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I have used a few tools, and like anything else it comes down to your proficiency with the language.

WinRunner http://www.mercury.com/ = Gotta know C++, and you better not be looking at modern tech (.net, java, etc...) plus requires add ins

Quick Test Pro http://www.mercury.com/ = Expensive but deals with modern tech if you but the extention and know VB needs add ins

OpenSource = OK for light stuff

Rational http://www.rational.com/ = Very confusing

SmarteScript http://www.accordsqa.com/ = easy to use, but doesnt require programming experience, new to market, no need for add ins

compuware http://www.compuware.com/ = have to hire them as consultants

just a few views.

The results for Best Modeling Tool (scroll to last chart) are:

• Winner: Visio 2003 - 37%
• 1st Runner up: Rational Rose - 18%
• 2nd Runner up: Oracle9i/10g JDeveloper - 7%

I assume that you are working with relational databases, although you don't mention it.. (data modeling could mean a lot of things)

Some DBMSs have some decent, albeit limited graphical design tools (MSSQL, Access..)

together from borland does entity relationship diagramming, and so much more. (great tool)

I believe IBM's rational rose may also do it.

Since my job includes SQL design as a subset of my duties (i'm a developer/architect, not a DBA) these two tools are significantly more valuable than ERWin.

I just wish I could get my boss to buy them. :)

On the commercial side, there are a few options, none of them cheap. Take a look at the Rational suite. One nice touch is only having to purchase the modules you need. The way Rational captures multi-project interactions is by becoming part of your development process, from soup to nuts. Yes, it's a commitment, but it's also your business.

Depending on your resources, the semiconductor company I work for uses Ration ClearQuest. It provides management, reporting, assigning, tracking, etc. for 3 case types: Bugs, Enhancements, and Work Requests.

I've been using for about a year now and from what I've seen, and it gets the job done pretty well.

Take a look at rational.com if it sounds interesting.

It's called Academia.

But seriously, folks, companies like Rational (now part of IBM) do this sort of thing. They sell products based on their ideas, but the end result of their efforts is software process techniques and tools. They've had some of the best minds in Computer Science working for them, people who have produced UML, the Unified Process, and many more while working at Rational.

Put it this way: you have a choice between two firewalls. You put the binaries for each through this software and one report shows repeated use of classes with known vulnerabilities.

Which vendor are you going to buy from?

The closest thing I've used to this new program is Purify. Let me pose this question: What does it mean for code to run "Purify clean?"

Answer: It means whoever developed the code has access to Purify and worked on getting rid of the warnings one by one until there were none left. Does it mean the code is higher quality? Yes, it's probably at least a bit higher quality than it was beforehand. But does that mean it's higher quality than some other code which isn't Purify-clean? Not necessarily. Just as code that compiles without warnings is not necessarily better than code that compiles with some warnings. It's like a used car that has been through one of those "40-point inspections>" It doesn't guarantee years of trouble-free driving by any means.

Rational Rose doesn't "only run" under Windows. I've personally used it on Solaris, and I see that they now have a Linux version out too. The Solaris version had a slightly sluggish GUI, but nothing to really complain about.

Check out the supported platforms page

Exactly.

I run Linux on my desktop at work, but I have an application that I need to do my job with that only runs under Windows (and doesn't work too well with WINE). So when I need that application I fire up VMWare and use it. Big deal.

I think what C and C++ really lack is the option to turn on array range checking. Sure you can drop a couple grand for a purify license or learn to use valgrind, but it should be an easy-to-switch compiler option.

I'm sure it's harder to accomplish this for kernel level code (it's primarily OSes being pointed at right here) but you can think everything is working hunkey-dorey and not realize something is going wrong under the covers.

Most errors of this can be found with testing under tools like valgrind or Rational's purify. I'm sure there are others (I've heard of ParaSoft Insure++, ATOM Third Degree, CodeGaurd, and ZeroFault), but the quality of these tools really matters.

The issue is that tiny errors can cause crashes intermittently, and not immediately. For example:
uninitialized memory reads -- usually not a problem, but if this value is ever actually used, it will be.
array bounds reads -- never acceptable, but depending on the structure of memory, may not always cause an immediate crash.
array bounds writes -- like ABRs, may not be immediately fatal, but these are going to crash your code sooner or later.

Since they don't always cause an immediate crash, these errors are likely to creep in to released code without use of one of these tools. And if you want to know why we shouldn't always run programs in an environment that checks these kinds of things, try it once; you'll notice a speed hit of usually an order of magnitude. C/C++ is a perfectly acceptable language -- not all debugging has to be done by the compiler/interpreter or only after you notice a problem.

Anyway, hope that wasn't too pedantic....

If it's like every other Eclipse plugin project, its status is and will remain what the RUP guys like to call "the inception phase".

Also, the cobination of SoDA, Rose and Requisite Pro offer a lot of options for manipulating requirements and code documentation.
ReqPro Link

(If this seems like an ad... I work work for IBM Rational.)

Also, the cobination of SoDA, Rose and Requisite Pro offer a lot of options for manipulating requirements and code documentation.
ReqPro Link

(If this seems like an ad... I work work for IBM Rational.)

I'd suggest discussing this on a non-OSDN sponsored forum. Whilst I trust editorial integrity here, any positive appraisal of Sourceforge will (quite rightly) come under suspicion, with this being the major money-maker for those bank-rolling this site.

But sourceforge isn't a VSS competitor - it's a whole-process management system. Its competitors are Clearcase, Sourcecast or the free system aegis. Clearcase has its own source control system but the others are built (AFAIK) on top of CVS - *that's* the VSS competitor here.

PVCS - My software company migrated from MS VSS to PVCS, it works much better - but - at least for our relatively large project, it's kind of slow. We've been using it for about a year and it's worked well.
Clearcase - Rumored to be "THE version control system", I've heard it is complicated to setup and use, but Rational Clearcase is supposed to be the end all of version control systems. Checking out the link before posting, it seems that Rational software is now owned by IBM?
Starteam - I evaluated this product a while ago (18-24 months or so ago). It seems that this company has been purchased by Borland. But at any rate, Starteam seemed to be a very comprehensive version control system. We didn't choose Starteam - as many of our developers had already had PVCS experience and at the time Starteam was the new-kid-on-the-block and we didn't want to fight with a new product. We already had enough headaches with MS VSS, we wanted something we knew for certain would be tried and true. That being said, Starteam did look great.
Last but not least, CVS the open source version control system. I've used it a few times, but never set it up or configured it and can't really comment on reliability, etc. I'll assume it's great - I'm know others have mentioned CVS and I'll leave the people that have used it to give you more information.

Both languages piss me off considerably (forgive the strong language)!

First procedural (QCL) and now OOP! But everyone knows, that OOP is snakeoil, well except for those gready UML tools vendors and their greedy consultanting brothers who errected a tool industry to cure the problems they caused by pushing OOP into PHB everywhere :-)

Honestly. Quantumn physics is reversable phyics, as physical relevant quanties must be measureable and thus be represented by unitary operators.

This implies that quantumn operations are inheritently reversible and that thus a destructive update is very hard to realize!
Man, non-destructive updates (persistent data!) don't I hear "functional programming" cried out loud here?

Regards,
Marc

The practices try to make it easier to produce good code design, but they could be applied to any design methodology. You could do XP Object-Oriented or not, with Java, COBOL, perl, basic, or assembler.

You do know that those aren't design methodologies, right? XP is a lifecycle methodology, and thus includes a design methodology, as well as systems and practices which attempt to ensure that the methodology is followed.

There is nothing to make your software design good or bad except your skillz and the developer sitting next to you.

Wait, don't forget about all the other developers who'll be refactoring your code, and the tests which serve as much to document the original intent of changes as to test the continued validity of the changes, and the constant integration which keeps your code polished, and weekly or biweekly product deliveries that keep your customer in the feedback loop, and the planning game that makes sure important requirements are found and developed for, and...

So, I'd say XP doesn't enforce any coding methodology

You'd be right, but this is the first time you've said that; you've been talking about design methodologies before.

, but tries to create an environment that encourages good habits.

Nope, not XP's job -- that's for the team to do. You could say that XP describes a set of "good habits", and how they interrelate to reinforce each other.

I was talking about the methods for designing at a fairly low implementation level the actual code that makes an application work

Do you know the difference between "design" and "implementation"? I ask because in the above sentance you mix them up.

the parent comment here expressed concern about code made under XP being sloppy.

The parent comment poster should speak for himself, but I have to say that I did NOT see that in his post at all. What I saw was that he felt that code produced using XP would be unreliable: in other words, it would fail to meet requirements all or part of the time, either due to bad understanding of the requirements, bad solutions to the requirements, or bad implementations of the solutions.

That's what I meant by design.

Well, that's not design. That's coding standards. XP addresses those too, but leaves all the details to the team doing the actual work.

If you talk about RUP or Waterfall as a design methodology then obviously they are incompatible with XP.

So are you agreeing that XP includes design methodology?

BTW, minor point: RUP is a flexible system which can include XP. See Rational's own website for what I'd consider dramatic proof.

-Billy

There are many products that do code coverage testing such as PureCoverage. Basically they analyze code as it is running and make note of which parts of your code have been executed and which haven't. This is very useful in making sure all possible code paths are tested, and if a code path isn't hit at all it gives you a good indication that you've got a 'dead' patch of code that you might want to look more closely at. Sadly such tools are generally very expensive.

IBM's "planned" available of Rational isn't just "planned." It's actually done. I'd suggest that maybe you guys missed it, but, well, you know.

IBM and Rational Software Sign Agreement for IBM to Acquire Rational
December 6, 2002

Armonk, N.Y., and Cupertino, Calif. -- IBM (NYSE:IBM) and Rational Software Corp. (NASDAQ:RATL) today announced the two companies have entered into a definitive agreement for IBM to acquire the equity of Rational at a price of approximately $2.1 billion in cash or $10.50 per share.

Funny. Rational seems to think that they are being bought buy IBM and IBM seems to concur.

Didn't IBM already sign something with Rational.. because: this link thinks they did

1. As far as I have heard, Atria was founded by the old DSEE team and did not buy ClearCase outright:

   In January of 1990, Atria Software, Inc. was founded to create the next generation of Software Configuration Management (SCM) product for Unix. Atria's founders were all originally from Apollo, and the founding team included all of the original designers of DSEE.

2. Only ClearCase LT uses FlexLM. The standard version uses its own license manager, which is actually a drawback since FlexLM at least tries to provide support for fallover with triad setups, but ClearCase's lm has no fallover mechanism.
3. Actually, Pure and Atria merged in August 96, and then in the Rational buying binge of 97, they picked up Pure Atria in June. So says Rational's history book. As for integrating RUP, using UCM with ClearCase is optional. I don't think it's existence as an option impacts standard ClearCase that much.

we are mostly a hardware company

Not even hardly. IBM is mostly a services company (over half of IBM's employees and about half of their revenue hail from the services division). Over the last year, IBM has sold off a lot of its hardware lines, including -- most recently -- its hard drives.

We also sell a set of software engineering tools

That they do. However, you linked to VAGenerator, a product that is being sunsetted. What they DO produce is the Open Source-based (i.e. Eclipse-based) WebSphere Studio Application Developer.

we'll probably integrate Rational's tools with that

You betcha -- but a lot of it has already been done. WSAD already integrates with ClearCase. Rational also has a product called Rational XDE that already gives somewhat-Rose-like integration into WSAD.

Did anyone else notice the new toy?

Purify Plus for Linux!

R.I.P., gprof, Insure++ and Valgrind. :)

Yes. In the next version of Rational Rose called Rational XDE files are stored as XML. There is a link to evaluation software if you want to try it out.

However, "some sort of SVG browser" may not do it. Depending on the nature/complexity of the XML, you may need a completely customized file viewer/editor.

Rational has a JSP based site that's pretty damn fast (unless it gets slashdotted, of course).

Perhaps it would have been a good idea to make it clear that you refer to this UML, and not this UML.

That confused me, for one, for a minute or so.

Godel, Escher, Bach

"The Advent of the Algorithm" - David Berlinksi
A quirky, very accessible treatment of the link between mathematics and computation.

"Concrete Mathematics" - Ronald Graham, Donald Knuth, and Oren Patashnik
If you're hard-core about the mathematical aspect.

"Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications" - Grady Booch
If you're interested in OO.

Books by or about:
alan turing
godel
noam chomsky
claude shannon

Where's the comparison with Merant Dimensions, some of the Rational products, or TeamTrack???

Where's the beef???

You do not specify that you are using dynamic views, but it sounds like you are.... Try using snapshot views instead. Another ( ugly ) idea is a preemptive reboot.

Check the Knowledge Base too...

RUP, IMHO comes short when it comes to developing software that is really valuable to end customer. Check out the demo here. RUP wants to divide the whole s/w development process into stages and proceed in a systematic fashion where progression into one stage completely disqualifies the previous stages. The problem is that most of the times the customer never really understands what is possible and what really is required to address a business and/or process need. Which really translates to improper requirements. This is also the cause of user dissatisfaction because by the time s/w arrives the business needs/environment may have changed or shows symptoms of the same. This is very disconcerting to the end customer for his time and expenditure.

This is why Extreme Programming is a bit more applicable to what we know about s/w development, how much can we communicate to the end user, how can we make it easier for developers to let users participate in all stages of development.

That said, I actually like UML a lot. The use cases work in larger contexts while class diagrams work in narrow contexts i.e. 2-4 people can really understand what you are trying to communicate. The sequence diagrams are priceless, because even managers can follow some of it. I like to combine class diagrams with a design pattern [GoF] applications.

Rational now has an extreme programming plug-in. That very statement makes me run in the opposite direction. XP is often compared to Open Source, where users really know what they want and the whole process is more conversational rather than a contract that's been handed off to a developer.

RUP, IMHO comes short when it comes to developing software that is really valuable to end customer. Check out the demo here. RUP wants to divide the whole s/w development process into stages and proceed in a systematic fashion where progression into one stage completely disqualifies the previous stages. The problem is that most of the times the customer never really understands what is possible and what really is required to address a business and/or process need. Which really translates to improper requirements. This is also the cause of user dissatisfaction because by the time s/w arrives the business needs/environment may have changed or shows symptoms of the same. This is very disconcerting to the end customer for his time and expenditure.

This is why Extreme Programming is a bit more applicable to what we know about s/w development, how much can we communicate to the end user, how can we make it easier for developers to let users participate in all stages of development.

That said, I actually like UML a lot. The use cases work in larger contexts while class diagrams work in narrow contexts i.e. 2-4 people can really understand what you are trying to communicate. The sequence diagrams are priceless, because even managers can follow some of it. I like to combine class diagrams with a design pattern [GoF] applications.

Rational now has an extreme programming plug-in. That very statement makes me run in the opposite direction. XP is often compared to Open Source, where users really know what they want and the whole process is more conversational rather than a contract that's been handed off to a developer.

PVCS or ClearCase or can set you back 5K a workstation.

If you're not using all of the features in these products, they can be replaced by CVS and something like SourceForge.

Things I like better in Valgrind:

• Valgrind works on Linux.
• Valgrind doesn't require instrumenting each object file and library at build time. (This is a biggie)
• Valgrind's run-time options are more flexible.
• Valgrind works with both gcc 2 and 3.
• Valgrind seems to run faster than Purify. (Different hardware and OSes, so this is a guess.)
• Valgrind doesn't have a Motif GUI. ;)
• Valgrind doesn't have an insane, broken license manager.
• Valgrind's technical support is better. (Yes, I've dealt with both.)
• Valgrind doesn't cost $2,364 per seat.

Things I like better in Purify:

• Purify can handle static libraries.
• Purify makes it easier to disable errors/warnings from libraries out of your scope.
• Valgrind doesn't work on Solaris, so I'm stuck with Purify for my day job. :)

Since you're already a Rational customer, I would check into Rational preVue . Many years ago it had another name - and was a product from a company that Rational bought...

• PureCoverage from Rational. It's been a few years since I've used this, but it was handy to have. Basically, you compile the code with special instrumentation and then run the PureCoverage tool which brings up a window showing (among other possibilities) functions, lines, and number of times each was called/executed.
  
• gcov (part of gcc). This provides the same basic functionality as PureCoverage but doesn't give the pretty windows (duh).
  

but, if you bellong to a team developing a product, and you must take your product scheduling and also test the code... what do you think about using some Rational enterprise tools? I've attended a product overview of some tools which can help on that. Did you know ratinal has a dumb user "emulator" which can test your app during the nigth, report the errors even telling you how to replicate application crash's... those are some cute tools :)

Serena They have a variety of ChangeMan products, but I haven't evaluated any yet. The demo looked promising, but I have no idea about cost.

Rational They are expensive, and pretty good. Supports Windows, quite a few unix variants, and SuSe zSeries.

AldonSupports AIX, AS/400, and Windows. The product is a port of their original AS/400 change management software. No idea about cost.

I'll be looking at BitKeeper today, thanks to some other replies here.
Personally, I prefer Perforce. The atomic changelist feature is reason enough, but the product is rock solid and easy to use, and performs well over a broadband VPN link. That being said, the product currently doesnt support the OS/400 native object file system, only IFS (Samba style) files. Perforce informs me that this is an item on their todo list.

I wonder why he keeps saying that ClearCase is a centralized system. With
ClearCase MultiSite source code repositories can easily be replicated and kept in sync between different sites.

Together with other divisions on different continents, we've been working on large software projects using MultiSite for several years now.

Do you have any evidence that Ada increases software reliability? I've used Ada for about 5 years and I haven't seen any significant difference in reliability between Ada applications and those written in other languages such as C++.

Most of the Ada vendors have gone out of business so I guess Ada would be a great open source project. You aren't going to get any technical support for the compiler so you might as well have the source.

• Persistent and temporary file formats
• User interface
• Network protocols
• System and architectural design
• Relationships between data elements (or objects if you think that way)

For big projects (and only big projects) using the Unified Modelling Language and especially the Rational Unified Process is very useful.

Rational has quite a few tools which (when used correctly) allow to trace what class is responsible for which business case.

For big projects (and only big projects) using the Unified Modelling Language and especially the Rational Unified Process is very useful.

Rational has quite a few tools which (when used correctly) allow to trace what class is responsible for which business case.

Rational has some interesting software you can use (like ClearCase)...

• Smaller. You only need one executable on your client. And one more for your server. No kernel patches, no drivers, no installation, just the binaries. Ubercool.
• Multi-platform. Perforce has binaries for practically every platform in use out there. Find me another Version Control System with BeOS, QNX, AIX, SCO, MacOS9 and MacOSX support.
• Fast, fast fast. Because of the low communication overhead, it works extremely well across slow/high latency links.
• Ease of use. It's really easy to configure and setup.
• Great support. We've had to go to perforce support twice and both times they've been awesome, with quick responses and knowledgeable people.
• Price. The single server, two client setup is FREE! And per seat licensing + support is very very reasonable. I use the free one on my laptop to version files.
• Plug-ins. Perforce publishes their API, and they have perl, python, ruby and tcl utilities galore.

Most of all, I would advise you to educate yourself on the options/methods of version control. 12 isn't that big. Wait 'til you get to 1200.

Ada is almost dead in the military. Why? Because there isn't enough money in maintaining Ada programs. They work, first time. Great for the military, lousy for the military-industrialist complex. Spend twice as much making it in the first place, then get no lucrative bugfix money afterwards. Making expensive programs that actually work is commercial suicide. Making cheap programs that actually work (which you do after some experience) gives you only subsistance level profits. Making cheap programs that almost work and require lots of profitable maintainance for years is the road to riches. So what if a few ships need towing to port due to a divide-by-zero error?

Of course, where firms could get sued if they screw up, such as in commercial avionics and jet engines, Ada is universally used. Ada doesn't guarantee good, safe, maintainable programs, but it's relatively easy to make them in Ada, and darn near impossible to make them in C.

As for Ada being harder to learn than C, which is harder :

Maybe if people just quietly gave facts and hard numbers in the Great Language Wars then the Truth Will Out.... Nah. But it's worth a shot, anyway.

I also used to think like this. The sum extent of my source control was cp -r currrent vX.x. Source control was for wimps.

I'm of a rather different view today. I now utterly insist on using it, even in tiny little things that I think are one-offs at the time (quite often it turns out they aren't).

I think I can understand Linus' dislike. It sounds like you're less free, and as if the whole coding thing is suddenly less enjoyable. However, having gone through exactly the same feelings I can say that in my case it certainly isn't true that things are less enjoyable. In fact, in some ways it's easier as I can go wandering off in my own direction for a while, before hitting a dead end and backtracking safe in the knowledge that I have a defined state to fall back on should I need to.

Personally, I'd recommend taking the plunge. Some systems are better than others, but any system use injects a bit more organisation and confidence into the process of coding.

Cheers,
Ian

Check out the Rational web site. They have tutorials and free downloads.