Methodology

The first step required is to gather the list of CASE tools on the market. If they hadn’t been narrowed, this list would be very huge. Since it’s hard to search for a list of case tool product on the market, the list was taken from UMSL’s System analysis website [10]. This list is quite representative in terms of they type variety of CASE tool products on the market right now. It has the heavyweight player, Rational Raose, the most popular tool, Microsoft Visio, and the Open Source tool in ArgoUML.

Next, this list was combined with the products listed in [9] to expand the list. The resulting combination would then be inspected for paper or journal availability from academic publication. Academic publications were searched from chosen digital libraries. These digital libraries are: ACM Digital Library, IEEE Computer Society Digital Library, ScienceDirect, and Springer Link. These libraries were chosen because they are the most relevant ones in software engineering [11][12]. The publications that were selected are those which contain the specific product name on their title or abstract and it relates to system analysis.

Additionally, if no sufficient academic publication was found for a certain CASE tool, the manual documentation and or executables were then collected from their official website. This was considered necessary to verify the features it has. Lastly, the final criteria for including a product are their ability to cover each of any features on both upper and lower CASE.

This paper used list of lower and upper CASE support described in [9] and combined with some feature support described in [2] as following:

UPPPER CASE

• data flow diagramming
• ER diagramming
• workflow diagramming
• object oriented diagramming
• data dictionary
• business rule adoption
• analysis tools

LOWER CASE

• code generation
• form generation
• report generation
• document generation
• import and export utilities
• program coding
• testing

Each of the chosen product list will be verified against this CASE support features. Product support was extracted from study, official documentation, or by directly evaluating the executable.