ABSTRACT

Ideally, a CASE tool helps automate the software development cycle in its entirety, from analysis to maintenance. Most existing tools, however, deal only with one or a few of the tasks involved.

If we work in an object-oriented environment, we would better carry our development in an object-oriented fashion. This makes the task more interesting, but technically much more demanding.

The question then becomes: what should we expect from a CASE tool for object-oriented development? Like any other type of CASE tool, we expect it to help us drawing and validating various types of models, we expect it to implement a central repository of software and models, to generate screens, to allow rapid prototyping, to let us easily browse the models, to incorporate syntactic and semantic analyzers, to do code generation and to document automatically.

On the other hand, the tool must adapt to the organization that is using it. This means that it must be adequate to the needs of the managers, that it should fit the technical culture of the company, that it must be compatible with the platforms used for development, while not defeating the expectations of the developers.

Keywords: CASE tools, object-oriented development, software engineering.