Artisan Studio Version 7.1 delivers new model-driven development features

“Artisan Studio Version 7.1 delivers a variety of important new modeling functions and features that considerably extend its capabilities and further reinforce our market-leading position, especially in relation to mission and safety-critical embedded systems and software development,” said Hedley Apperly, Vice-President of Marketing at Artisan Software Tools. “Our leading role in the OMG’s standardization of UPDM has enabled us to deliver our UPDM product at precisely the same time as the finalization of the standard. We have also provided some key features for improving the visual clarity of diagrams, to aid interpretation and understanding by engineers and managers alike.”

The release of Artisan Studio Version 7.1 has been precisely synchronized with the finalization of the OMG’s UPDM 1.0. It provides comprehensive support for this new standard, which addresses the visual modeling needs of the global defense community. Artisan Studio delivers support for all seven UPDM viewpoints, providing a standardized means to describe both DoDAF and MODAF architectures. Artisan Studio’s UPDM capability delivers enormous benefits for developers of military systems in terms of design consistency, quality and efficiency, improved tool interoperability and cost savings. In addition, model interchange and improved flow-down from systems of systems to systems development builds upon Artisan’s Work as Onesm strategy.

Artisan Studio’s ‘glossUML’ capability greatly improves the visual clarity of Artisan Studio UML, SysML and UPDM diagrams, helping to improve communication between all project stakeholders and fundamentally increasing design project understanding. glossUML creates presentation-ready diagrams of Artisan Studio models enabling them to be used as-is as well as to be cut and pasted directly into software like Microsoft Powerpoint®, eliminating the time wasted re-drawing diagrams for the purposes of presentations.

Artisan Studio Version 7.1 now also includes Artisan Publisher, a new, template-driven document and report generator. With input accepted from multiple Artisan Studio models, the ability to add external images and a drag-and-drop facility for building document structure, Artisan Publisher provides an expanding range of out-of-the-box templates for the quick creation of repeatable and configurable output. A preview option also reduces errors and the time spent on the production of larger documents. Artisan Publisher will replace Artisan Studio’s previous document generator.

Improvements have also been made to the UML Activity modeling capability and enhanced support for extra-large models, making Artisan Studio easier, faster and more efficient to use. The UML Activity modeling improvements include new meta-types and symbols, drag-and-drop facilities, the ability to populate diagrams from the dictionary, a consistency checker and the ability to re-use activities across diagrams. Artisan Studio’s ability to support extra-large models has also been significantly improved with the time taken to recondition very large models dramatically reduced several orders of magnitudes from hours to seconds. With versioning now performed per package rather than per model, further significant performance benefits are achieved.

Finally, Artisan Studio Version 7.1 provides improved XMI support with OMG MIWG (Model Interchange Working Group) Test Case 1 compliance, an improved Automated Code Synchronizer with code transformation patterns for C and C++ increasing productivity by reducing the timescale for developing new transformations, C language state machine support and support for Windows 7.

“The launch of Artisan Studio Version 7.1 continues to deliver on our strategy to join up embedded engineering disciplines, teams and organizations enabling diverse and disparate specialists to Work-as-One,” concluded James B. Gambrell, CEO of Artisan Software Tools. “For mission and safety-critical embedded systems and software development, visibility across the entire design process is crucial to timely and effective decision making. It is also fundamental to improving efficiency and productivity, reducing costs and proving compliance with industry-specific formal standards and certification processes. Artisan Studio delivers all this in a single purpose built tool suite.”