Results

Before proceeding to the result part, the CASE tool list obtained from [10] is briefly described here in alphabetical order to get an overview of a specific product.

• Artiso Visual Case is a tool for software development, database design, database maintenance and business analysis developed by Artiso Corp.
• DB-MAIN is a modeling tool dedicated to Database Application Engineering. It was originally developed by University of Namur’s LBID Lab. in 1991.
• iGrafx FlowCharter is process analysis and modeling tool developed by iGrafx.
• MetaEdit+ is a tool for designing a modeling language and then generate diagramming functionalities. It was developed by Metacase company.
• Microsoft Visio is a diagramming program for Microsoft Windows that uses vector graphics to create diagrams.
• OmniGraffle is a diagramming application for Mac OS X operating system developed by The Omni Group. It can create diagrams, flow charts, org charts, and illustrations.
• Rational Rose is a UML modeling and model-driven development tool which was developed originally by Rational Software. It has the ability to integrate with existing integrated development environments or languages.
• SmartDraw is a diagramming tool developed by SmartDraw.com.
• ArgoUML is a UML diagramming tool written in Java developed by Tigris. It has an open source BSD License.
• Visible Analyst is an integrated Strategic Planning, Data Modeling, Business Process Modeling (BPMN), UML Modeling, and Structured Analysis and Design Modeling developed by Visible.

The next step was finding publication from digital libraries mentioned before. This finding results is listed in the following tables. You can click the hyperlink from the "name" column to go to their respective official website. The "Publication" column lists references acquired during searcing from digital libraries. The next column, "executable", states whether a particular product has a evaluation, demo, or even final working executable.

The last two columns are extra columns that were added during searching process. It was found out, that not entire product work on a similar platform. Therefore, it is necessary to list the type of platform on which they operate.The last column, "Price", was also considered necessary to be added because those products have a wide price range, from a free to thousand dollars products. If a particular product has different versions, and thus has different price set, the most expensive and latest price was chosen since it would mean that product has the most complete features among its variants.

Table 1. CASE Tool Products list.
Data retrieved on November 8, 2009.

From table 1, we can conclude several point of views. First, based on the number of publication, Rational Rose was considered as the popular product being used followed by Microsoft Visio and MetaEdit+. Although the relation was not clear between product popularity with the number of publication, i could indicate a tendecy toward that relation. Second, Windows was the most supported platform for these products. Therefore, your CASE tool of choice should consider this aspect. If cross platform is mandatory, then the option is narrowed to Rational Rose and ArgoUML.

The price column indicates a wide range of price from these products. The heftiest is MetaEdit+ and the cheapest are ArgoUML and DB-Main. So far, a conclusion cannot be drawn from this criteria because usually the number of features a product has is linearly related to its price tag. Therefore, a feature comparison needs to be conducted for this purpose.

Table 2 compares the features listed in each product documentation or feature list against the features supported in either upper and or lower CASE. Sometimes, the documentation itself is not sufficient to describe a product features, or in most cases it was hard to find their features. In that case, their feature list was extracted from their official website. These feature lists can be viewed from links attached on the tabel 2's heading (retrieved on November 8, 2009).

As the last resort, if neither publication, documentation, nor official feature lists didn't contain any useful information, their executables were installed and evaluated. Please note that some evaluation products come up with evaluation license key. So, a registration is required to get an evaluation key emailed.

Table 2. CASE Tool Products Features Comparison.
Data retrieved on November 8, 2009.

As we can see from table 2 above and the prices listed in table 1, price for a specific product relates to their features and abilities. Both Rational Rose and MetaEdit+ has the most features supported and thus the priciest product. They are currently considered as the most complete CASE tool products on the market. What separate between these two products is the support of domain specific modelling. MetaEdit+ has it in their package, whereas Rational chose to sell it in a different software package. Therefore, Rational Rose priced at the lower range than MetaEdit+.

During the process of finding each product features, interesting findings were found. Apparently, there was a vague distinction between these products. There were two different categories in term of lower and upper CASE abilities: diagramming tool and integerated tool. Visio, SmartDraw, and Omnigraffle are considered as diagramming tools. Actually, Visio was fall into a grey area between diagramming and integrated tool because it has a weak database code engineering.The rest are considered as integrated CASE tools.

Furthermore, integrated CASE tools can be categorized into: database enabled and generally enabled integrated tools. Database enabled only able to engineer source code for database, whereas generally enabled tools able to engineer database and application source code. Visio and DB-main are considered database enabled. Rational Rose, MetaEdit+, Visual Analyst, ADOit, and ArgoUML are generally enabled CASE tools.