I'm working for a client who is shooting for CMMI3 accreditation. As a result we have to produce reams of documents that nobody reads, to get a tick in the box to pass through the various gateways in the process.
I dislike producing documents as much as the next person, but if I have to do it then I want to generate them from the model. Then I can get on with the real business of software design.
Here's an example. A document needs to have a list of stakeholders, a business context, some business process models, and a list of requirements. In between these is some boilerplate text that rarely changes. Each of these sections needs a different EA template, and I can't generate the master document at all.
As far as I can see, there doesn't seem to be any way to produce multiple sections in a document generated by EA, without generating all the subsections individually and then stitching them together in a master document by hand afterwards. At first I though that Virtual Documents might be the answer, but you can only specify a single template for the whole virtual document at generation time. If you could associate the template at the package level in the virtual document, it would at least be an improvement. Some kind of conditional or filter processing would be good too.
The current template editor only allows you to iterate over the model once. This is too restrictive unless your document happens to have the same structure as your model. As the model is where the real value of EA lies, I wouldn't want to bend the model out of shape just to fit the documentation...
Has anyone else experienced this problem, and are there any work-arounds? In an ideal world, I want to be able to set up and save some combination of templates, generation options, and target file in a virtual document as part of my project. Once that is done, I could regenerate the document whenever the model changed.
