Artisan has been developing a UML tool for 10 yearshaving spun out of Smiths Aerospace back in 1998 with backing from 3iPond Ventures and Pi Capitalbut at the end of last year was bought out by the managementemployees and Questor VCTwhich is managed by SPARK Venture Managementa UK early-stage technology venture capital investor. "According to Venture Development Corporation’s 2007 Embedded Software Market ReportArtisan is now the third largest vendor of systems and software modelling tools for the global embedded market" said James Gambrellthe new CEO. "With the MBO we have a huge opportunity to accelerate the sales growth of the company and take additional market share." The market is also changingwith IBM's modelling subsidiaryRationalacquiring the other big player in this areaTelelogic. While Rational focuses on application and enterprise software developmentTelelogic also includes requirements capture and product management software and the i-Logix modelling groupbased in Swindonfor embedded software development. "The opportunity for ArtiSAN is even greater when you factor in a rapidly growing market combined with current market uncertainty surrounding the proposed IBM/Telelogic merger" said Gambrell. But the Unified Modelling Language (UML) has taken many years to penetrate embedded designswhich has limited ArtiSAN's ability to grow so far. "It’s a market segment whose time has come" he said. "The most important aspect is UML which is now broadly accepted as the de facto standard for modelling and it’s been adopted across a broad range of areas. For us it’s about building capabilities on top of UMLwith domain specific modelling languagesMODAF and DoDAF (military modelling specifications) and SysML. "The largest market is the military and aerospace with the US Department of Defense" he said. "It is shifting from requirements to capabilities and they are mandating the move from text based to model based requirements by 2011 and the Ministry of Defence (in the UK) and NATO are doing the same thing." This move opens up other areas such as automotivewhich is happening alreadymedical equipment design and industrial automation. "It’s still very early days for where this will go" he said. Last month the company teamed up with safety critical software provider Esterel Technologies to integrate the Esterel SCADE Suite product line with Artisan Studio. This will allow systems and software engineers to collaborate more effectively in the development of safety-critical systems and share design information in and across the tool-chain. This is important in safety critical systems as SCADE Suite is the only Model-Based Development tool to provide DO-178B qualified code generation up to Level A for the C language as well as IEC61508 code generationqualifiable up to Safety Integrity Level (SIL) 3 and EN50128 qualified code generation up to SIL4. "Using model driven developmentthe entire development workflow is automated and streamlinedfrom requirements analysisthrough to systems and software architecture definition and non-certified code generation in Artisan Studio and detailed design and generation of certified code from SCADE Suite ensuring increased developer productivity and the deployment of high quality systems" said Gambrell. One of the key new areas is mobile phoneswhich is a global design business. "We have two pilot projects of significance in Europe and another one" said Gambrell. Around 40percent of the business is in the UK35percent in the US and the rest in Europe. "Our focus is on building the US business which should be five times the UK business and we are doing that with customer support" he said. "And we have distributors in IndiaChina and South Koreaand a direct presence is something we will be looking at in 2009. Asia has a much broader adoption of UML and modelling then anywhere else in the world so its an easier sell." It has just launched a synchroniser for Microsoft’s C#languageenabling software architecting to be undertaken in UML using Artisan Studio while allowing developers to retain the context of C#-aware features by implementing the coding detail using their preferred C# development environment or program editor. This increases software design predictability and reduces the time for development by eliminating the need for separate modelling and coding phases and the manual updates that would otherwise be required to keep the model and code from diverging. Approved as a standard by ECMA (ECMA-334) and ISO (ISO/IEC23270)the C# object-orientated programming language was originally developed by Microsoft as part of the .NET initiative and interfaces to other .NET Assemblies can be modelled and implemented using Artisan Studio and the C# Synchroniserand a .NET Assembly Importer is provided to avoid the need for programmers to manually enter library elements. For Telelogicthe move to IBM is now coming to fruition. Once the deal completed in Aprilthe product roadmaps are coming together. In the meantimethe latest release of Telelogic’s Rhapsody UML design tool moves to the Eclipse open framework and adds a graphical prototyping tool at the higherSysMLlevel. Building on Telelogic’s ‘Code Respect’ initiativeRhapsody now allows C developers to use high level models in a design while preserving the code structurefunctionality 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. The tools also allows legacy C code to be reverse engineered to give a graphical view of how it worksfor documentationtesting and modification. This can then be used in the model environment as a file of code and included in the testing regime. "What you have in Rhapsody is a profile for the C developer that allows you to tailor the UML environment to the kind of things that the are used by Csuch as files" said Paul Urbansenior product marketing manager at Telelogic. "The reverse engineering maps that code to filesand you can draw dependencies from that file to othersand once you bring it into the modelling environment you can add state charts and Rhapsody will generate the code so that takes you a big step towards design level debugging" he said. The Eclipse Plug-in means 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 reverse engineering and code synchronisation capabilitiesdevelopers can work on the code or model within one complete development environmenteither within the Eclipse environment with synchronised debugor with Rhapsody in the Windows environment. Working in this mannerthe code and model remain in synch and it is easy to navigate from one to the other. Developers can debug at the code or model level using the Eclipse debugger and Rhapsody’s animation with the ability to synchronise breakpoints between them. With the enhancements announced todayRhapsody is the first SysML tool that provides systems engineers with virtual prototyping capabilities using integrated graphical panels to rapidly visualise and validate a user mock-up early in the development cycle. Additionallythe graphical panels will allow engineers to easily modifymonitor and analyse data during stimulation making it easier to ensure the design is correct. Rapsody 7.2 also offeres SysML Requirements TablesAllocation Tablesand N-2 matricsenabling large quantities of information to be easily organisedcustomisedand viewed. Improved model consistancy and checking functionality further allows software developers to create their own and domain-specific checksimproving design quality and intergrity.
