Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/11/caliber_defineit/
Borland defines what apps require
DefineIT
Posted in Developer, 11th August 2006 05:02 GMT
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DefineIT is the latest tool to come out of Borland's move away from being a developer tools company and into a software services, management and support company.
It will come as no shock to any developer or user that perhaps the biggest failure of any software project is the failure to define and understand system requirements.
Requirement analysis is not a new problem and companies have been developing and releasing tools in this area for years. The problem with most of them is that their use seems to make little difference to what is actually developed. This is not just a problem related to the requirements analysis, but the way the information is then interpreted by different people in the development cycle.
What Borland is targeting here is the removal of a specific requirements language. It has also introduced an automated translation from the plain language definition of the requirements into a flowchart that can be easily passed to designers and developers.
To make it even more effective Borland has also introduced a "storyboard" approach (workflow to the rest of us) that allows you to simulate the design, long before code is written. The potential of this is outstanding. The analyst and user can confirm the accuracy of the model, the business analyst can see and clearly document the business process, the developer can actually see what they are trying to do and the test/QA engineer has an empirical model against which to accept or reject the code.
Borland has also ensured that Caliber DefineIT is not seen as yet another standalone solution. Even as a version 1 tool it comes with a whole set of integrations into other parts of Borland's Caliber toolset, as well as various tools from Segue Software and Mercury (now HP) TestDirector.
On the face of it then, this would appear to be a carefully thought out and well positioned tool. After all, it is difficult to see how the developer can get it wrong given the way that all parties can validate what each wants. However, it is still a version 1 tool and there are a number of important features that are missing. While you can export the flowchart and information into a limited set of UML models you cannot import existing models and reverse engineer them yet.
Installation of Caliber DefineIT is very simple. You go to the Borland (www.borland.com) website, sign up and are sent a trial key. You then download the software and you are up and running. There appears to be no limitation to understanding the product through the trial software.
When the Welcome screen loads up you are faced with a simple screen allowing you to get a brief understanding of the products, work through the tutorials, examine some samples which will demonstrate the new features, or read through the help file. At the risk of seeming overly geeky, it really is worth taking the time to read through the help files before starting the tutorials or playing with the samples. You can also elect to ignore all of the choices and jump right into the Workbench.
One of my pet hates is overly busy work areas and the basic Workbench starts by looking a little fussy. If you are working with a large screen or a computer with multiple screens this is no problem but on a laptop you immediately find yourself closing windows in order to work comfortably.
The tutorials will walk you through defining a project step by step, allowing you to make your own decisions as you go forward. You start by defining the name of the project followed by all the actors. At any point you can go back and add additional actors. Once you have done this you define the first of the requirements. This is where you start to gather a lot of information about the system.
The next step is to define a scenario and the primary actor. This generates the scenario screen and the basic scenario diagram (flowchart). To make the scenario effective take each sentence in the scenario definition and turn it into a step, decision or branch. During this process it is likely that the original statement for the scenario will be defined or may even need to be broken down into smaller scenarios.
As you work through the process of detailing the scenario, DefineIT creates a detailed scenario diagram or flowchart. This provides a double check over the decision processes involved in the scenario. A clever feature here is that you do not need to make the changes just in the Scenario editor. You can go to the flow chart and add new steps or decisions as required. These are immediately reflected in the Scenario editor. However, you will need to return to the scenario editor in order to document the new step or decision.
As you work through the chart there is an automatic validation of the various branches. This acts as a first line check of anything missing. With any complex software decision it’s very easy to miss a decision point.
A key feature to prevent any scenario from becoming excessively complex is that you can invoke another scenario from a step. This allows for a project to develop over time and be broken into more manageable and detailed steps. It also provides both the developer and the test/QA engineer with easy to use data to code and test against.
For the test/QA engineer DefineIT will go further. For each decision point you can generate test cases from DefineIT. The problem here is that you need to do this from each decision point rather than from each scenario or project. This is something that Borland should look at urgently because it is difficult to see anyone really going through every decision point to generate test cases.
Once you have created a flowchart you can then run through it using the Storyboard feature. This allows you to validate the flowchart and find unused steps or, more importantly, missing steps. This is a major breakthrough for requirements analysis. Users and analysts can sign off a project confident they have an effective representation of what is required.
All of the data created by DefineIT can be input into CaliberRM, allowing for versioning and management. Any CaliberRM user can view the output from DefineIT.
Despite the amount of software that is written, it is rare for a vendor to actually introduce a requirement analysis package that is exciting, easy to use, and a must have. Despite the price of the licence - £1,300 for a named user licence and £3,900 for a floating licence - any experienced software developer, analyst and user will recognise how much time and money can be saved through an effective requirements tool.
While Borland has received a lot of negative comment over its move away from developer tools, if DefineIT is indicative of its new direction then things are looking very bright for Borland indeed. ®