The mysteries of Roadmaps ... ?

[matthew.james]

I'd appreciate advice /assistance from anybody with experience using the Roadmap diagram overlays ...

- How can I control the starting point of the Roadmap.  I'm looking to use years and start the roadmap half way through the year, but no matter what I do it shows the entire year (eg starts at 1/1/2018 even if I specify a start date of July 1/7/2018)
- I have swimlanes as well as the roadmap overlay, which causes the actual timeline to start about 5 cm in from the left border rather than right at the left border of the diagram, this leaves a large chunk of dead space at the left. How can I get rid of the dead space?
- How can I get rid of the "Unit" label in the timeline (Unit: Years)?
- How does the magic for the "Use legend for phase colors" work?  It requires "Apply auto color" setting in the Legend, which in every other diagram links the Legend colours to the shape via property values, but with roadmaps it seems to be independent of element properties.  What controls the positioning of the phase splits and where are they stored?  I can drag them to anything I like so I assume they are not linked to any element properties?  Can they be ... ?

Thanks in advance

[matthew.james]

Further to this ...

- If I change the tick spacing using the slider then the elements 'stretch' or 'compress' to maintain the temporal relationship. Nice.
- However if I change the start date then only the timeline is updated, so in effect the elements are time shifted, e.g. when I go to update the roadmap in a years time and 'fast forward' a year I can update the timeline but then I have to manually shift all the elements ... ?

- Also the "Hide/Show Roadmap Segments" appears to be broken.  I can go in to individual elements and turn off specific phases *but* if I then change the tick spacing all of those phases get turned back on again for all elements.
- And worse, if I then go in and turn the phases back off again, the split of the remaining phases is reset and needs to be manually fixed

Beginning to wonder if this view is workable or even usable ...

[Geert Bellekens]

Matthew,

The roadmap diagram stuff is fairly recent and what I like to call a "sales feature".
It's only true purpose is to allow the sales people to say "Look, we do Roadmap diagrams as well", but it hasn't been thoroughly designed and tested.
It probably only works well for the use case: "demonstrate the feature to a potential client"

As with many of these exotic features in EA (testing, debugging, project management, instant chat, email,...) there are most often better tools on the market for such tasks.

EA is really good as a general purpose modelling tool, and to generate development artifacts (code, database definitions, XSD) and documentation, but outside of that scope I'm not sure it is the best tool for the job.

Geert

[qwerty]

Sigh. If only they once would realize that and concentrate on their real values.

q.

[Sunshine]

Whilst it is possible to create roadmaps in Sparx EA its labour intensive as you are finding out.
The only reason I use Sparx EA to create roadmaps is that I've got to create MS word document with all the details behind. Using the document generation feature saves me time but creating the roadmaps is less than ideal.
Others in my organisation use Visio which is no better.
I did try MS Project a while back but keeping the names of work packages in synch with a MS word doc was too painful.

[qwerty]

Speaking of MS Project (argh!) I used faces which is Python based and just genius. Interestingly those Mickeysoft "products" still dominate the market though they are bloated and .... cut myself, rant-mode disabled.

q.

[matthew.james]

The roadmap diagram stuff is fairly recent and what I like to call a "sales feature".
...
It probably only works well for the use case: "demonstrate the feature to a potential client"

I must admit that I was kind of expecting that to be the case 
I thought it was worth a try as it *could* have been a good fit for some work I need to do, being linked into the overall model.  I was hoping that perhaps I was just missing something and that it wasn't just poorly thought out and broken ... oh well