Artisan launches Artisan Studio Reviewer

Screenshot of the Artisan Studio Reviewer's Fix-It function (click image to zoom by 1.4x)

Washington DC, USA and Cheltenham, UK – 14th October 2009. Artisan® Software Tools, the world’s largest independent supplier of industrial-grade, collaborative modeling tools for complex, mission and safety-critical embedded systems and software, has launched Artisan Studio Reviewer™, a powerful design reviewer that automates the otherwise manual task of checking UML, SysML and even UPDM models for completeness, correctness and consistency. With applications development deadlines continually shortening, Artisan Studio Reviewer significantly enhances the management and operation of complex mission and safety-critical development projects, cutting design time by up to 30% and improving design quality.

“Artisan Studio Reviewer automatically provides all the information needed to measure the quality of architectures and systems modeled in Artisan Studio, identify design faults early and fix them quickly,” said Hedley Apperly, Vice-President of Marketing at Artisan Software Tools. “As design projects progress through their lifecycle, the time taken to fix errors gets exponentially longer and it can be difficult either to find or justify the time needed to manually check every detail of a Model for completeness, correctness and consistency. Artisan Studio Reviewer replaces the previously manual task, which might otherwise have taken days, with an automated process that takes just seconds or minutes, even for large, complex models.”

Artisan Studio Reviewer checks UML, SysML and UPDM models using over 100 pre-configured design review scenarios. These out-of-the-box design reviews can be easily modified and re-configured to suit a company’s specific design practices and also supplemented with user-defined reviews to meet any unique requirements of a design project. As such, Artisan Studio Reviewer is an invaluable design tool for both project managers and design engineers of all disciplines – architects, systems and software engineers. Design managers no longer have to estimate the status of a design as Artisan Studio Reviewer provides the necessary metrics to measure design quality at each phase of the design cycle. Error reporting on models not only enables design engineers to easily identify errors within a design but, its active mentoring capability that details the consequences of not fixing them as well as proposing solutions for their correction, Artisan Studio Reviewer effectively guides engineers through the rectification process. Fully integrated with Artisan Studio, models can be fixed and updated from within Artisan Studio Reviewer.

“’Done yet?’ is one the most difficult questions to answer in engineering. It’s particularly difficult with large models consisting of hundreds of diagrams, thousands of objects, and a team of designers,” said Gary LaBarre, Senior Consulting Engineer at Northrop Grumman Electronic Systems. “Artisan Studio Reviewer answers the question, quickly performing hundreds of automated checks that would otherwise be undertaken manually. Executed prior to a peer review, Artisan Studio Reviewer allows designers to quickly assess the quality and readiness of their work and frees the peer review team to focus on the correctness of the functionality. Executed against the entire model, it allows early identification of trouble areas, avoiding time consuming generation of defective documentation or code.”

Artisan has also established a content feedback program for Artisan Studio Reviewer, through which users can make recommendations for improvements and new reviews, thereby actively participating in the future development of the product.

“Artisan Studio Reviewer is a further realization of our Work as One™ philosophy,” said James B. Gambrell, CEO of Artisan Software Tools. “Rapid and effective decision making is crucial to the entire mission and safety-critical embedded systems and software design process. As design deadlines continue to shorten, Artisan Studio Reviewer gives design managers and engineers confidence in the robustness of their designs by making 100% model checking coverage a reality as well as ensuring consistency between engineers and across models. Furthermore, it supports the documentation and communication of best design practice along with the implementation of company-wide design standards.”

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About Artisan Software Tools

Artisan® Software Tools is the world’s largest independent supplier of industrial-grade, collaborative modeling tools for complex, mission-critical systems and software. Artisan has delivered a stable, robust working environment to thousands of users across an extensive range of complex applications in demanding sectors including Military, aerospace and defense, Automotive and transportation, telecommunications and electronics, and medical. Artisan’s standards-based tool suite, Artisan Studio®, provides comprehensive support for the leading industry standards, including OMG SysML, UML and Architectural Frameworks. Artisan WorkbenchTM provides a fully integrated, collaborative engineering framework for the trouble-free deployment and maintenance of best-in-class tools for mission and safety-critical systems and software development. Artisan’s tools deliver on the promise of an integrated collaborative development environment - allowing systems and software engineering teams to Work as OneTM - from concept through to delivery, maintenance and support. Founded in 1997 with extensive venture capital backing, Artisan is headquartered in the USA and UK with offices in Germany and Italy, supported by a global distributor network. For more information visit: www.ArtisanSoftwareTools.com.