Excel Software today began shipping a major upgrade of MacA&D, the industryis leading software design tool for Macintosh. MacA&D 7.3 adds XML support, integrated test documents, more flexible requirements traceability and enhancements to its scriptable HTML reports.
XML ( eXtensible Markup Language) has become a popular industry standard for exchanging information that is human readable, platform independent and somewhat self-explanatory. XML is stored in a text file using tagged data values and is widely supported by editors, browsers, parsers and other third party tools. All MacA&D design documents can be listed as XML files or imported from XML files. This includes class models, object models, state models, process models, structure models, data models, task models, screen models, data dictionary, and requirements.
Developers create test designs and procedures to provide structure to the testing process. MacA&D adds the ability to create test documents with a built-in text editor or by configuring it to use another application like Microsoft Word. Test documents can be linked to requirement and use case entries or to diagram objects. This smooth integration and traceability of test documents throughout the requirement specification, analysis and design process can improve developer productivity and testing efforts.
Large projects are often partitioned into many documents, spread across multiple folders containing thousands of linked objects. MacA&D has powerful link management features that tightly and efficiently integrate project data. Requirement and use case entries can be linked to design models, text specifications, code files, HTML files, test documents, foreign documents or to other requirement entries.
MacA&Dis;HTML report generator is a popular way to generate standard and custom reports of project data. The scriptable report generator adds features for XML and test documents. New XML scripting tags allow any piece of data from any MacA&D document to easily be included in a generated report. Likewise information from test documents or links between documents can be included.
Pricing for MacA&D starts at US$495. You can find more information at the Excel Software Web site.