Businesses evolve and change fast. Software creation must keep up with this pace. This includes changing models along with many lines of source code. Staying on top of these changes and keeping the overview is essential for making the right decisions. A lightweight and continuous automated process that ensures maintainability and keeps QA costs low is the key to both an efficient and innovative business unit.

Hewlett-Packard Development Company was looking for an agile way to make informed decisions about software architecture. The aim was to accelerate software delivery while keeping the development process lightweight and the software itself both efficient and maintainable.

HP Cloud Service Automation (CSA)

HP Cloud Service Automation (CSA) is a solution composed of automation software tools for use by companies and government agencies to deploy and manage cloud computing applications. The solution simplifies and automates the deployment of databases, middleware and packaged applications and enables composite application provisioning and monitoring in heterogeneous and extensible cloud computing environments. The software is part of a broad portfolio of cloud computing products, services and solutions offered by HP as part of its HP IT Management Software family of products.

HP CSA allows IT departments to move and manage applications among in-house (private) cloud systems, external (public) clouds and traditional IT systems. HP CSA software is also designed to deliver unified security, governance and compliance across applications, as well as physical and virtual infrastructures. The software automates key IT processes so that there is one consistent approach to IT resource management. HP CSA also allows IT departments to dynamically monitor and provision server, storage and network elements as well as applications to meet the needs of current and upcoming workloads. In addition, the solution allows IT to automatically grow and shrink the allocated resources in order to meet quality of service targets. HP CSA Software is included in HP CloudSystem, a cloud infrastructure from HP that combines storage, servers, networking and software for organizations to build complete private, public and hybrid Cloud computing environments. Hewlett-Packard’s Cloud Service Automation team is located in Fort Collins and in Cupertino in the USA. About 40 software architects and developers work on the project. Customers are companies like The Walt Disney Company or the SFR Business Team. This testimonial refers to Tim Barry, Master Tech­nol­ogist at the Hewlett-Packard Developement Company in Fort Collins and working on the CSA product release till August 2012.

Solution:

For implementing Hewlett-Packard's Cloud Service Automation software solution, the CSA development team uses UML Lab. With regard to Yatta's modeling IDE, Tim has this to say:

The Java code generator provides substantial value by generating Java Interfaces and their corresponding implementation classes out of the box. These sources are then re-used by other automated procedures to generate APIs and UIs. The build automation is done with a dedicated Maven integration of UML Lab which was provided to HP by the Yatta developer team as a customized UML Lab solution. Knowing several other modeling solutions and their limitations for years, UML Lab is the first to truly impress Tim:

We are very proud that Tim is happy with our software tools. Even more importantly, Tim and Hewlett-Packard were able to realize a great software project with reduced cost and risks by using UML Lab. Our Yatta developers felt really proud when Tim told us, "We would not be where we are without your tool."

Because pushing our customers' business as software developers and architects is what drives us—and makes our start-up business a success.

About Hewlett-Packard Development Company

With over 349,600 employees and a revenue of 127.24 billion US$ in 2011, Hewlett-Packard is one of the world's leading IT companies worldwide. HP is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, in the United States and provides products, technologies, software, solutions and services to consumers, small- and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises, including customers in the government, health and education sectors.

Software Engineering Improvements:

• Multiple source code artifacts are automatically adapted by code generation within seconds.

• Source code changes are reflected instantly in the model view.

• Model and source code are always in-sync with Round-Trip-EngineeringNG.

• By using UML Lab, the CSA developer team of Hewlett-Packard was able to make the right software architecture and design decisions in a truly agile way.

Business Benefits:

• Short time to market for a new HP product: Cloud Service Automation (CSA).

• The software realization keeps up with rapidly evolving businesses.

• Constant maintainability is ensured by a light-weight solution for consistent software design and implementation.

What HP Has To Say About UML Lab

[Disclaimer: This case study refers to a UML Lab collaboration that took place between 2011 and 2013.]