Sparx Systems Forum
Enterprise Architect => General Board => Topic started by: steen.jensen on December 18, 2020, 10:13:21 pm
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https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-24U1NXFZ&ct=201216&st=sb
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That is such nonsense. >:(
I have worked with some of those tools, and they generally can't even do half of what EA can.
But maybe Sparx stopped sponsoring the Gartner events? ???
Geert
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Indeed I've evaluated a lot of the magic quadrant tools and whilst occasionally they have features i wish Sparx EA had most of the time I find too many weaknesses to justify any possibility of using for real world work. They are often overpriced and lack graphical capability or ability to scale due bad choices in repository technology. Similarly Gartner themselves are over priced and under deliver on providing advice and guidance. I tend to use the others rather than rely on the misinformation provided by Gartner. I honestly don't understand how Gartner continue as a business with the waffle and tripe they produce.
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Who cares? Anyone of you selling EA licenses?
q.
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Who cares? Anyone of you selling EA licenses?
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I care. Not really because of the licenses I sell, but because EA is my livelihood.
More users => more consulting demand => more work for me.
Geert
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Who cares? Anyone of you selling EA licenses?
q.
Clearly you don't.
To be honest I'm sick and tired of fake news and misinformation
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Where's the fake news then? Only Gartner's thruth is Gartner's truth. Anyone asked for the reason for dropping EA as EA tool?
q.
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Sorry, i didn't want to upset you, just point out that Gartner removed Sparx EA because Sparx Systems didnt want to participate in the report for unknown resoning. :'(
Im the only guy that defend Sparx EA in my organisation....
Most middle manager whant a tool that is easy & more visible solution and they read stuff like Gartner & Forester at breakfast.
We are trying with Pro CLoud Server & Prolaborate, but the operating & maintance of this setup is more costly now compare when we selected the original Sparx EA setup for about 4 years ago.
Time will se if I can keep this product or we have to check for alternativs in the feature.
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That's an interesting discussion.
In my opinion Sparx is too complex to use for large companies (Gartner's target audience). Multinationals want cheap generic employees doing cheap generic work as cheaply as possible, and just good enough to get by (especially in IT). To use EA to anywhere near its capabilities you need to REALLY understand UML AND SQL (for model queries) AND its API.
If you are a professional, Sparx is a great (maybe the best) tool. It's just that it's not part of Gartner's target audience.
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That's my opinion too, Richard. @steen: nobody is upset. It's just a discussion like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv5iEK-IEzw (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv5iEK-IEzw)
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It seems punitive. I think it's unfortunate. American MBA's are conditioned to use this kind of report in making business decisions.
Gartner's always had a "niche" or "visionary" quadrant for smaller companies.
A truly independent study wouldn't require the vendor's participation.
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Ring. Hat. Toss.
In my opinion Sparx is too complex to use for large companies (Gartner's target audience). Multinationals want cheap generic employees doing cheap generic work as cheaply as possible, and just good enough to get by (especially in IT). To use EA to anywhere near its capabilities you need to REALLY understand UML AND SQL (for model queries) AND its API.
If you are a professional, Sparx is a great (maybe the best) tool. It's just that it's not part of Gartner's target audience.
See, now that's interesting. I see it a little differently.
In my view EA is an enthusiast's tool -- not a professional's. In order to make good use of EA you need someone in the organization who knows the ins and outs of the tool. It's not enough to know the modelling language.
EA is a toolkit. It's a rag-bag of features that don't work well together, and which sometimes are different attempts to implement the same functionality. Unless you intend to work only within the tool, it comes with nothing to help you in any given usage scenario: no usable project setups, model structures, or document templates. What's there is all demo-level stuff. On the IT side of things, EA integrates poorly and clunkily. And even the extension mechanisms are limited: you can access the most basic functions through the API, but only a very small number of the high-level ones.
Navigating this quagmire requires deep insight, which must either be built up within the organization, or purchased from a third party. All of this makes EA a far more expensive tool to use than the purchase price would suggest.
As to this Gartner stuff, I don't think it's necessarily a big deal in and of itself. It's just marketing. If Sparx have taken the positive decision not to cooperate with Gartner for this report, that can be simply because they haven't see enough return on that in previous years.
But I am concerned for EA's future.
To some extent, the failure of EA is the failure of UML: it promised effective communication in all things software, but very quickly turned its back on all real world issues involved in software development and instead disappeared up its own backside, issuing new versions of the language standard with ever more complex syntax and semantics, but making no attempt at implementing profiles for any architectural patterns, design principles, or even source code languages. So if you take the trouble of teaching all stakeholders a completely alien symbolic language, you can then use it to express... nothing that actually matches the reality you encounter at any stage of the software development process.
The failure in both cases is one of attitude. Instead of facing inwards and trying to come up with more clever bits to bolt on, there needs to be a 180o shift of focus outwards to what the tool is actually used for. No one is ever going to do their project planning in EA, but they will use it to draw UML diagrams, and those diagrams need to be made easily available in other contexts.
I firmly believe that what EA needs is not yet more superficial features spread like manure across a weedy field. What it needs is, at the front end, packaging of sets of features for different real-world scenarios, with profiles, document templates, project structures, user security roles, version control setup, integrations with other tools, and locking off of extraneous features. At the back end, it needs optimization in the data layer, a complete overhaul of the IT integration principles and a substantially expanded API.
I also believe that we the community could help Sparx in this. We have the expertise in using this tool in the wild; Sparx don't. They don't supply their own consultants, and internally, they only develop one piece of software so even if they do eat their own dog food it's only one flavour of one brand.
So we could actually help in prioritizing what improvements to make and what features to focus on for a given goal, eg reducing cost of adoption in mid-to-large organizations. But that would of course also require a higher level of community commitment from Sparx.
Well, that's what I think anyway.
/Uffe
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Well spoken. The forest is listening patiently.
Sarcasm aside, I'm completely with you. Except that I don't think Sparx can be helped in any way. How many good will attempts have been started? And where does Sparx steer? Yesterday we stood in front of a deep ravine. Today we're a step further.
I'm no longer willing to pay for a product that gets worse every year.
q.
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Hi All,
After reviewing the inclusion criteria for the 2020 Magic Quadrant we found that the Performance and Tools Market Focus sections are straightforward and clearly met by Sparx Systems. However, the section entitled Market Momentum, which requires Sparx to divulge customer information is in violation of both our ethical and our privacy standards. While we have clearly met the underlying condition of entry, we will not violate our customer's right to privacy or act contrary to our own standards. Anonymous statistics concerning license sales were insufficient for the Gartner Research team, so we unfortunately had to bow out of this year's MQ.
Thank you all for your continued support.
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Hi All,
After reviewing the inclusion criteria for the 2020 Magic Quadrant we found that the Performance and Tools Market Focus sections are straightforward and clearly met by Sparx Systems. However, the section entitled Market Momentum, which requires Sparx to divulge customer information is in violation of both our ethical and our privacy standards. While we have clearly met the underlying condition of entry, we will not violate our customer's right to privacy or act contrary to our own standards. Anonymous statistics concerning license sales were insufficient for the Gartner Research team, so we unfortunately had to bow out of this year's MQ.
Thank you all for your continued support.
Well done Spark Systems on sticking to your guns on privacy ethics and standards as well as the law.
Interesting if that is true it implies the other tool vendors by the fact they are on the MQ have supplied customer details in which case it begs the question if they asked permission. Maybe its hidden in the licensing agreement. If those vendors failed to seek permission from their customers then in some countries they will have violated the privacy laws. Europe springs to mind with GDPR and a number of other countries with privacy laws such as UK, Australia and New Zealand are others. I wonder if anyone will raise this for investigation and follow up with legislative action if the laws have been breached. Sounds like it could keep a few lawyers busy for a while [size=78%];)[/size]
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Unfortunately I'm not surprised by Gartner's approach and well done Sparx for sticking to your guns
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Ring. Hat. Toss.
See, now that's interesting. I see it a little differently.
In my view EA is an enthusiast's tool -- not a professional's. In order to make good use of EA you need someone in the organization who knows the ins and outs of the tool. It's not enough to know the modelling language.
EA is a toolkit. It's a rag-bag of features that don't work well together, and which sometimes are different attempts to implement the same functionality. Unless you intend to work only within the tool, it comes with nothing to help you in any given usage scenario: no usable project setups, model structures, or document templates. What's there is all demo-level stuff. On the IT side of things, EA integrates poorly and clunkily. And even the extension mechanisms are limited: you can access the most basic functions through the API, but only a very small number of the high-level ones.
Navigating this quagmire requires deep insight, which must either be built up within the organization, or purchased from a third party. All of this makes EA a far more expensive tool to use than the purchase price would suggest.
......
What he said. But in my opinion, i think the first step in making EA less of everything above (to those outside Sparx) and more like the tool Sparx thinks it is, requires no code changes, and while it is work, is pretty simple in concept.
Publish a user manual.
All we have now is documentation, which is not the same thing at all.
Also it is mostly auto-generated documentation - I know, i actually tried to read it. It is 10x the size of the source, due to pointless repetition. Worse, the current documentation is useless unless you know what you are looking for, and why you need it, which is also the opposite of documentation. I often find myself in bait-n-switch circular link references which only cost me time and tell me nothing. So i have to come here, go to google, or flail around aimlessly in a multiplicity of options pages, which then send me back to the bait-n-switch....
Anything else, no, everything else, becomes easier for everybody with a manual, because EA will then be used by everybody in approximately the same way, which is also the as it was designed to be used. Hard coded 'Magic Number' ENUMS (such as Project Task/Issue status fields) should then make sense, as the reason for them, and the workflow they automate is clear. Bugs and feature requests are on point and in context, feature overlap is explained, or at least mitigated. Example documents and templates can be made useful out of the box, Less duct-taping hacks together to make primitives/out of the box things work the way you think they should, rather than the expected usage. Whitepapers are just documents laying out a particularly clever hack, and do not count as manuals IMHO.
Sparx has to do this. All the community can do without this is reverse engineer intent, or overlay/hack in out interpretation of intent.
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Not once since V6 I had the feeling that Sparx has any interest in it's users. Only market shares seem to count. That's why they produce mainly stuff for sales persons. (It has been different before that V6! Which is the time from which I goot hooked to EA.)
q.
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What he said. But in my opinion, i think the first step in making EA less of everything above (to those outside Sparx) and more like the tool Sparx thinks it is, requires no code changes, and while it is work, is pretty simple in concept.
Publish a user manual.
https://www.sparxsystems.com/resources/user-guides/15.2/
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Admittedly I haven't looked into those (and I don't think you really made a new version). But the past "manuals" were a good replacement for my non existing hydraulic press. Probably the meaning of "manual" is interpreted differently to what I would mean.
q.
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Maybe not completely what timoc was looking for.
Had a quick look at the scripting document. It's 204 pages in total, of which 190 pages are descriptions of Javascript mathematical functions.
Geert
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Actually I had also a short look into the GUI manual. It was just that usual repetitive "Click-here-click-there". One ton of documentation.
q.
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I also believe that we the community could help Sparx in this. We have the expertise in using this tool in the wild; Sparx don't. They don't supply their own consultants, and internally, they only develop one piece of software so even if they do eat their own dog food it's only one flavour of one brand.
So we could actually help in prioritizing what improvements to make and what features to focus on for a given goal, eg reducing cost of adoption in mid-to-large organizations. But that would of course also require a higher level of community commitment from Sparx.
For the community to help Sparx, Sparx would have to listen to the community and make EA a piece of software that actually can be deployed and used in managed environments. Like actually using %appdata% for something useful. Currently if there is a bug/defect/weakness in a MDG/script/sample/pattern/dictionary you have to download a new version (hopeless if your software licensing is outsourced) and pay your IT services company to repackage and redeploy it.
I gave up developing a MDG that a few organisations were using as it was way too hard. I should just be able stick the files for the MDG on Github and leave the rest to the end user. However to make it work have to know the ins and outs of how every the organisations (mis)manage their PC fleets.
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My view is that you get what you pay for, and EA is great value for its price. I also found the manuals easy to use, they are huge but I just CTRL-F the heck out of the PDF and always find what I need pretty quickly. Also the online version with search function (+ Googling!) works fine for me.
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My view is that you get what you pay for, and EA is great value for its price. I also found the manuals easy to use, they are huge but I just CTRL-F the heck out of the PDF and always find what I need pretty quickly. Also the online version with search function (+ Googling!) works fine for me.
I think most of use agree that EA is the absolute champion when it come to value for price.
Most competitors cost a multitude and often don't even offer half of the functionality.
What frustrates many of us is that it could be so much more. It wouldn't even necessarily be more expensive.
One example is that they could involve the community much more in things like bug reports and feature requests.
Publishing all reported bugs and feature requests, including their status could be one example.
Asking feedback from users when developing new features could be another. Now we often get new features that seem like a good idea, but aren't thought through or tested in real-world scenario's.
These end up in the basket of "sales-features". They look good on shiny paper, but are useless in practice.
Geert
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What Geert said. I could add a lot about bug fixing and documentation but meanwhile think it's just futile.
q.
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Gert has encapsulated our frustration very well!
As Geert has hinted, Sparx has a unique resource in a set of knowledgable, passionate, users who actually want the product to improve and are keen to help.
Paolo