Design for Success (Continued)

Marketing Models
OneSource in Concord, Mass., is a business intelligence provider, oriented primarily to marketing and sales professionals. With OneSource's products, users can manage staff and contacts, combining content from different sources in a form that makes it easy to organize and sort information.

Clearly, when you're providing business intelligence and ways of manipulating data, you need to have a firm grasp on the data yourself. OneSource uses the XDE family of modeling and development tools from Rational (part of IBM, Somers, N.Y.).

One of the main reasons for selecting XDE was its support for UML (Unified Modeling Language). OneSource uses UML extensively in its modeling activities. However, perhaps an even stronger selling point was the ability to launch XDE from within OneSource's chosen Integrated Development Environment (IDE), Microsoft Visual Studio. Many modeling tools are purely external to the development process, and can represent a real obstacle to smooth and seamless integration of application development. "XDE is closer to the code," observes Mark Israel, CTO of OneSource.

XDE can generate code automatically from UML, which is a necessary and expected capability. However, XDE can also reverse-generate UML from existing code. This is a problem that all designers face: dealing with legacy code that has no supporting model. Generating a baseline model can then serve as the foundation for future development.

Not only does XDE perform that task, but it also lets you view the UML graphically as the code executes. Israel reports that this can serve as a useful debugging tool. "We once used XDE to profile an existing code base, then watched the UML as the code executed. It became clear that a certain component was being called twice unnecessarily."

While XDE supports UML, it doesn't enforce UML with users. "We've seen other products that are very strict in their enforcement of UML," advises Israel. Such UML zealots might have their customers, but most users prefer to control a tool, rather than let the tool control them.