Rational Rose Killer

On IdealUmlCaseTool it is suggested that TogetherJ is a candidate RationalRoseKiller. If only.

Given that a Rational rep was once heard to say "we are going to achieve standardization in the software tools industry, and we're going to do it the MicroSoft way" we can justly suppose that robustness, ease of use, standards conformance, openness and industrial strength/professional quality are not features that will enable a tool to break Rose's strangle-hold on OO CASE.

Is having any one of the CaseTools desirable? That's a separate issue (some clients demand them, and some demand RationalRose).

How could a vendor break the near monopoly on mind-share that Rose seem to have?

A couple of years ago I did a CASE tool evaluation exercise, about 6 weeks doing nothing but play around with various UML1.0/C++ tools. I was astounded by just how poorly Rose (then) compared to its competitors, and by how unhelpful Rational's sales people were.

Two years, two employers and numerous clients later, I'm still astounded by how widespread is the automatic assumption that "CASE tool" means "Rose". That exercise keeps coming back to haunt me: it seems as if no amount of evidence will shake the idea that Rose is the tool.

I'm a bit of dullard when it come to this sort of thing: if evidence and experience won't make the point, I'm a bit stuck for ways to sway people.

Any ideas?

-- KeithBraithwaite

I've looked, they're great features. I'd love to use a tool like that every day, if I were going to use a CASE tool. They aren't the RationalRoseKiller. As mentioned in numerous places on the pages relating to the GreatestMarketingCompanyInTheWorld features aren't going to do it.

WordPerfect was/is without a doubt superior to MicrosoftWord, features, reliability, usability etc. etc. When was the last time you saw a copy running anywhere?

KB

Well, I've got WordPerfect 8 on my linux box...

...on my Linux box, ah yes. OK, the question was too broad: when did you last see any other WP package but Word used in a commercial environment? It's three years since I was last in an office where anything else was used, and there FrameMaker was being deprecated and Word rolled out. I've seen the occasional IBM shop where whatever that Lotus WP thing is called was installed. But every document was written with Word.

In any case (NPI), the point is that in commercial environments, Word beats all comers, whether users prefer the alternatives, whether the alternatives are technically superior. Similarly, Rose beats its competitors for reasons other than, well, being better. So the Rose killer, if it ever appears, will not triumph by force of superior features.

Yesterday, a friend of mine told me about a project of a large German ministry he is involved with. They decided to go with StarOffice instead of Microsoft. -- FalkBruegmann

As much as I dislike CASE tools, mainly thanks to the hype that gets used to sell them vs. their actually utility in a real project, I do love using Visio when I need to express ideas in UML, or Booch, or Jacobsen use cases, or any other way. Visio is cheap, easy to use, clever, and you can also use it to redesign your bathroom, draw an oil refining process, or build some whiz-bang business diagrams for marketing brochures once you sicken of being forced to use crappy CASE tools and quit your company altogether to start your own. In fact, I love to just play with it - all those groovy stencils! -- DonOlson