Artisan acquires HOOD Bridge from Objektum Solutions

“Many organizations have made significant investments in modeling tools to support their systems and software development projects. However, external influences such as hardware, platform and skills obsolescence have created substantial risks to the ongoing success of these companies.” said James B. Gambrell, CEO of Artisan Software Tools. “Numerous military and aerospace projects were designed and developed using now obsolete HOOD toolsets. I am, therefore, thrilled to announce this acquisition as the Artisan HOOD Bridge gives these companies a pragmatic path to modern Unified Modeling Language (UML) tools such as Artisan Studio.”

As well as hardware, platform and skill obsolescence, many legacy tools just don’t provide the facilities to keep the design and implementation in step. This results in the code base deviating from the design, leading to outdated and worthless designs. Modern modeling notations and tools, such as the UML and Artisan Studio, are more appropriate for the development of large-scale systems and software, resolving this synchronization issue and future proofing the designs.

“The Artisan HOOD Bridge technology precisely maps the elements of the HOOD designs and Ada source to a UML model,” stated Derek Russell, Managing Director at Objektum Solutions. “UML artifacts are generated for each element based on these mapping rules. As elements are created, automatic checking ensures integrity and consistency. Rare mismatches are flagged for resolution, ensuring traceability and the highest level of migration fidelity. Pairing Artisan HOOD Bridge with the appropriate services certainly makes Artisan the one-stop shop for legacy model migration, providing an international distribution and support capability.”

The Artisan HOOD Bridge analyzes HOOD detailed designs and/or Ada source code, enabling engineers to correct errors in the original design, compare HOOD designs with Ada source code and merge Ada source code with existing HOOD designs. This results in the automatic generation of new Artisan Studio UML models from the original legacy HOOD designs and/or Ada code. To ease the adoption of UML by users familiar with HOOD, Artisan Studio’s ergonomic profiling capabilities have been exploited to present users with familiar HOOD diagrams in Studio.

The Artisan HOOD Bridge is used by the Nimrod project team at BAE Systems. The Artisan HOOD Bridge migration solution is providing them with the ability to transition the project to a mainstream methodology with comparative ease and at minimal cost, ensuring they have the ability to continue to develop and maintain their legacy systems. The solution provides protection against ageing tools with diminishing support, protection against the lack of HOOD expertise resulting from what is fast becoming an obsolete methodology and future-proofing of the project through better alignment with industry standards.

“The Artisan HOOD Bridge and its associated professional services are already proven enablers for design tool modernization and risk reduction within a significant number of organizations.” said Hedley Apperly, VP Marketing at Artisan Software Tools. “As well as appealing to existing HOOD users and Artisan Studio customers, we plan to extend this indispensable technology. Taking advantage of our position as the leading independent modeling tool vendor in our market, we are already working on migration from other legacy modeling tools, as well as migration to alternative UML modeling tools.”