A Russian emigre to the US, who was for a while vice-president of research and development at Prime Computer Inc, now Computervision Corp, has caught the start-up bug. Vladimir Geisberg, graduate of the then University of Leningrad, has started a new company, appropriately named Software Emancipation Technology Inc, which last month introduced a family of software development products called ParaSet. ParaSet is said to be the first system to use the same model to forward engineer new software and reverse engineer existing software to modify, maintain and update it. The company says this technological approach enables changes made anywhere in the process including development of documentation, design models and source code and at the lowest level of granularity, to be automatically reflected and maintained throughout the entire development process and all software deliverables. ParaSet is also said to provide the first what if capability for engineers to assess the impact of potential changes to their software. ParaSet defines a new product class based on parametric software development, which manages the complexity of design and maintenance. Parameters may include statements, variables, functions and classes common throughout the source code or relationship, entities and subsystems in design models or blocks, paragraphs and words in documents.
10 Changes from any view
Unlike traditional top-down design methodologies that allow changes only from high-level designs, ParaSet allows changes from any view of the model, both procedural and object-oriented programming. The software includes a $7,500 core system comprising Para/Designer, Para/Programmer and ParaOnline with two options, Para/Analyzer and ParaDebugger. Because of its features, it should be usable immediately without disrupting the way people work. It currently supports C and C++, RCS and SCCS source control systems for configuration management. Shipments begin in March. Software Emancipation Technology is backed by venture capital providers Advent International, Oak Investment Partners, Charles River Partners and Walsh & Greenwood.
