Bobby
I have to violently agree with you.
I am delivering fantastic results working with corporate customers, using EA. Knocking their socks off.
I sure as heck don't tell them 'Here's a great UML tool'.
I tell them 'Don't even think of UML. Put UML completely out of your mind. This Sparx EA thing is just a MUCH better Visio than Visio. It does the things you wish Visio would do. We're only going to be using one percent of EA's full capability. And the way we're going to use it is just dead simple."
Customers respond to this message. I'm doing simple things that deliver major understanding to them, and they get a repository that is quite easy to learn and use.
The trick is I am not just showing them 'what to do' -- I show them 'what to ignore' and 'don't do that' and 'don't do it that way, do it this way'.
They catch on quickly.
My wish list for EA going forward would be to have much better focus on the small usability things including printing and documentation. This sort of stuff should be trivial for the EA developers.
I'm amazed by the 'full round trip model driven architecture reverse engineering' technology that the Sparx developers have implemented. It's robust. It works. It's not simple. Hats off to Sparx. To my simple mind, it's rocket science.
And I hope I never have to use any of it.
The business model for EA doing architecture management and planning in the corporate sector is easy.
It's cheap. It makes the diagrams and information in the repository freely available to everyone in the organisation who needs to see them via a variety of means. You don't have to buy another license to see the models -- as with so many other tool sets.
Other tools don't even support simple 'copy and paste' from a diagram into a MS Word document.
I could go on, but I won't.
Let's continue this conversation, however. More later.
Jon McLeod
www.enterprisearchitects.comHi everyone,
Let me start off by saying that EA is a great tool.
But the fact is that while most of us feel comfortable with UML, profiles, cardinality and documentation templates, most organizations are still using Visio, Word and Excel. These tools provide no functionality for traceability or sophisticated robustness and validation features, but they are easy to use.
EA has come a long way but unfortunately it seems like visio and word are still winning. Why do I care? I care because I would like to see more and more organizations adopt robust design practices. I would like to propose that we start a new message board, say "Mainstreaming EA" (or whatever, I don't care about the name) which focuses only on discussing features that will help us make EA mainstream.
Here are a few examples:
- Allow multiple levels of bullets and numbering within the notes field
- Improve EA help and tutorials by having less technical people write these
- Improve the diff and compare feature. The current view is very technical. Why shouldn't a BA be able to use this feature and get an understanding of what has changed in the model?
- The document template editor is great but proper documentation is needed. I had to spend so much time learning about its nuances. It is not for the faint of heart.
- Create extensions to UML to allow users to create Logical models. Right now even a logical view has to be extremely robust. Users end up going back to Visio and they continue using it through the detailed design phases of the project. Why can't EA allow users to include meaningless visual objects in the models only for the purpose of documentation. EA can always throw out a warning that the logical model is not robust and should not be used for more detailed design. Let users choose the level of robustness in some models.
I have to make an extreme statement, I believe very few people besides the techies like us care about UML, but in most organizations technology is considered an expense and not a strategic revenue generating department. So why don't we build tools that can provide value not only to techies but can show value to business users. Great looking EA models in user presentations, and accurate documentation right from the tool would be great start. (I know we can do it in EA, but look at the effort)
Even with all the improvements over the last one year EA remains a techy tool. Just throwing it out there. We can judge by the responses to this post whether these views are in minority or together we can contribute ideas to make EA a more "mainstream" application.
Thank you.
Regards,
Bobby
