Following unprecedented agreement between key methodologists on the need for standardisation in their upper-CASE software engineering world, the Object Management Group is resuscitating its analysis and design special interest group. The embryonic group hopes to issue a request for information through the next meeting of the Object Group’s task force committee in Ottawa, Canada, on September 14, or at the very latest at a Tokyo meeting on November 16. It will call for the Object Group formally to create a group to standardise on methodologies and issue Requests for Proposals after feedback from the Request for Information. The Request will be reviewed at an informal meeting of the group during next week’s Object World show in San Francisco. The aim is to create a common meta-model for methodologies, addressing the use of common terminology, notation, process (steps to take) and results of steps. It is intended to ensure compatibility and interoperability between methods, tools and/or terminology, providing users with a choice of standard approaches and the opportunity to re-use design elements across different projects. Users must currently choose from a plethora of object analysis and design methods, each with its own language and processes. Increasing demand by users now familiar with procuring and implementing information systems based upon industry standards, has apparently driven methodologists to re-visit the notion of standardisation. A previous end user analysis and design interest group eventually disappeared back in 1993 due to lack of interest, or in committee parlance was negative due to bandwidth. The Request for Information will seek responses in the areas of frameworks, languages for representing methods, tools for interoperability and a repository facility. Rational Software Corp’s Grady Booch, Objectory AB’s Ivan Jacobson and Project Technology Inc’s Stephen Mellor shared a panel at Object World in Boston earlier this year. Meantime, although a Request for Information – much less the Request for Proposals – has yet to be issued, Unisys Corp, plus four or five other vendors, including Texas Instruments Inc, are already lining up responses to the repository facility component of the Requests. The new group’s Sridhar Iyengar, a Unisys information management systems architect, said his company’s Common Object Request Broker Architecture 1.0 and Object Linking & Embedding-compliant Universal Repository is an obvious candidate. He expects it will take up to two years for any concrete guidelines to materialise. Unisys is currently working with ICL Plc to marry Urep to ICL’s Dais object request broker.
