Finally, we come to validation. Validation is too often overlooked as a job that falls on the design side of the fence. However, validation is essential to any model to ensure that it matches the design itself.When it comes to large-scale systems, the design changes also become larger scale. As such, one can not afford to spend time both on updating the model to match the changes as well as revalidating the entire system. This drives the need for the engineering software to support many methods of validation that are easily compared against previous validations and engineering baselines.
eXpress' solution to the validation problem is multi-faceted. First, keeping the engineer on track throughout their change process is done through an integrated error-checker. This helps notify the engineer immediately of definition problems before time is wasted solving problems that show up on dependent layers of information. Second, eXpress provides the most extensive reporting available. Reports have subreports, which have subreports, etc. This allows data drill-down into any aspect of the design.
It is the most subtle of restrictions in a tool that make it less scalability. Unfortunately for many, these restrictions are only found after significant investment into a particular tool or methodology. As a result, thorough research and a proven track-record is critical in tool selection. The superficial features that are inherent to any group of tools that attempt to solve a problem are not the ones that will determine its ultimate success.