Messages

421

General Board / Re: Reusing a Use Case, generic or template?

« on: June 05, 2018, 07:50:18 pm »

I only can recommend Bittner/Spence. Use case synthesis is a rather simple thing. But sometimes simple things are harder to understand than complex ones. IT people tend to analyze things and dissect them once they start with it. But UCs are just the other way around. I always see the same sort of questions (yes, I had them too in the beginning when working with UCs). The only remedy is to understand what UCs are good for. It's like teaching people Zen. So simple. So difficult.

q.

What q. said.  Really good and easy book.

422

General Board / Re: Importing Visio via MDG Add-in - how to improve import quality?

« on: June 02, 2018, 12:53:39 am »

Learning how to model for the first time using EA is a bit like learning to drive by starting with an 18 wheel truck.  I usually recommend that people get the hang of modeling using the free Archi tool (www.archimatetool.com) and then come over to EA once the basic principles are understood. You can even export your models from Archi and import them into EA when you are ready.  Clearly that works best when using Archimate, but it has really helped me help people get over the mental barrier between diagramming and modeling.

My experience is that if the modeler understands the notation and methodology, using the tool is not a challenge.  Most of the screw-ups are because the modelers try to do something the notation was never designed to do.  My experience is that heavy investment in training for notation (UML, Archimate, BPMN... pick your poison) and in methodology (what an artifact is and how it should be used) pays back in spades.  Then Sparx, Papyrus, Rational... you can spend an afternoon giving modelers the tool overview and then let them look up details in documentation as needed (usually Google works wonders).

423

Automation Interface, Add-Ins and Tools / Re: Oracle Reverse Engineer

« on: May 30, 2018, 06:34:07 pm »

Yes, I know that EA can't RE a DDL. Unfortunately there's no emphasis for irony/sarcasm in texts.

q.

I didn't know that!  Not even the higher cost versions?  Don't open source tools like MySQLWorkbench do that already?  Me sees a feature request lurking somewhere......

424

Automation Interface, Add-Ins and Tools / Re: Oracle Reverse Engineer

« on: May 29, 2018, 10:10:38 pm »

I'm not an Oracle expert but any RDBMS should spit out the schema DDL code as a text file on request.  Then just run the DDL in EA to recreate the schema as a physical data model?

425

General Board / Re: Importing Visio via MDG Add-in - how to improve import quality?

« on: May 24, 2018, 11:34:26 am »

Hello Casey,
because of Visio, what you have is artwork, not artifacts.  No model consistency or metadata that you can really use.  You will have to clean up the artwork anyways before you can do anything useful with it, and the easiest/fastest/most accurate way to do it is right at import into EA.  My 2c is to bite the bullet and manually generate useful artifacts in EA using the artwork you have in Visio. 

426

General Board / Re: Step by step Guide

« on: May 19, 2018, 12:34:50 pm »

Hello,
how you use EA to document requirements depends mostly on how you are going to use the requirements.  There are several good ways to do this...
If you are going to use the requirements to drive UML based software design or system architecture, then the book "Applying use cases" by G. Schneider and J. Winters is more than enough to get you on your way.  It's a very easy read.  Then it will be obvious what to do in EA.
Good luck!

427

Suggestions and Requests / Re: Could Sparx Systems be more Agile in their delivery?

« on: April 26, 2018, 07:28:43 pm »

Seems like Release 14 is late, buggy and nobody really asked for it, so it seems to me like it's as Agile as you can get!!!


..... sorry it's been a long nasty week, I'll see myself out...... 

428

Suggestions and Requests / Re: Low code development

« on: April 26, 2018, 07:26:20 pm »

BPMN is managed by OMG but is not UML... maybe one day OMG will improve the sticky mess of Activity Diagrams by making them more BPMN-like... but for now it's entirely appropriate that BPMN is a small add-on to EA as a simple profile, like ERD data modeling etc.  My 2c

429

General Board / Re: Aris vs EA for Process Modelling

« on: April 26, 2018, 06:54:23 pm »

Hi Paolo where can I learn more about this clarification service? Sounds interesting!

So I would focus efforts on getting maximum clarity on what your client wants to achieve and how they want to achieve it - then the tool choice should be straightforward.

Yeah... Good luck with that.

/Uffe

Our EA Organisation now offers a "Clarification Service" to help users agree what they are talking about.  It's based on our Onto-Terminological Modelling and the few User Departments that have used it have been very pleased with the results.

Paolo

430

Bugs and Issues / Re: Window aliasing on Windows 10 external monitor + mouse control issues

« on: April 26, 2018, 03:24:18 pm »

Thanks Simon!
I'm interested to learn more about ways to mitigate this, especially the mouse mistaking the shadow for the actual window.
I'm running same resolution on Notebook and monitor (1920x1080 using DisplayPort) and I'm getting the shadow regardless of resolution setting or video input (VGA D-Sub, HDMI, DisplayPort).
My previous Windows 10 image on exactly same hardware did not have this problem (I had to reimage last week due to registry corruption)
Any more ideas I could try?

431

Bugs and Issues / Window aliasing on Windows 10 external monitor + mouse control issues

« on: April 26, 2018, 12:53:57 pm »

I have a weird issue on Sparx EA 1310 on Windows 10.
I often run workshops with the diagram in question on an external monitor or projector, and the EA main window with the project explorer, tool box etc. on my notebook screen.
Whenever I am connected to an external monitor or projector, an alias (shadow) appears near the the  window of EA main body and of the diagram; and the mouse sometimes works only on the alias, or only on the actual window.  Essentially I lose mouse control.  This issue occurs only with EA; none of my other programs show this behavior.  I have a screen capture but seems like the 'attach image' function is not working....

Can anyone recommend an EA setting or a Win10 setting that can remove this issue?  It's very disruptive (I have 10 people in a room waiting for me to goof around with the mouse  jumping from one window to its alias.....)  thanks!

432

General Board / Re: Aris vs EA for Process Modelling

« on: April 26, 2018, 12:30:09 pm »

Hi Uffe - welcome to use my analogy!

Re. the discussion for tool choice, you can follow roughly the steps you would for an application fit-gap analysis in an enterprise architecture engagement.  It really is essentially the same thing. 

There are good methodologies explaining how to do this and one of them - TOGAF - is freely available (you can see all of it on the Open Group website).  Yes it can be done!

433

General Board / Re: Aris vs EA for Process Modelling

« on: April 25, 2018, 10:39:59 am »

Hello Ian
I think it would boil down to what methodology your client wants to follow and what they want to get from their process models.
We had similar discussions in my company and honestly sometimes it felt like people arguing whether baseball bats or tennis rackets were the best tool... the answer of course depends on what game are we playing?  (In that specific case it turned out that we wanted to play basketball, which made the 'tool war' argument even more ridiculous). 
So I would focus efforts on getting maximum clarity on what your client wants to achieve and how they want to achieve it - then the tool choice should be straightforward.

434

Bugs and Issues / Re: EA using Wine and ODBC

« on: April 21, 2018, 12:50:48 pm »

I think EA should be cross-platform, what with Win10 being a kludgy mess and Microsoft reorganization moving away from OS-centric to service centric. 

I am concerned that EA is evolving into a more and more complex tool that offers features I don't need instead of a bug-free, highly reliable, highly usable, portable implementation of UML standard.  I can't justify spending any money on EA14 license.   

Sparx folks, if you are listening, how about focusing on bug elimination, x-platform, usability and user interface enhancements instead of adding more and more features?  Plenty of suggestions about these in the user forum!  Thanks!

435

Suggestions and Requests / Re: Master data models from information flows

« on: April 06, 2018, 11:23:13 pm »

Yes Paolo I got the names mixed up.  Gotta stop posting before my 2nd cup of coffee in the morning.  Original post edited with correct name (Mats).