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Author Topic: EA Vs. i-Logix Rhapsody  (Read 4977 times)

davisford

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EA Vs. i-Logix Rhapsody
« on: May 03, 2005, 05:30:54 am »
Hi, I work for a rather large organization and i-Logix Rhapsody is the UML "tool of choice" that has been imposed on us for embedded software modeling.  I have been able to procure EA for my group "under the radar", but now this decision is being scrutinized, and I need to prepare a case for why EA over Rhapsody.  I am in the process now of doing a comparative analysis and building a case, but I welcome any input that can help make the case from any users out there that are familiar with both tools.  

Regards,
Davis
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davisford

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Re: EA Vs. i-Logix Rhapsody
« Reply #1 on: May 03, 2005, 06:38:29 am »
Did some digging, and found this interesting website:  http://www.umlderby.org

They do comparison of different tools and rate them based on different profiles (developer, analyst, architect, IT manager, and custom profile).

I did a comparison of EA and Rhapsody (to be fair, it is not their 6.0 product) and EA won for every profile.
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mikewhit

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Re: EA Vs. i-Logix Rhapsody
« Reply #2 on: May 03, 2005, 07:18:38 am »
Think they've rather overstated the price of iLogix Rhapsody, at $99999
(platform any languages any price any)

Also, they might be biased to metrics that give a good rating to Poseidon, since they sell it !
This does not mean that EA is 'better' unless they explain the rating system.

They miss out C from languages - which Rhapsody claims to support, but EA does not.
Nor do they include Requirements and Test in their ratings.

MagicDraw 7.5 wins over EA 4.0 ...

Just trying to be unbiased !
« Last Edit: May 03, 2005, 07:24:46 am by mikewhit »
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robH

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Re: EA Vs. i-Logix Rhapsody
« Reply #3 on: May 03, 2005, 08:55:10 am »
I'm the first person to big up EA however I attended an I-Logix Webinar last week on their new Requirements management facilities in Rhapsody...if it really does what they presented then it's defintely worth looking at when working at the systems level...if only EA had a similar facility.
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mikewhit

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Re: EA Vs. i-Logix Rhapsody
« Reply #4 on: May 03, 2005, 09:36:45 am »
Have also seen some interesting comments re Test and Requirements in Rhapsody.

I would welcome some comments from a Rhapsody user on any shortcomings in EA in these subject areas, versus the approach/functionality provided by Rhapsody - perhaps we might be able to get some improved features into EA.

Rhapsody presentation ...
- It will demonstrate the use of Automatic Test-case Generation (ATG) as part of your development and testing activities
- It will show you that the automatically generated test cases offer a high level of model coverage, such as states, transitions, operations, generation of events, and how it relates to code coverage.
- It will demonstrate the use of these test cases for Unit tests, for Regression tests as well as for Integration testing.
- It will show you how these test can be executed in concert with other 3rd party tools you may already be using for code coverage.

Plus it will cost you several times the price of EA ... ;-)

Looks like it's going to be state-diagram based.
« Last Edit: May 03, 2005, 10:03:14 am by mikewhit »
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fwoolz

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Re: EA Vs. i-Logix Rhapsody
« Reply #5 on: May 03, 2005, 10:27:32 am »
I haven't been keeping up with current events, but does Rhapsody use XMI as an interchange format and, if so, is it compatible with EA for model exchange? If so, EA is a great way to expand your Rhapsody design capabilities w/o buying additional seats of Rhapsody!
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Fred Woolsey
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davisford

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Re: EA Vs. i-Logix Rhapsody
« Reply #6 on: May 03, 2005, 11:12:20 am »
Rhapsody does support XMI, but in my experience, XMI interchange between two vendor implementations has not proven that successful.  

The real short case analysis is that we have a very cross-functional domain: business level analysis modeling, IT, and embedded -- including requirements modeling, software architecture, detailed software design, and generating specifications and documentation from the model for each of these different areas.  EA succeeds in these areas and handles the different domains pretty well.  Rhapsody is very centric on embedded only and promotes the code generation runtime framework which I am not interested in.  I have also found that Rhapsody 5.x did not support all of UML 2.0 that I was interested in.  I am unsure how 6.0 fares.

I find usability in EA to be better.

Forward/Reverse engineering supports more languages whereas Rhapsody requires you to launch separate versions of the tool for each language and modeling information can't be shared between them -- maybe this is fixed in 6.0.

Documentation in EA is far superior.  The MS Word Master Doc / SubDoc is really, really useful.

EA Plugin architecture for UML Profiles, etc. is very useful.

There are other reasons, but I am out of time.

I do think EA should put executable UML on its roadmap.  Rhapsody is very much executable UML driven, but this requires some kind of underlying framework, and becomes very platform-centric.  Perhaps MDA can help, but I think there is quite a journey ahead.
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