

Some of the major features that should be supported by CASE development

environment are:
 a strong visual support
 prediction and reporting of errors
 generation of content repository
 support for structured methodology
 integration of various life cycle stages
 consistent information transfer across SDLC stages
 automating coding/prototype generation.
 Present CASE tools support Unified Model Language (UML).
We will elaborate on the features of CASE tools for various stages of software
development process in coming sub-sections using VSTS 2010.
CASE and Web Engineering

CASE Tools are also very useful in the design, development and implementation
of web site development.
Web Engineering requires tools in many categories. They are:
 Site content management tools
 Site version control tools
 Server management tool
 Site optimisation tools
 Web authoring and deployment tools
 Site testing tools that include load and performance testing
 Link checkers
  Program checkers
 Web security test tools.

A detailed discussion on these tools is beyond the scope of this unit. However,
various stages of development of a web project also follows the normal SDLC.
These are discussed in the subsequent sections.

CASE TOOLS AND REQUIREMENT ENGINEERING

Let us first answer the question:
Which is the most Common Source of Risk during the process of software
development?

One of the major risk factors that affect project schedule, budget and quality
can be defined as the ability to successfully elicit requirements to get a solution.

Statistically it has been seen that about 80% of rework in projects is due to
requirement defects.
How can a CASE tools help in effective Requirements Engineering (RE)
A good and effective requirements engineering tool needs to incorporate the
best practices of requirements definition and management.

The requirements Engineering approach should be highly iterative with the

goal of
establishing managed and effective communication and collaboration.

Thus, a CASE tool must have the following features from the requirements
engineering viewpoint:
a dynamic, rich editing environment for team members to capture
and manage requirements
to create a centralised repository
to create task-driven workflow to do change management, and
defect tracking.

But, what is a good process of Requirements Engineering for the CASE?

A simple four-step process for requirements engineering is given in Figure 3.3.

 The four-step requirement engineering process

Requirement Elicitation
A simple technique for requirements elicitation is to ask “WHY”.
CASE tools support a dynamic, yet intuitive, requirements capture and
management environment that supports content and its editing. Some of the
features available for requirement elicitation are:
 Reusable requirements and design templates for various types of
system
 Keeping track of important system attributes like performance and
security
 It may also support a common vocabulary of user-defined terms
that can be automatically highlighted to be part of glossary.
 Provide feature for the assessment of the quality of requirements
 Separate glossary for ambiguous terms that can be flagged for
additional clarification.

What do we expect from the tool?

 It should have rich support for documentation that is easily
understandable to stakeholders and development teams.
 It should have the capability of tracking of requirements during
various SDLC systems.
 It should help in the development of standard technical and
business terminology for end clients.

Software Analysis and Specification

One of the major reasons of documenting requirements is to remove the

ambiguity of information. A good requirement specification is testable for each
requirement.

One of the major features supported by CASE tools for specification is that the
design and implementation should be traceable to requirements. A good way to
do so is to support a label or a tag to the requirements. In addition it should have
the following features:

 Must have features for storing and documenting of requirements.

 Enable creation of models that are critical to the development of
functional requirements.
 Allow development of test cases that enable the verification of
requirements and their associated dependencies.
 Test cases help in troubleshooting the correlation between business
requirements and existing system constraints.
What do we expect from the tool?
 It should allow development of a labeled requirements document
that helps in traceability of requirements.
 It should allow both functional and non-functional requirements with
related quality attributes to be made.
 We should be able to develop the associated models.

Figure 3.4: A sample DFD using CASE Tools

 A Sample ER Diagram using CASE Tools

some of the models developed with the help of a sample CASE Tool.

“The automated approach of

software development needs to
have a spirit of collaboration,
bringing together world-renowned
principal investigators, business
analysts, and software development
teams.”

Validation of Requirements

A very important feature in this regard is to allow collaboration yet customizable

workflows for the software development team members. Also facilitating
approvals and electronic signatures to facilitate audit trails. Assigning owner of
requirement may be helpful if any quality attributes may need changes. Thus, a
prioritised validated documented and approved requirements can be obtained.

Managing Requirements
The requirements document should have visibility and help in controlling the
software delivery process. Some such features available in CASE tools are:
 estimation of efforts and cost
 specification of project schedule such as deadline, staff
requirements and other constraints
 specification of quality parameters.

Software Change Management

An incomplete or ambiguous requirement if detected early in the analysis phase
can be changed easily with minimum cost. However, once they are converted to
baselines after requirements validations the change should be controlled.
One of the major requirements of change management is:
Any change to these requirements should follow a process which is defined as
the ability to track software requirements and their associated
models/documents, etc. (e.g., designs, DFDs and ERDs, etc.). This helps in
determining the components that will be impacted due to change. This also helps
tracking and managing change. The whole process starts with labeling the
requirements properly.

Most CASE Tools store requirement baselines, including type, status, priority and
change history of a software item. Such traceability may be bi-directional in
nature.

Static word processing documents or spreadsheet recedes communication issues

because those tools do not allow sharing and collaboration on up-to-date
requirements. To overcome this a CASE enabled requirements management
infrastructure offers the familiarity of environments such as Microsoft Word, with
added communication methods, such as email. Thus, CASE is a very useful tool
for requirement engineering.

CASE TOOLS AND DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION

In general, some CASE tools support the analysis and design phases of software
development. Some of the tools supported by the design tools are:

 Structured Chart.
 Pogram Document Language (PDL).
 Optimisation of ER and other models.
 Flow charts.
 Database design tools.
 File design tools.

Some of functions that these diagrams tool support are simple but are very
communicative as far as representations of the information of the analysis and
design phases are concerned. CASE Tools also support standard representation of
program architecture; they also contain testing items related to the design and
debugging. Automatic support for maintenance is provided in case any of the
requirements or design items is modified using these diagrams. These CASE
tools also support error-checking stages. They allow checks for completeness
and consistency of the required functional design types and consistency at
various levels of cross referencing among the documents consistency checking
for these documents during the requirements analysis and design phases.

What are the features of high quality requirements?

 Correctness
 Unambiguous
  Must
 Consistency
 Known constraints
 Modifiable
 Priority Assigned
 Traceable
 Verifiable

Proper modeling helps in proper design architecture. All the CASE tools have
strong support for models. They also help in resolving conflicts and ambiguity
among the models and help in optimising them to create excellent design
architecture and process implementation.

 But why do we need to model?

 Can you understand code? If you understand it, then why
would you call it code?
 The major advantages for modeling are:
 A model enhances communication, as it is more pictorial and
less code.
 Even early humans have used pictures to express ideas in a
better way.

Model versus code

A model
 helps the users
 may reduce the cost of project
 can convey a broad spectrum of information.

Some standard models may need to represent:

 Overall system architecture of the software
 Software dependencies
 Flow of information through a software system
 Database organisation and structure.
 Deployment configuration, etc.

Models also help in better planning and reduction of risk as one can make top
down models, thus controlling complexity.

 So what is a good modeling tool?

  The following are some of the characteristics of a good
modeling tool:

CASE tools provide continuously synchronized models and code, thus also help in
consistent understanding of information and documentation. It also helps other
software developers to understand the portions and relationships to portions
other team members are working on.

 Help in management of source code through a more visual

model.

 Refactoring of the code allows a re-look and improvement of

code, as modeling tools contains, thus are most continuously
sychronised code and models suitable for refactoring.

 Modeling can help in creating good patterns including

modeling patterns, language specific patterns and basic patterns for
common operations such as implementing interfaces, etc.
 Models also facilitate reverse engineering.
 Given the task of maintaining software that was built by a
team that has moved on to a new project, there may be very little
documentation available for the project.

 The value of a modeling tool can be tremendous in such

cases. The developer can take the existing code, create models for it to
understand the software. This can save a lot of time for the developer.
 A modeling tool should have been integrated with
requirements tools, so that architects see consistently unambiguous
information.

A State Model
CASE Repository
CASE Repository stores software system information. It includes analysis and
design specifications and helps in analysing these requirements and converting
them into program code and documentation. The following is the content of
CASE repository:
 Data
 Process
 Models
 Rules/ Constraints.

Data: Information and entities/object relationship attributes, etc.

Process: Support structured methodology, link to external entities, document

structured software development process standards.

Models: Flow models, state models, data models, UML document etc.

Rules/Constraints: Business rules, consistency constraints, legal constraints.

The CASE repository has two primary segments.
1. Information repository
2. Data dictionary.

Information Repository includes information about an organisation’s business

information and its applications.
The CASE tools manage and control access to repository. Such information data
can also be stored in corporate database.

Data dictionary contains all the data definitions for all organisational
applications, along with cross-referencing if any.

Its entries have a standard definition, viz., element name and alias; textual
description of the element; related elements; element type and format; range of
acceptable values and other information unique to the proper processing of the
element.

CASE Repository has additional advantages such that it assists the project
management tasks; aids in software reusability by enabling software modules in
a manner so that they can be used again.

Implementation tools and CASE

CASE tools provide the following features for implementation:

Diagramming tools enable visual representation of a system and its
components
Allow representing process flows.
Help in implementing the data structures and program structures
Support automatic creation of system forms and reports.
Ready prototype generation.
 Create of both technical and user documentation.
Create master templates used to verify documentation and its
conformance to all stages of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).
Enable the automatic generation of program and database from the
design documents, diagrams, forms and reports stored in the repository.

SOFTWARE TESTING
CASE tools may also support software testing. One of the basic issues of
testing is management, execution and reporting. Testing tools can help in
automated unit testing, functional regression testing, and performance testing. A
testing tool ensures the high visibility of test information, types of common
defects, and application readiness.

 Features Needed for Testing

 The tool must support all testing phases, viz., plan, manage
and execute all types of tests viz., functional, performance, integration,
regression, testing from the same interface.
 It should integrate with other third party testing tools.
 It should support local and remote test execution.
It should help and establish and manage traceability by linking requirements
to test cases. This also helps when requirements change; in such as case the test
cases traced to the requirement are automatically flagged as possible candidates
for change.
 It should create a log of test run.
 It should output meaningful reports on test completeness,
test analysis.
 It may provide automated testing.

SOFTWARE QUALITY AND CASE TOOLS

Software quality is sacrificed by many developers for more functionality, faster

development and lower cost. However, one must realise that a good quality
product actually enhances the speed of software development. It reduces the
cost and allows enhancement and functionality with ease as it is a better
structured product. You need to pay for a poor quality in terms of more
maintenance time and cost. Can the good quality be attributed to a software by
enhancing the testing? The answer is NO. The high quality software
development process is most important for the development of quality software
product. Software quality involves functionality for software usability, reliability,
performance, scalability, support and security.
Integrated CASE tools:
 help the development of quality product as they support standard
methodology and process of software development
 supports an exhaustive change management process
 contains easy to use visual modeling tools incorporating continuous
 quality assurance.

Quality in such tools is represented in all life cycle phases viz., Analysis/ Design
development, test and deployment. Quality is essential in all the life cycle
phases.
Analysis: A poor understanding of analysis requirements may lead to a poor
product. CASE tools help in reflecting the system requirements clearly,
accurately and in a simple way. CASE tools support the requirements analysis
and coverage also as we have modeling. CASE also helps in ambiguity resolution
of the requirements, thus making high quality requirements.

Design: In design the prime focus of the quality starts with the testing of the
architecture of the software. CASE tools help in detecting, isolating and resolving
structure deficiency during the design process. On an average, a developer
makes 100 to 150 errors for every thousand lines of code. Assuming only 5% of
these errors are serious, if software has ten thousand lines of code you may still
have around 50 serious coding errors in your system. One of the newer software
development processes called the Agile process helps in reducing such problems
by asking the developer to design their test items first before the coding.
A very good approach that is supported by CASE tools specially running time
development of C, C++, JAVA or .NET code is to provide a set of automatic run
time
Language tools for development of reliable and high performance applications.
Testing: Functionality and performance testing is an integrated part of ensuring
high quality product. CASE support automated testing tools that help in testing
the software, thus, helping in improving the quality of testing. CASE tools
enhance the speed breadth and reliability of these design procedures. The
design tools are very important specifically in case of a web based system where
scalability and reliability are two major issues of design.
Deployment: After proper testing a software goes through the phase of
deployment where a system is made operational. A system failure should not
result in a complete failure of the software on restart. CASE tools also help in this
particular place. In addition, they support configuration management to help any
kind of change thus to be made in the software.
Quality is teamwork: It involves integration of workflow of various individuals. It
establishes a traceability and communication of information, all that can be
achieved by sharing workload documents keeping their configuration items.

SOFTWARE CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT

Software Configuration Management (SCM) is extremely important from the view

of deployment of software applications. SCM controls deployment of new
software versions. Software configuration management can be integrated with
an automated solution that manages distributed deployment. This helps
companies to bring out new releases much more efficiently and effectively. It
also reduces cost, risk and accelerates time.
A current IT department of an organisation has complex applications to manage.
These applications may be deployed on many locations and are critical systems.
Thus, these systems must be maintained with very high efficiency and low cost
and time. The problem for IT organisations has increased tremendously as some
of the organisations may need to rebuild and redeploy new software versions a
week over multi-platform global networks.

In such a situation, if rebuilding of application versions is built or deployed

manually using a spreadsheet, then it requires copying of rebuilt software to
many software locations, which will be very time consuming and error prone.
What about an approach where newer software versions are automatically built
and deployed into several distributed locations through a centralised control. For
example, assume that IGNOU has a data entry software version 1.0 for entering
assignment marks which is deployed all the RCs. In case its version 1.1 is to be
deployed, if the re-built software need to be sent and deployed manually, it
would be quite troublesome. Thus, an automatic deployment tool will be of great
use under the control of SCM.
What do we need?
We need an effective SCM with facilities of automatic version control, access
control, automatic re-building of software, build audit, maintenance and
deployment. Thus, SCM should have the following facilities:

Creation of configuration
This documents a software build and enables versions to be
reproduced on demand
Configuration lookup scheme that enables only the changed files to
be rebuilt. Thus, entire application need not be rebuilt.
Dependency detection features even hidden dependencies, thus
ensuring correct behaviour of the software in partial rebuilding.
Ability for team members to share existing objects, thus saving time
of the team members.

Figure 3.8 shows a simple Configuration Management based rebuilding and

deployment process.

Simple configuration management environment