As a company on the forefront of adapting new technologies for the telecommunication industry, Ericsson, a leading telecommunications manufacturer based in Stockholm, Sweden, spared no effort when putting a new object-oriented development environment to the test.
After a thorough evaluation, Ericsson selected SNiFF+, a product from TakeFive Software, as one of the corporate tools for Ericsson C and C++ development projects. That was two years ago. Today at Ericsson and its development company, Ellemtel, close to 800 engineers use more than 300 active SNiFF+ licenses to develop innovative solutions and services for all types of communications networks. Because its range of applications is so broad - from embedded systems in telephone switches to workstation application -- Ericsson requires an open, flexible development system that gives programmers the freedom to choose the best tools for creating new programs or customizing existing ones.
SNiFF+'s ability to work with the best compilers, debuggers and editing tools available in a mixed platform environment consisting of Sun Microsystem's SPARC workstations, and Hewlett-Packard's HP-U workstations, is one of the program's many useful features, according to software engineer Ingmar Olsson, a member of Ellemtel's C++ support team.
"It's important to be able to use different tools because often a certain tool may not be good enough," says Olsson. "We need the flexibility to make changes in our development environment. With SNiFF+, we get an open development environment and we can integrate and customize the interface to a new tool. For example, we can take the tools for automatic enforcement of Ellemtel programming rules, version and configuration management, and memory monitoring and integrate them to SNiFF+."
Olssen says this kind of seamless integration must not require any change to the project, the architecture, the design, the implementation structure or the file structure. Consequently, "It's much easier to customize the development environment and have the 'front' technique to realize the best software products, and that's a competitive edge in a changing business like telecommunications."
Ellemtel also requires a development environment capable of handling huge C and C++ software systems. Telecommunication programs are large, often half a million lines of code or more. SNiFF+ can handle large programs based on its "fuzzy parser" technology. "It's an important mechanism because it allows programmers to view the program before it's complete," says Olsson. "It gives you quick feedback so that you can make changes and extensions to the software before it's fully implemented."
Developers at Ellemtel agree that SNiFF+ is a powerful environment that lets them spend more time on solving specific problems and being more productive.
SNiFF+ gives powerful support in textual and graphical browsing, visualization of the software system, generation and retrieving of cross-reference information. SNiFF+ is based on a flexible concept of projects and subprojects which consist of a set of files on a certain level in the filestructure of an application.
"Development can be more efficient and designers can be more productive with SNiFF+ than without it," says Olsson. "At Ellemtel, you can develop software with other tools if you want as long as they fulfill the requirements for the development process. But since we got SNiFF+, everyone can choose to use this tool instead. It is very easy to learn and to use, and its openness and high performance gives improved development productivity from the very beginning."
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