Computer-Aided Software Engineering (SASE):

Computer-Aided Software Engineering (SASE) is a set of automated tools for implementing software engineering activities and standards during the software development process. Following is a brief overview of CASE architecture.

#1. The environment architecture is composed of the hardware platform and operating system support which includes networking and database management software, this forms the basic ground form CASE.

#2. A set of portability services provides a bridge between CASE tolls and their integration framework along with the environment architecture.

#3. The integration framework is a collection of specialized programs that enable individual CASE tools to communicate with each other, to create a project database and to exhibit the same lookup for the software engineer as he would feel when doing the software engineering procedures manually.

#4. Portability service provides CASE tools and their integration framework to become portable and migrate along with different hardware platforms and operating systems without much change.

The CASE framework provides a very large range of tools for conduction all the possible software engineering activities. Here is a listing of some of the commonly used tools provided by a CASE framework:

#1. Information Engineering Tools:

These tools model business information as it moves between various organizations. They represent:

(a) Business data objects

(b) Relationships between various business data objects and

(c) The flow of business data objects between organizations.

#2. Process Modeling and Management Tools:

These tools provide:

(a) A key element of a process for a better understanding of the process,

(b) Links to the description of work tasks related to a process and

(c) Links to other related process management tools.

#3. Project Planning Tools: They provides tools related to:

(a) Software project effort and cost estimation,

(b) Project scheduling.

#4. Risk Analysis Tools:

They provide information and methods to a project manager in the following areas:

(a) Building risk analysis tables, and

(b) Provide guidance for risk identification and analysis.

#5. Project Management Tools :

These tools provide a project manager with the following help :

(a) Creating, tracking and monitoring project plans and schedules, and

(b) Providing metrics to estimate & evaluate project and product quality factors.

#6. Documentation Tools :

These tools help in the following manner :

(a) Document production, and

(b) Desk-Top publishing of the documents.

#7. System software Tools :

These tools include :

(a) E-mail

(b) Electronic bulletin boards, and

(c) Network communication software.

#8. Software Configuration Management Tools :

These tools help in the following areas of SCM :

(a) Identification

(b) Version control

(c) Change control

(d) Auditing and

(e) Status accounting.

#9. PRO/SIM Tools :

These are a set of Prototyping and Simulation tools for predicting the behavior of a real-time system before it’s production. They help the software engineers to build prototypes of the systems for analyzing the functionality, operation, and response of the system.

#10. Test Management Tools :

These tools help in the process of control and coordination for software testing procedures. It has a Test Driver that reads one or more test cases from a testing file, formats the test data to fit to the needs of the software under test, and then invokes the software to be tested.