We have a standing offer to publish any comments which vendors or readers
may care to make regarding our product reviews. We are greatful to Simon
Angell of LBMS for providing the following response to our review
of Systems Engineer. It is presented unedited.
Thank you for giving me a chance to reply to your recent review of Systems Engineer 6.1.0. Before I comment on your review in detail, I would like to reply to the comment in your email about not wanting training in the product before using it.
In LBMS, and my personal, experience if CASE or model management products ever fail it is because clients have either not defined clear objectives or because they expect the products to solve all of their development issues on their own. Any serious modelling product needs to be used following a clearly defined process and knowledge of the product is essential to achieve real success. To this end we always recommend to clients that some form of implementation training is budgeted in with the purchase price of the software.
Systems Engineer is a big tool and, yes, the user interface could be simplified, in fact you will find that 6.2 has simplified the database design facilities and we have already started to build a much simpler user interface for release 6.3. In some respects Systems Engineer is suffering from being the first windows based concurrent multi-user CASE product on the market. Since being released in 1990, the market, and user requirements, have changed significantly. As a result of this LBMS is faced with a dilemma, we have a large client base around the world (over 15,000 copies sold) and between them they require support in the following areas:
This is certainly far from a complete list of the uses that our clients have for Systems Engineer, indeed a large number of them use Systems Engineer for all of these tasks. We recognise that the user interface for Systems Engineer requires constant and continuing simplification, so that diversity of support offered by the tool does not intimidate the first time user.
We have left exclusive relationships in the diagram editor to enable high level models to be represented in a clearer manner.
Systems Engineer can support two different ways of sub modelling:
The help file does advise the designer to convert all entity sub types and that all many to many relationships need to be resolved, this is because of the problems DBMS have in supporting these constructs.
The conversion of sub types and the resolving of many to many relationships is done by a model transformation wizard in version 6.2 (Aug 96). This function also automatically associates logical and physical entities, within an association matrix.
When modelling logical and physical data structures within Systems Engineer separate data models are created for the logical view and for each physical structure derived from it. These multiple models are then linked by an Entity-to-Entity matrix to show entity cross references. This allows the analyst to model a single business view of the data and then to separately model each physical implementation within differing DBMS environments.Although Systems Engineer has the concept of a single data inventory, new attributes can be added directly at the entity level. The analyst has the choice of adding data items directly into the data dictionary or, most commonly, adding attributes to an entity. If the data item does not exist, then Systems Engineer automatically creates both the attribute and a data item.
It is always difficult comparing Systems Engineer to other products such as ER/1 (which has a forty entity limit within its data models), ERwin and PowerDesigner (which are both single user, data modelling only products). The type of product required to support one or two analysts is very different from one able to support enterprise wide system development. I am not sure why you found the product slow on the specification of machine mentioned, we have had project teams in excess of 35 people concurrently accessing the same repository using a 486 16Mg PC as a client workstation.
The main method of navigation around the product is via the Associations Menu, this allows a context sensitive manner of navigation to similar objects with the repository.
If the people reading your review wish to purchase a data modelling only product that will support individual analysts and where reuse of design information is not critical, then single user products such as ERwin and PowerDesigner may be relevant. Our normal client profile is major organisations that require a product to cope with all aspects of modelling enterprise systems. Nowadays that means dealing with the integration of new system development, data warehouse systems and package applications into an existing legacy framework. This type of organisation will often have project teams of up to 50, may have dispersed development groups and will require information to be reused across the business. These requirements can be supported only by a product that has the strength of concurrent multi-user access and that can enable analysts to model all aspects of system design.
Simon Angell
Simon_Angell%LBMS__UK@lbms.com
(Simon Angell)