The University of Cape Town has boosted the course content in its Business Science Information Systems and Bachelor of Commerce Information Systems degrees with 100 Rational Rose Enterprise licences from Software Futures.
The licences, bought for a reduced annual licence fee of US$10 each, form part of the Rational Software Engineering for Educational Development (SEED) programme offered by Software Futures, which targets South African tertiary institutions.
The programme, which allows registered members of SEED to receive 100 licences of any one of Rational's point solutions for a year at the nominal administrative fee, permits the purchase of bulk Rational licences for use as part of the IT-related curriculum offered at UCT.
Rational Rose has been introduced to the 140 second-year students as an alternative to the current program, Microsoft Visio, to present an object-oriented engineering approach to systems analysis and design, enabling automation of the visual modelling process.
UCT's 200 third-year students apply Rational Rose, the visual modelling tool, in a real-world practical group systems development project in parallel to their studies. 100 Honours students are exposed to some of the more powerful functionality in Rational Rose Enterprise, including its code generation package and extensive tool base.
UCT's objective with the introduction of Rational is to encourage students to use the software at the front end as an intelligent tool for creating diagrams for models.
"Rational Rose exposes the students to a more rigorous style of building systems and improves their marketability on qualifying," says Mike Eccles, senior lecturer in the Commerce Department at UCT.
"Using Rational enables a deeper understanding of the actual development process, discourages cutting corners and strengthens analysis."
Software Futures' Rational SEED programme is designed to help uplift education and contribute to the technical growth of SA.
"Rational Rose ensures that students are groomed to understand and work according to best practices, leading to a continually improved way of developing and designing software," says John Pratt, Development Best Practices business unit leader at Software Futures in Cape Town.
Other institutions already taking advantage of the SEED offering include Wits University, Rhodes University, Cape Technikon and Unisa.
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