QuickCRC Software Design Tool Promotion

MARSHALLTOWN, Iowa, April 6, 1999 --- Excel Software is offering a
$150 discount on QuickCRC 1.1 for Macintosh or Windows 95/98/NT.
Normally priced at $395, QuickCRC will be available for $245 between
April 6th and June 30th. QuickCRC is a design tool for discovering
objects and related information for an object-oriented software
development project. It automates the CRC card concept of identifying
classes, responsibilities and collaborations between objects.
Software designers fill in information about each object class on a
separate CRC card. Design scenarios involving a group of
communicating objects can be identified and simulated.

CRC cards are often used during the design phase of small software
development projects or as a front-end to larger projects that use a
more comprehensive design method and notation such as the Unified
Modeling Language (UML). The use of CRC cards for software design has
been popularized by several books including "Designing
Object-Oriented Software" by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock, Brian Wilkerson and
Laura Wiener, "Using CRC Cards: An Informal Approach to O-O Software
Development" by Nancy M. Wilkinson and "The CRC Book" by David Bellin
and Susan Suchman Simone. A white paper titled "Software Design Using
CRC Cards" and trial version of QuickCRC is available for free
download at http://www.excelsoftware.com.

QuickCRC uses a diagram workspace for creating card and scenario objects.
A card represents the properties of a class including its name,
description, superclasses, subclasses, attributes, responsibilities
and collaborating objects. A scenario represents a design mechanism
defined as a series of steps involving communicating objects.
Scenarios can reference cards or other scenarios. Cards and scenarios
can also reference external agents defined by the designer to
identify system and user interfaces. As information is entered or
changed for a card or scenario object, it is instantly synchronized
throughout the model.

Separate diagrams partition a model into subject areas. The contents
view allows a designer to navigate between diagrams shown as folder
icons that can be opened or closed. From the contents view, a card or
scenario can be dragged between diagrams or double-clicked to edit
its properties.
This makes it easy to locate and modify information as the model
grows. The inheritance graph concisely illustrates the class
inheritance structure of the model. It gets generated from
information on the CRC cards regardless of how the cards are
physically arranged or partitioned between diagrams.

A text representation can be generated from the information in a CRC
model. This information can be used as a coding specification,
transferred to other applications or used to automatically generate a
new CRC model. Design models can be exported or imported to Excel
Software's MacA&D and WinA&D software engineering tools for detailed
design or code generation using popular methods and notations such as
UML. Likewise, the MacTranslator or WinTranslator reengineering tools
can be used to generate QuickCRC design models from existing code.

QuickCRC for Macintosh is compatible with all Macintosh computers
running System 7 or later. QuickCRC for Windows runs on Windows 95,
98 or NT. CRC models are binary compatible between platforms.
For Information Contact:
Excel Software
Ph: (515) 752-5359
Fax: (515) 752-2435
Web: http://www.excelsoftware.com
Email: info@excelsoftware.com