RAS setup for an enterprisee

[maxb]

Hi
I am trying to get the understanding of how I can use RAS and how the setup should look like

We have 10 departments responsible for different applications, and off course departments have interdependencies of different kind.

We use Prolaboarate for review and communication with stakeholders, which is working well.
We have one shared repository today, and suffer to secure quality of our current architecture (baseline)

Our expectation is that a department shall be able to create alternative solutions and collaborate around them in prolaborate

When ready the selected solution shall be pushed into current architecture

I am unsure of how many repositorys I should have and how to structure the RAS repository.

IF anyone has ideas or like to team up and discuss I apreciate that very much.

I have watch the resources on youtube that I have found
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRyi2nuynZ4
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB12uLQxqtuX7kLiBGES6PsoY1Nw_3F1z

And read most of the sparxsystems documentation
https://sparxsystems.com/enterprise_architect_user_guide/16.1/modeling_fundamentals/reuseable_asset_service.html

[Geert Bellekens]

A workflow like that will be very difficult to manage using RAS.

You might want to look into https://www.eateamworks.com/portfoliomanager/
That is an add-in that supports this type of workflow.

Geert

[maxb]

A workflow like that will be very difficult to manage using RAS.

You might want to look into https://www.eateamworks.com/portfoliomanager/
That is an add-in that supports this type of workflow.

Geert

We have evaluted Portfoliomanager as well as Lemontree, and is now investigating RAS.

If you even if the workflow is complicated with RAS as you wrote, how would you imagine a good setup?

[Geert Bellekens]

The main problem you will face with type of workflow is the merge.

How do you merge a a changed architecture back to the baseline?
RAS will not be helpful with the merging process. That is going to be a manual thing, because you only want to merge the new changes tot he baseline, and make you sure you don't overwrite previous changes.

Especially with a lot of projects going on in parallel, you'll have a hard time managing it all. (that's why tools such as Portfolio manager exist)

The way it could work using RAS is to have different repositories for each project, and one repo for the baseline.

You upload the baseline to RAS, and download a copy of the baseline in the new project repository.
Then when the project is finished, you'll have to export the relevant part (as xmi) and merge it back to the baseline.
Then upload the new version of the baseline to the RAS.

There is very limited support for merging model content in EA, so this will be a very costly and very laborous process.
You couldn't pay me enough to do this type of work

In my opinion this is bound to fail.
I've seen many organisations setup a system like this (with or without RAS) and they all start out with good intentions.
But then after a few years, projects get finished, but never merged into the baseline, the baseline starts to get out of date, etc...

Geert

[maxb]

I agree with you Geert,

But my understanding is that Lemontree and Portfolio manager have a very little share of the EA user community, and if soo they must be ether small or found another solution for handling the baseline.

So conclusion
With RAS I will need a number of repositorys to allow alternative designs, and to collaborate all of this repositorys needs to be integrated to Prolaborate.
As RAS have a limited abity to support the Merge process, the merge will be painfull and require a group of people working with this more or less as a full time jobb.


BR Max