RATIONAL ROSE AS A CASE TOOL

Rational Rose visual modeling facilitates and
automates parts of the software development process
through the use of the Unified Modeling Language. The
UML is meta-language receiving strong industry support
that specifies a standardized set of graphical notations
and their syntax that is useful in object-oriented analysis
and design (OOAD).

The Rational Software Corporation offers a
Software Engineering Educational Development
(SEED) program that provides copies of various software
packages and training materials, including Rational
Rose, to qualifying educational institutions. Information
about the SEED program may be obtained from
seed@rational.com or from the company web site at
http://www.rational.com. The SEED program can provide
both individual 1-year licenses that can be provided
to both students and faculty to use the Rational Rose
software as well as server licenses so that the software
can be installed in a laboratory environment. In addition
to Rational Rose, many other software tools are also
available under the SEED program such as those for
configuration management or real-time system development.
The SEED program can also make available
training materials for various courses related to OOAD,
UML, and Rational Rose (Sweeney 2000).
Rational Rose has many advantages as a UML
visual modeling tool, but its flexibility may be the most
valuable. This flexibility is achieved by the software’s
ability to support many object-oriented languages including
Java, MFC C++, Visual Basic, as well as Oracle
8i databases. Rational Rose promotes software component
reuse and better utilizes scarce software development
resources. Rational Rose supports both forward
and reverse engineering. Support for forward engineering
means that Rational Rose can generate code based
on a visual model of the application, whereas reverse
engineering support allows Rational Rose to convert
existing code into a visual model. The combination of
forward and reverse engineering is often referred to as
round-trip engineering.

Successful OOAD processes are often described
as having the characteristics of being both “iterative”
and “incremental” (Fowler 2000; Reed 2000; Liberty
1998). In the context of OOAD, iterative means
that the development proceeds piecemeal toward completion,
in such a way that as Fowler notes, “each iteration
builds production-quality software, tested and integrated,
that satisfies a subset of the requirements of the
project (Fowler 2000)”. Each iteration builds incrementally
on previous iterations during the construction phase
of the project. Rational Rose supports this iterative/
incremental development approach in part through
its round-trip engineering capabilities and by virtue of
its ability to be used in a team development environment.