Design for Success (Continued)

Getting Up to Speed
It was necessary for all the OneSource designers to get up to speed on UML before they could use XDE effectively. "We had some external training for that on a high level," notes Israel. They also took advantage of some of the online training that Rational provides.

Israel has identified one feature of XDE that should be of interest to anyone contemplating outsourcing some development work. "When you work with outsourcing, you need to define to a lower level: every class and every method on each class," Israel points out. XDE lets you do that, so the results are less ambiguous, and the developers can work more independently because they don't require as much communication.

Whereas XDE integrates well with Visual Studio and source code control, not all tools play together so nicely. "We had to work to integrate our metadata tools," reports Israel. When you go for best-of-breed tools, you must expect some trade-offs in integration.

OneSource has been satisfied with its relationship with Rational. "Since we deal with three main vendors—Borland, Microsoft, and Rational—it can get tricky sorting out who's responsible for any problems, but Rational has been very supportive," remarks Israel.

In the future, OneSource hopes to add further capabilities to its modeling repertoire, such as more detailed design. Another is integrated testing, which allows testing at the design level before development begins. Finally, the use of metrics would enable designers to demonstrate return on investment, as well as to support planning, estimation, and management.

About the Author
Edmund X. DeJesus is a freelance technical writer in Norwood, Mass. You can reach him by e-mail at dejesus@compuserve.com.