Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Memories of IT - 1989 - Methodologies and CASE tools

1989...

As per my previous post, we have a couple of methodologies to evaluate. PRIDE was all about Information Resource Management; IEM was, well, about Information Engineering. If I was to line them up against each other today, I am not sure there would be much difference between the two, except we knew that IEM had two popular CASE tools supporting it, so PRIDE never really stood a chance.

So, IEM won. This was James Martin's baby, through his latest organization, James Martin & Associates. At the time, they had a Canadian office that we worked with, so I don't how many degrees of separation there was between myself and James, but it wasn't close. He was doing tours at that point, charging large sums; when he did come through Toronto, only VPs of my company got to go. I recall he was already moving on to new topics, like Enterprise Engineering and Value Flows...

Meanwhile, back on the project, we have IEM, so now we look at supporting CASE tools... but let's talk about CASE first. Computer Assisted Software/System Engineering. There were actually a few different angles to it. It had started with the model/diagramming tools I have mentioned before. Because they supported tasks in the first few phases of the SDLC, they were tagged as Upper-Case, meaning the diagrams were good but it stopped there. At some point, other vendors created code generator products which, because coding happens later in the SDLC, were tagged as Lower-Case; then vendors of both types of tools would hook-up, so that Upper-Case diagrams could be used (somehow) as input to the Lower-Case tools to tell them what code to generate.

I never saw a Lower-Case tool up-close, so I never knew how they worked independently, or how interfaces with Upper-Case tools really worked. I never did have to know that, because we were looking at the third angle: Integrated CASE tools (I-CASE, long before i-pods or other such stuff). This was a product that did the whole SDLC, from first diagrams to final code gen and testing, and there were two main players: the Information Engineering Workbench (IEW), and the Information Engineering Facility (IEF).

Next time, comparing IEW and IEF...

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About Me

Ontario, Canada
I have been an IT Business Analyst for 25 years, so I must have learned something. Also been on a lot of projects, which I have distilled into the book "Cascade": follow the link to the right to see more.