Objektum Solutions and Artisan team with BAE Systems to resolve the HOOD-to-UML migration challenge on the Nimrod project

The HOOD (Hierarchic Object Oriented Design) design methodology was established by the European Space Agency over 25 years ago. Although never considered a mainstream methodology, it was adopted and successfully employed by a variety of major avionics, aerospace, defense and nuclear organizations to support engineering programs requiring a robust methodology to support complex, mission-critical systems development. Given its age and limited adoption, this has resulted in both HOOD skills and tool support becoming limited.

BAE Systems recognized the need to move towards a more mainstream environment for complex, mission-critical design and development by migrating its legacy designs to the industry standard UML environment to continue the ongoing development and maintenance requirements to better fully support the Nimrod in the years to come.

During 2007, BAE Systems reviewed its various migration options and engaged Objektum Solutions, a company with extensive expertise in the HOOD methodology, to investigate ways in which its HOOD data could be migrated into Artisan Studio, which was already widely deployed within BAE Systems. The outcome of this engagement has resulted in Objektum Solutions developing the HOODbridge, a standalone utility to migrate HOOD design data into an Artisan Studio UML model without any loss of design data integrity.

BAE Systems used Artisan Studio's powerful, extensible and highly flexible features to develop an Ada Profile - where profile properties are first class citizens in the design. Additionally, code generation templates have been developed to generate code from the models. Using the Objektum Solutions HOODbridge with the BAE Systems Ada Profile and code generation templates, it has proven the ability to migrate HOOD designs into Artisan Studio along with the generation of source code consistent with BAE Systems’ original COTS HOOD tool. The HOODbridge builds a readable, navigable intermediate view of the BAE Systems´ Nimrod designs which can be thoroughly checked before the UML model is generated. Once the design has been migrated from HOOD to UML, BAE Systems can then exploit the richer UML notation in order to maintain and further develop the models.

Having proven the viability of the general concept, the Nimrod project team at BAE Systems is now standardizing on HOODbridge and Artisan Studio as its tools of choice for the migration of HOOD software designs to UML. The team is continuing to refine and validate the migration process in order to prove its accuracy and reliability before beginning the migration task in earnest. “With the HOODbridge/Artisan Studio HOOD-to-UML migration solution, the Nimrod project team at BAE Systems has been able to satisfy all of the objectives of its migration rationale,” said Peter Kibble, Commercial Director at Artisan Software Tools. “The HOODbridge/Artisan Studio HOOD-to-UML migration solution provides BAE Systems with the ability to transition the Nimrod project to a mainstream methodology with comparative ease and at minimal cost, thus ensuring they have the ability to continue to develop and maintain their legacy systems. The HOODbridge solution provides protection against ageing tools with diminishing support, mitigates against the declining availability of HOOD expertise resulting from what is fast becoming an obsolete methodology and ultimately future-proofs the project through better alignment with industry standards.”