Messages

1

Suggestions and Requests / Re: Links to external EAP projects

« on: October 02, 2006, 08:00:52 am »

Hello,

Thank you for your post.  No, you are not the only one with this question.  I have a similar question that I posted yesterday.

Have you received any replies so far or figured out an effective method?

Regards,
Bobby

2

General Board / Re: EA use for a large Corporate Archietcture proj

« on: October 03, 2006, 07:20:27 pm »

Hello,

Thank you everyone for sharing your experiences.  I have started looking more through the forum for large projects and have found more queries and interesting insights into the topic of large projects.  There are no concrete numbers.  So far I have loaded about 500 different elements in various diagrams in a project and the load time still about 3 seconds.  The next step in the testing is to install VSS in the test environment.

There is a commonly requested feature in this forum – Referencing elements from other projects.  I believe this will be a useful feature.

A sample scenario - an Activity diagram in Project B makes references to actors and enterprise data entities in Project A.  These are external references, and the Project B team only has view permission to Project A elements.  When Project B is loaded, the user gets a msgbox like “Would you like to scan for any updates to external references?”.  If the user clicks “Yes” they see a list of everything that has changed in Project A actors and enterprise data entities since the last time Project B was saved.  User is then given option to update the reference.  Of course this will only work well with version control.  

Benefits:
-
Organizations can break down their enterprise scale projects into smaller parts,
-
Reduced clutter in Project Explorer,
-
Simplified security structure required.

What are your thoughts on this?  Is this feature expected in EA in near future?

Thank you again.
Bobby

3

General Board / EA use for a large Corporate Archietcture project

« on: October 01, 2006, 03:07:47 pm »

Hello EA users,

Our organization is going through a corporate optimization effort and we are documenting our business processes, business goals, infrastructure, data entities, system designs (from Analysis models down to detailed designs for new systems).

It is my responsibility to figure out a mechanism to store all of this information in an easily accessible and referenceable manner.  Tools like Troux (http://www.troux.com) cost a lot and are not necessarily the best solution.  I like EA and here is what I plan to do:

Create one EA project with two root level models - Corporate and Projects.  Corporate root model contains corporate wide business processes, business goals, data entities, actors etc under an easy to navigate tree structure.  Only few senior company members will have modify access to this.

The Projects root model has project sub-packages i.e. a package for each project or system.  Each project will then contains its various models like Business, Domain, Class etc.  Individual project teams will have modify access to specific projects.

This should allow our company to establish relationships between Corporate information (roles, data entities, business goals, processes etc) and individual projects under the Projects root model.

So we should be able to do impact analysis such as - Project A implements Use Cases H and P; which support Business Processes B, D and G; which are carried out by Actors J and K; and reference corporate data entities F and L; and satisfy corporate business goals A through D.  This in essence will allow us to use EA for Corporate wide Architecture efforts.

Questions:

-- If you have used EA in a similar fashion, what was your experience?
-- Since EA cannot reference models across Projects, all information (Corporate and Projects) will need to be kept in one EA project.  This project will grow very large very quickly.  What is the largest project size anyone has implemented?  I am hoping that storing the project in a SQL server DB should allow us to grow it significantly without seeing degradation in performance.  Am I on the right track?
-- Needless to say this project will require fine grained security, so that a developer cannot modify the corporate goals.  What was your experience with EA security?

Does anyone have any ideas on what EA's limitations are on such a large project?

Any help/information you can provide is appreciated.  Thanks.

Bobby

4

General Board / Re: EA inter-project referencing

« on: October 03, 2006, 07:25:26 pm »

Thank you for your reply.  Could I request you to look at my second post under the following heading “EA use for a large Corporate Archietcture project”.  That should have been spelt Architecture.

Any thoughts you can share on this related post are appreciated.

Bobby

5

General Board / EA inter-project referencing

« on: October 02, 2006, 10:55:13 am »

Hello everyone,

1.  Is it possible to reference elements in one project from another project?  This is only to establish relationships between elements across projects.

2.  If there is a very large project, and it is stored in the database, when I load the project into EA will it load the entire project into my computer memory or will it keep it in the database until it is requested?

Any help or information you can provide will be extremely helpful.

Regards,
Bobby