CSC 508 Milestone 2
Tool Feature Comparison

Activities

Given that we have a body of existing tool requirements, I would like to do a feature comparison between the Inferno tools as currently specified and comparable tools found in the related work search.

The following is the match-up between the topics in the milestone 1 task roster and the Inferno tools:

Search For	Person(s) Assigned	Comparable Inferno Tool(s)
Software Process Tools	Ying-Po, Yajun	Process and artifact navigators
Software Traceability Tools	Bob	Artifact navigator
Software Requirements Tools	Joe, Paul	Requirements tool
Software Specification Tools	Andrew	Specification tool
Software Prototyping Tools	Sharon, Ryan	Prototyping tools
Software Design Tools	Margaret, Ahmed	Design tool
Graphical Software Debugging Tools	Luke, Eric	Implementation tool
Visual Programming Tools	Alfredo, J.T.
Software Configuration Management and Version Control Tools	John, Allen	Configuration tool
Software Testing Testing Tools	Kathyrn, Jim	Testing tool
Software Project Administration Tools	Don, Peter	Archived scheduling tool
Software Documentation	N.A.
Full Software Environment Tools	Scott	General Inferno features

The tool comparison should be presented in the form of a taxonomic feature comparison matrix, with the following general structure:

Features:	Tool 1	. . .	Tool 5
Feature 1
Feature 1.1
Feature 1.1.1
Feature 1.1.2
Feature 1.1.3
Feature 1.2
Feature 1.3
Feature 1.3.1
Feature 1.3.2
Feature 2
. . .

The left column is the taxonomic feature index (more on taxonomy shortly). The top row lists each tool begin compared. The entry for each tool is a rating between 0 and 10, where 0 means that the tool does not support the feature at all, 10 means the tool supports the feature as well as possible, and a rating between 1 and 9 indicates some degree of partial support for the feature. For example, if the feature were "color", a rating of 0 would be given to a tool that had support for black and white only; a rating of 10 would be given for full 24-bit color support; a rating of 7 would be reasonable for a tool with reduced color support, say 8-bit; a rating of 1 would be appropriate for a tool with support for grey-scale, but no real color.

Taxonomy

The study of taxonomy is pursued significantly in biological sciences, where the goal is to categorize the plant and animal life into a logical hierarchy. For example, biologists start with the largest category of kingdom, which has the two members of plants and animals. From there, the biological taxonomy goes to phyla, classes, orders, etc., down to the smallest category of sub-species.

In our tool comparison, we will use taxonomy to organize the functionality of the tools. For example, we can consider the function categories found in the top-level menubar to be primary candidates for the top-level categories of functionality. Each item in a menu is a subcategory, and items in submenus or dialogs will be subsubcategories. It is likely that most tools will have at most several levels of command hierarchy, just by the nature of the user interfaces that modern GUI-based tools use.

Since software tools are not as well organized as the animal kingdom, we will have to look elsewhere than top-level menubars for feature categories. For example, some tools have no menubar at all. Overall, the focus of our categorization is on functions that are accessible anywhere in the tool's user interface, whether through menus, buttons, or typing. We specifically do not care about features that are not directly accessible to the user.