The Promise and the Reality of AD/Cycle

Source: Datamation Published: Nov 1990

In the 1989 & 1990 timeframe analyst George Schussel frequently met with IBM developers to track and understand the promise of the new computer aided software engineering (CASE) technologies that IBM was developing. The umbrella term that IBM used for its CASE approach was AD/Cycle. An interesting standards approach, Schussel was not optimistic about its chance for success because of the complexity it represented. Ultimately AD/Cycle collapsed because of the new distributed client/server approaches that were more practical and cost effective.

The first two paragraphs of this landmark article stated:

IBM‘s AD/Cycle applications development platform is slowly emerging. Whether IBM‘s dream of using multiple vendors and tools will revolutionize software development or collapse under its own weight remains to be seen.

Like any new software project, AD/Cycle is fraught with risk. IBM‘S integrated approach to computer aided software engineering (CASE) promises a dramatic improvement in productivity across the application development life cycle, but much of the technology is unproven and untested. The amount of up-front investment required by users is unknown, but large. Companies may invest millions of dollars in staff, software and hardware, only to find no significant improvement over more conventional development approaches using tools such as relational database managers and fourth-generation languages. But competitors may adopt AD/cycle and achieve significant success, thereby gaining a competitive business advantage.
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