Accelerate analysis, development, and testing

Soft-X-Form™ accelerates analysis, development, and testing over traditional development. Businesses most often choose third-generation programming langauges to deliver modern, customized applications. They want the benefits of abstract modeling and domain languages without the constraints of general-purpose fourth-generation programming languages.

Using Soft-X-Form™ to execute models and generate source code elevates your analysis, speeds the development, and simplifies testing.

Software Activity	Traditional	Soft-X-Form™
1. Request (e.g. requirements)	Requirements analysis for new features must be complete at all levels of detail. Documents must bridge the chasm separating the domain (i.e. your customers and products) from the implementation language and platform. In order to peform good analysis, product engineers must be low-level programmers, too.	Perform requirements analysis where it is most valuable: at the top layers of detail. Your business can specify requirements in terms of customizable business and product models, without being programmers. Product models at a higher level of abstraction carry more meaning with less bulk. They are easier for non-programmers to write, understand, correct, and adapt, so it is more likely that problems are found and corrected early.
2. Development	Programmers implement the details using a specific programming language, on a specific platform. Re-use is hard because the result runs in just one place.	Soft-X-Form™ takes these models and runs them directly, or generates the actual source code. By automatically translating models, developers are left with a small number of gaps to bridge manually. Soft-X-Form™ takes the original and generates source code for different languages and platforms.
3. Test	For all independent development, exhaustive testing is required to remove defects. Once a defect is found, it must be determined if the defect is located in the model, or the implementation of the model.	Testing is limited to the parts touched by developers and to ensure the automatic code conversion/generation for the language and platform are correct. The correctness of the translation processor can be validated by sampling, not exhaustive testing. Nearly all defects will be from the model, not the implementation.
4. Deployment (e.g. publishing) and user adoption (e.g. training.)	Traditional deployment creates monolithic install packages, bundling all features.	Deployment can be traditional, but it is also possible to architect a system which deploys upgrades as small modules and data tables, not monolithic packages.