Method support within CASE tools (education)

Presents a description of the extensive use made of CASE tools within the BSc and MSc courses in software engineering at Teesside Polytechnic. CASE tools can be successfully used to first year undergraduates to reinforce the underlying techniques. It is argued that commercial CASE tools are unsuitable for use in the first year course. The paper gives a short description of the philosophy behind ASCENT, the CASE tool built at Teesside and outlines a set of ´acid´ tests that should be applied to CASE tools. It is essential that CASE tools should support a method in order to produce a high quality system. The paper reports on the work at Teesside in providing tools that strongly support the underlying method. Examples are drawn from two methods´ Gane and Sarson´s Structured Systems Analysis (SSA) and Yourdon (employing Ward and Mellor real time extensions). Emphasis is placed on modelling a system using a hierarchical set of diagrams.<>