Requirements Analysis

[PaulLuzerne]

Having just purchased EA  I am both impressed  and overwelmed.  I'm at the requirements analysis phase of a new project and I don't yet grasp how I should start making use of EA features.  I recognize that rich documentation can be exported from EA and linked to a word document - this is nice.  At this phase, I presume that I should be using EA for functional requirements,  business use cases, and system use cases.

I have Zicom Mentor and of course the EA example project but these aren't turning on the lightbulb in my head.  What are my resource options?  A rich-example project focusing on requirements analysis would be nice; something that puts it all together.  Are there any upcoming conferences   that might be appropriate.

[Kevin Brennan]

Hi Paul,

First of all, how experienced are you with requirements analysis and/or UML?

[PaulLuzerne]

I have significant experience in requirements analysis with much less experience in UML.  If I weren't using EA I'd developing my analysis documentation as a completely seperate document from the design and implemtation documentation - with EA I'm hoping to centralize all of this.

Of course my UML will not necessarily be to the same quality as someone with more UML experience but I expect to learn and improve as I go - nothing new with that idea.

It seems to me that my question is really one of how to establish an overall framework of the system documentation using the features of EA.  I want to get this framework in place from the beginning so that later phases of the project will integrate without having to reference seperate documentation.

[Kevin Brennan]

Hi Paul,

In that case, yes, you've pretty much got it. What you need to do is to document things like the business use cases and so forth in EA.

My suggestion is to document aspects that EA handles well (like the UML and Custom screens, which can handle UI design) and then output it into RTF files which you can incorporate into a master document.

EA still has some shortcomings as a pure requirements tool but such is life (I'd really love some stronger support for textual elements, as I mostly use it to create documentation that will be read in MS Word form rather than generating code). If you need to make the most readable document possible, you'll find that it still doesn't give you enough control over formatting and layout to be perfect from a requirements analysis perspective, although v5 is much better in this regard than previous versions.