Software Versions

As software is progressively revised, it becomes harder to keep track of the versions in use. A number of CASE tools are available to help with this task.

CASE tools provide stricter control over software versioning. ie.

The management of the changes to a software program is known as software configuration management (SCM). To avoid conflicting changes being made by different parts of the development team, all proposed changes need to pass through a central body so they can be evaluated and tracked.

A number of CASE tools are available to track the changes made to a software solution. Some of these, for example AIXCMVC and PVCS are specific management tools. Some integrated CASE tools, such as AIX SDE Workbench contain version management components.

Test Data

Test-data fall into two categories: data to test the correct working of modules, and test data to evaluate the performance of a system under simulated working conditions. There are test-data generators whose purpose is to create large sets of test data. These test-data generators can be given the data specifications and syntax for a particular data set and they will then generate large amounts of data that can be used to evaluate the performance of a system.

A program known as a file comparator can be used to compare the outputs of two different versions of the same program. The same input data is entered into the two versions, the output being saved. The file comparator can the scan the output files and indicate where and what the differences are.

Production of Documentation

Throughout the software development cycle the production of documentation is a continuous process. It makes sense to incorporate the production of documentation within a CASE environment. Allowing the developer to produce documentation at the same time as the development process is taking place may also avoid the delay in its production. A number of different CASE tools are available to assist with the documentation process.

Graphics based CASE tools include:

Adobe illustrator: can be used as a general drawing and text-handling tool
Create: a visual development program that creates flow charts.
Smart chart: a tool used to automatically generate structure charts.

A number of different text-based documentation tools are available within different CASE environments. The tasks performed by these tools vary from project management through the production of code in a supported language.

A number of document-orientated CASE tools exist. Their purposes vary from templates through to automatic document producers. Some of these available are:

ALDA: a tool that is used to create and use advanced technical documentation
DocBuilder: a tool that automatically produces various types of documentation including specification documents, design documents, and quality and test coverage reports.