A characterization of OOA tools

Despite unification of tools supporting object oriented analysis (OOA) there is still a variety of tools making it hard to select one of them for a given environment. Clearly, if one is willing to apply a certain favorite OOA method, the choice would be restricted to tools supporting that method. However, there are usually several such tools and no clear criteria for selecting between them without extensive experimentation. But this, in general, is impossible due to time restrictions. The paper deals with the selection problem and poses a set of OOA tool characteristics that can be used for tool description and thus form a base for an efficient tool comparison. In order to show how this set of characteristics may be applied, we give, as an example, a characterization of OMTool.