Since 1990 Dr. Dobb’s Jolt Product Excellence Awards are awarded annually to representatives of the software industry in five different categories. Recently, on October 26th, The Jolt Judges announced the awards for 2011 in the category “Design, Planning, and Architecture Tools”. In detail, the Jolt hall of fame now includes the products Paradigm for UML, Restructure 101, and Requirements Center 2010.
To obtain the prestigious award in 2011 tools must reveal various properties. For instance, they should be more lightweight than in the past, easy to use, as well as easy to configure with respect to the needs of an organization instead of enforcing their own processes and methodologies.
According to the judges:
The winners of this year's Jolt awards are ideal tools in this respect. They're easy-to-use, complete, and integrate well with other tools, especially development environments. As a result, they bridge the no man's land between the requirements/design and coding stages, leading to the type of collaboration that enhances the development process systemically.
Requirements Center 2010 by Blueprint Software Systems, Inc. received one of the productivity awards. The tool automatically reflects all changes in the use case model, the business processes, or the requirements in the requirements model. It offers sophisticated editors and allows exports to ALM tools.
Headway Software got a productivity award for their product Restructure 101 which supports architectural refactoring. Using the tool architects can identify architectural smells such as dependency cycles in Java or .NET implementations. Restructure101 also includes metrics such as Cyclomatic Complexity for this purpose.
Another Jolt award went to Visual Paradigm International for their product Visual Paradigm for UML which already received a Jolt productivity award in 2004. The modeling tool was awarded due to its completeness and robustness as a designer toolbox. According to Gary Pollice,
It hits the sweet spot for software developers who desire a robust UML modeling tool, but want the freedom to use as little or as much formality as they need.
By the way, for all of you who always wondered what the name of the award means. “Jolt” does not define a four letter acronym, but refers to the sponsor of the award presentation, Jolt Cola.
In the next weeks the Jolt Award for coding tools is underway. If you like to nominate a tool just visit the nomination site.