Meantime, Compagnie General d’Informatique SA has launched the French version of its Bird object-oriented programming methodology with an English language version expected in May. The Bird framework is organized into domains for configuring the upper levels of project management, building descriptions of technical concepts and techniques for qualifying, reviewing, verifying and validating the deliverables. Key components are Business Process Re-engineering, Information System Urbanism – the physical distribution of data and services, Application Development and Software Product Implementation. It borrows heavily from the methods and techniques of OMT (Rumbaugh), OOSE (Jacobson), CRC (Booch) and OOD (Wirfs-Breck) to deal with real world implementation and interaction with graphical and data storage objects. It is designed to support paper-based modeling or OMT software engineering tools including its own PACDesign. A meta-model of Bird is implemented in PACDesign which authorizes use of icons belonging to a specific sub-schema, verifies validity of links between icons, identifies inconsistencies within the metamodel and between the graphical description of the model and repository, and automatically modifies model descriptions. Bird-based objects are available in VisualAge SmallTalk and Bird-based projects have been completed using PowerBuilder and NatSystems Inc’s NatStar development environment (formerly NS-DK). NatPAC/Design is up under most Unixes, OS/2 and Windows NT; prices start at 5,000 British Pounds. It is currently working on making Bird available in a ‘Methods Notes’ form, using a customizable Notes Framework. Bird is from 27,500 pounds. CGI says it has 850 users worldwide.
