Rapid Prototyping: An Integrated CASE Based Approach

Seamless methodology integration covering the entire lifecycle has proven to be an elusive Grail for software engineers. Mix-and-match approaches (where the best elements of various methodologies are “cut and pasted” together into an ad-hoc solution) have proven to be unsatisfactory since the parts rarely interface cleanly, a problem that is compounded in CASE support where dissimilar notational techniques and views may be used that reflect differing approaches to orthogonality. The authors take the opinion that the success of an integrated methodology depends upon the interoperability of the tools that support it, and to this end the topic of synergistic primitives and models has been subjected to much investigation. This paper proposes an object-oriented approach to rapid prototyping, analysis and design using the same object toolset and procedural view in each phase.