In this post we will be discussing CASE Tools. This post is meant to be a high level overview and will touch on topics such as advantages and disadvantages.
Three common CASE Tools are Information Engineering Facility (IEF), Information Engineering Workbench(IEW) and Oracle Designer. The IEF tool, now named CA Gen is marketed by CA Technologies. The tool set originally supported information engineering methodology in the 80’s. Now it has expanded to support additional development techniques such as component-based development, creation of client/server and web applications and generation of C, JAVA and C#.The IEW tool was developed by a software company located in Atlanta Georgia and was acquired by Computer Associates.Oracle Designer is Oracle’s CASE tool for designing information systems and generating it.
Some advantages of CASE Tools include improved productivity in development, and improved quality through automated checking. CASE Tools can also help automate preparation and updates of documentation, prototyping and incremental development, automatic preparation of program code from requirements definitions and reduced maintenance systems.
Some disadvantages include cost increase, and need for specialization. CASE Tools can also cause limitations in flexibility of documentation, in adequate standardization, slow implementation and unrealistic expectations.