Enterprise architect vs Borland Caliber

[sm1234]

I am trying to evaluate Enterprise Architect vs Borland's Caliber RM tool to make a decision for my team. I have downloaded EA and am trying to get my requirements which are in the form of Use Case word documents into the tool. It does not seem to be very easy to do this in EA. User Guide just talks about being able to import a CSV file. But maybe I am not very familiar with EA yet. Also, I have used Mercury Test Director in the past and just love it. The test capabilities in EA seem a little less user-friendly than Test Director. Also in TD, I can create test cycles and copy tests for 1 cycle of exceution and repeat in subsequent cycles. Is this feature available in EA?

I was wondering if any of you were evaluating EA against Caliber and Test director and what your opinion is on the ease of use aspect of EA vs Caliber and TD.

Thanks.

[Hugo]

Hi

Ive not looked at Caliber but will do.

We use TestDirector too and this is our centralized, rich data store for testing and defects too.

EA can in theory interface to external systems like this, but perhaps Sparx should consider making this a simple setu option or add-in that takes effort out.

H

[bioform]

BIG diff between Borland Caliber and EA...

EA is a UML modeling tool that will support RM, but Claiber is JUST an RM tool, that has VERY VERY poor support for linking to Borland Together (there UML tool) - it only supports static links (e.g., launch Together, link to requirement... requirment changes, etc.... your lost...)

Doing RM in EA requires you to do some thinking up front... they have a good whitepaper that will help...

I am currently using EA's Requirement Object for the High Level functional requirements (Supports a special requirement object type of Features).

I trace Feature (EA special Req. Object) to Requirement (EA Req. Object), then Requirements (here to called "External" requirements) to Use Cases, where I define the "Internal" or derived requirements.

My use cases then have "Realize" traces:

1. Upward to Features/External Requirements
2.  Horizontally to  Business Domain Classes
3. Horizontally  to User Interfaces
4. Horizontally to Test Cases
5. Downward to Components

Each of these objects: Use Cases, BD Classesm and UI contain the derived (internal) requirements, such as UI to be supported (logical UIs not the actual design/implementation choice), Business Rules (required fields, minimum data entry for record creation, validation checks, etc.), etc.

I used Caliber RM with Together for 6 months, and IMO EA is SO much more powerful... and of course since your requirements are contained IN the model!!! Wow, can you say simple to manage and understand the requirement context, check for implementation coverage, perform impact analysis, etc.

The next part for me is integrating testing more fully using it's features....

Hope this helps!

Questions contact me at [email protected]

The Use Cases, User Interfaces,