Sony DNSE, headquartered in Basingstoke, UK, develops digital TV transmission and reception equipment. A software development team led by Colin Phillips was interested in moving to an object-oriented design approach, with the eventual goal of using a component-based development model.

"Communication is significantly better because we now use a common terminology for program component and interface details, facilitated by Real-time Studio's shared dictionary."

In considering the adoption of an object-oriented approach, they were time-constrained, and concerned that an "all or nothing" adoption might disrupt project schedules. The team decided they needed to take a more gradual approach in order to minimize the learning curve and reduce time away from the project. After reviewing the alternatives, Colin's team chose Real-time Studio^®, from ARTiSAN Software Tools, largely because of the flexibility with which it can be adopted.

"We also chose Real-time Studio because its real-time extensions fit in well with the real-time embedded portions of the project," Colin explains. "It's a broad tool suite with a wide variety of modeling views. While we are only using a subset of its capabilities, we are already deriving some very tangible benefits."

Specifically, Sony is using Real-time Studio to create use cases to model component interfaces. These are supplemented with sequence diagrams for particular scenarios. They then develop class diagrams and generate code from there.

One of the key objectives was to achieve clear and unambiguous communication across multiple sites involved with the project. Sony DNSE wanted to make sure that teams in different countries could all agree on the software design and the interface specifications for the components they developed. The team members in Basingstoke, Western UK, and in Brussels are using Real-time Studio, and they share the system documentation they produce with a team in Japan. All four sites participate in reviews, and with Real-time Studio models and documentation to work from, it is far easier for the teams to reach consensus than before.

"We have already derived some significant benefits," Colin says. "Communication is significantly better because we now use a common terminology for program components and interface details, facilitated by Real-time Studio's shared dictionary. This consistency of terms coupled with superior design documentation makes it far easier to bring new people on the project up to speed. It also means that we can do a better job of evaluating our designs before implementing the code, which in turn leads to a smoother integration process."

Sony's scalable adoption of Real-time Studio seems to be working for them. While some features of the product will remain unused until the next project, they feel the benefits derived so far have made their purchase worthwhile.

"We've reported a few problems to ARTiSAN as you might expect, but have found their support to be excellent. Overall, we're quite happy with our choice of Real-time Studio, even if only for the bits we're currently using," Colin adds. "In fact, we've just placed an order to purchase more licenses, so we can bring other engineers on-line as well."