CASE Tool

Screenshot of the UML Umbrello editor.

The CASE tools (Computer Aided Software Engineering, Computer Aided Software Engineering) are various computer applications or computer programs intended to increase the balance in software development reducing their cost in terms of time and money.

These tools can help in all aspects of the software development life cycle in tasks such as the process of making a project design, cost calculation, implementing part of the code automatically with the given design, automatic compilation, documentation or error detection among others. Already in the 70s a project called ISDOS designed a language and therefore a product that analyzed the relationship between the requirements of a problem and the needs that these generated, the language in question was called PSL (Problem Statement Language ) and the application that helped to find the needs of designers PSA (Problem Statement Analyzer).

Although these are the beginnings of computer tools that help create new computer projects, the first CASE tool was Excelerator, which came out in 1984 and worked under a PC platform.

CASE tools reached their peak in the early 1990s, around the time IBM had partnered with software company AD/Cycle to work with their mainframes or mainframe computers., these two giants worked with CASE tools that covered the entire software life cycle. But little by little mainframes have been less used and currently the Big CASE market has completely died, opening the market for various more specific tools for each phase of the software life cycle.

Objectives

1. Improve software productivity.
2. Increase the quality of the software.
3. Reduce time and cost of development and maintenance of computer systems.
4. Improve planning for a project.
5. Increase a company's computer knowledge library by helping to find solutions for requirements.
6. Automate the development of software, documentation, code generation, error testing and project management.
7. It helps to reuse the software, portability and standardization of the documentation.
8. Global management at all stages of software development with the same tool.
9. Facilitate the use of the different methodologies of software engineering.

Classification

Although it is difficult and there are many ways to classify them, CASE tools can be classified taking into account the following parameters:

• The platforms they support.
• The life-cycle phases of the development of systems they cover.
• The architecture of the applications they produce.
• Its functionality.

According to phases of the development life cycle

The following classification is the most common based on the phases of the development cycle that they cover:

• Upper CASE (U-CASE), tools that help in planning phases, qualification analysis and development strategy, using, among other UML diagrams.
• Middle CASE (M-CASE), tools to automate tasks in the analysis and design of the application.
• Lower CASE (L-CASE), tools that semi-automate the generation of code, create error detection programs, support the depuration of programs and tests. They also automate the full application documentation. Here you can include quick application development tools.

Other classifications

There are other names that are given to this type of tools, and that is not an exclusive classification among themselves, nor with the phases of the development life cycle:

• Integrated CASE (I-CASE), tools that encompass the entire software development process, from analysis to implementation.
• MetaCASE, tools that allow the definition of our own modeling technique, the allowed elements of the generated metamodel are stored in a repository and can be used by other analysts, that is, it is as if we define our own UML, with our possible elements, restrictions and relationships.
• CAST (Computer-Aided Software Testing), software test support tools.
• IPSE (Integrated Programming Support Environment), tools that support the entire life cycle, include components for project management and active configuration management.

According to functionality

By functionality some can be distinguished as:

• Code semiautomatic generation tools.
• UML editors.
• Code refactoring tools.
• Maintenance tools such as version control systems·