Telelogic Announces Enhancements to Rhapsody Model Driven Development Solution including New Eclipse Plug-in

Today’s announcements include:
o The introduction of Rhapsody 7.2, a new version of the company’s flagship Model-Driven Development solution that provides breakthroughs in systems engineering, software asset re-use, and automated documentation and testing;
o The new Telelogic Rhapsody Eclipse Plug-in, a version of Rhapsody integrated within the Eclipse open source development environment, scheduled for release this summer; Rhapsody Eclipse Plug-in allows embedded device and real-time system software developers to continue working on existing projects at the code level while gradually adopting MDD within a single familiar development environment

“Leveraging existing code from previous projects is a significant part of most embedded system development efforts and for teams implementing model driven development approaches the need to efficiently automate the transfer of design intent among system models and software code is of key importance,” said Matt Volckmann, Senior Analyst/Program Manager with Venture Development Corporation’s (VDC) Embedded Software practice. “By offering several new features within Rhapsody 7.2 that allow for more integrated methods of code design and model driven development, Telelogic continues its strong history of product innovation and clearly endeavors to maintain its leadership position within the embedded software and system modeling tools market,” said Volckmann. “VDC’s most recent analysis of the embedded standards-based software and system modeling tools ranked Telelogic as the market share leader on a revenue basis”.

New Features Increase Automation; Open MDD to C Developers and Integrated Eclipse Development
Building on Telelogic’s “Code Respect” initiative, Rhapsody now allows C developers to leverage the benefits of MDD while preserving the code structure, functionality and order. Rhapsody further offers the unique ability to reverse-engineer existing code and then forward-generate identical code. This allows software developers to use the right tools for the job and work at either the code or model level.

With Rhapsody’s Eclipse Plug-in, software developers can streamline their workflow and increase efficiencies by taking advantage of Eclipse’s powerful code editing capabilities and gain the benefits of working with an MDD solution all within the same development environment. Using Rhapsody’s strong reverse engineering and code synchronization capabilities, Rhapsody’s Eclipse Plug-in allows developers to work on the code or model within one complete development environment. Working in this manner, the code and model remain in synch and it is easy to navigate from one to the other. Developers can leverage debugging at the code or model level using the Eclipse debugger and Rhapsody’s animation with the ability to synchronize breakpoints between them.

IDT, a company that specializes in Automated Software Testing (www.idtus.com) recently conducted a one year Software Testing survey which concluded that among other statistics, some 50 - 75 percent of the software development lifecycle is spent on testing related efforts. With recent enhancements to Rhapsody TestConductor™, an integrated model-based testing solution, C developers can now detect and eliminate software defects earlier in the development cycle when they are less costly to fix. Rhapsody TestConductor facilitates unit and integration testing by automating many manual test procedures and decreasing the time needed for testing. It executes tests in single or batch mode, determines the success of the test, and creates a report, enabling developers to collaborate more easily and bring products to market more rapidly. Rhapsody TestConductor is based on the Unified Modeling Language™ (UML®) Testing Profile, enabling tests to be easily linked to design requirements captured in Rhapsody or in Requirements Management products such as market leading Telelogic DOORS®.

“Model Driven Development techniques help engineers become more efficient with the potentially time-consuming tasks of test creation and execution, as well as document creation,” said Greg Sikes, Executive Vice President, Modeling Solutions, Telelogic, An IBM Company. “With Rhapsody, engineers immediately gain a better understanding of their software and systems architecture and functionality, while operating in a more open and flexible environment with improved team communication.”

Systems Engineering Advancements
With the enhancements announced today, Rhapsody is the first Systems Modeling Language™ (SysML™) solution that will provide systems engineers with virtual prototyping capabilities using integrated graphical panels to rapidly visualize and validate a user mock-up early in the development cycle. Additionally, the graphical panels will allow engineers to easily modify, monitor and analyze data during simulation making it easier to ensure the design is correct. Rhapsody 7.2 also offers SysML Requirements Tables, Allocation Tables, and N-2 matrices, enabling large quantities of information to be easily organized, customized, and viewed. Improved model consistency and checking functionality further allows software developers to create their own and domain-specific checks, improving design quality and integrity.