InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
September 20, 1999
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Software vendors and modeling companies team to make more tools available
By James E. Gaskin
Recently, several major software development vendors have unveiled partnerships with software modeling companies to make more tools available to more developers.
"Modeling is a meaningful way to design and structure complex systems prior to writing code," says Liz Barnett, VP of Giga Information Group. Component-based development for the Internet, E-commerce, and multitier systems are excellent candidates for modeling.
The concept is simple: Modeling is to software development what blueprints and drawings are to architecture-an illustration that can graphically display design flaws before they are cast in stone. Each model presents abstract concepts and complicated designs in a clear format.
Standards Still Evolving
UML uses standard notation to exchange models between development tools such as Java and other modeling software. The standard, adopted in products from various vendors, is a good beginning-but it's only a notation used to express the software model. More still needs to be done.
"The OMG and UML have a good story, but it's still not easy to build a complex application, even with a model," says Bob Gleason, CEO of Riverton Software Corp., which shipped its first modeling product 2-1/2 years ago. "There is plenty of work ahead for all vendors to make this process easier and less challenging."
Gleason describes some of the shortcomings as a lack of a real object repository for the modeling software to share with the code-generation tools, better integration between modeling tools and version control tools, and more object management support for team projects.
isualize your goal" sounds like a sports psychologist at best- or psychobabble at worst. Yet visualizing the task ahead by using modeling tools is becoming standard procedure for software development groups eager to manage the complexity of their application development efforts.
Long popular in the object-oriented programming world, modeling hit the application development mainstream with the increased use of software objects when object-oriented programming techniques started appearing with C++ compilers in the early 1990s. Standards for software modeling are still evolving, but the Object Management Group (OMG) defined a Unified Modeling Language (UML) in November 1997 as a language for specifying, visualizing, constructing, and documenting component parts of software systems. 
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