Any good IT consulting firms using EA?

[lipmanc]

We have been using EA for a few months for analysis and design and will be outsourcing the technical design and development.  One of our objectives is for our EA models to be our system bible into the future.

Has anyone had success with maintaining the models well into production without the developers using EA?  If so, can you share your experience and lessons learned?

Assuming that development via EA is going to help us achive our objective (of keeping our models alive), can anyone recommend IT consulting firms (preferably in the east cost; New Jerseyish would be ideal) that have demonstrated experience with EA?  If this goes beyong the scope of this forum, please e-mail me at [email protected].

[mikewhit]

One of the downsides of the rapid update cycle of EA is that using it for long-term production work using in-house and third-party resources, risks some critical factor breaking in a new build, changing its functionality slightly, changing its COM/OLE interface, or at least its UI.

In which case, tried and tested automated systems or documentation generators (for example) might suddenly stop working or produce different results.

As a result it might be advisable not to roll out new versions of EA until they have been regression tested against existing work - as I am sure you would anyway !

This is not meant to denigrate EA, but just noting comments made on this forum about some features occasionally changing subtly on a new release: upgrade being essential due to a blocking bugfix !

If making heavy use of automation, it might be worth writing simple proof-of-concept apps which verify the operations used, for regression purposes.

Perhaps existing users of automation / documentation might comment to correct me here ...