Evaluation of Case Tool Methods and Processes - An Analysis of Eight Open-source CASE Tools

There are many approaches for Computer-aided software engineering (CASE), often accomplished by expensive tools of market-leading companies. However, to minimize cost, system architects and software designers look for less expensive, if not open-source, CASE tools. As there is often no common understanding on functionality and application area, a general inspection of the open-source CASE tool market is needed. The idea of this paper is to define a “status quo” of the functionality and the procedure models of opensource CASE tools by evaluating these tools using a criteria catalogue for the areas: technology, modelling, code generation, procedure model, and administration. Based on this criteria catalogue, 8 open-source CASE tools were evaluated with 5 predefined scenarios. Major result is: there was no comprehensive opensource CASE tool which assists and fits well to a broad set of developer tasks, especially since a small set of the evaluated tools lack a solid implementation in several of the criteria evaluated. Some of the evaluated tools show either just basic support of all evaluation criteria or high capabilities in a specific area, particularly in code generation.