Has ANYONE EVER been successful with EA?

[kimballjohnson]

I have been trying to use EA for three years. In every organization I enter on assignment, someone has a copy of EA and they suggest it to me for building requirements and so forth.

In every instance in three years, we have had to stop using and throw out all the work we did entering data because the report writer sucks so much time that we cannot deliver documentation on time.

I spent nearly a month at Amgen, a huge pharmaceutical company whose documentation requirements are so large, that only something that works Like EA is supposed to could possibly keep up with it.

However I spent two weeks collectng requirements and two weeks trying to create 4 simple rtf templates and 1 hard one.

The stupidest, ugliest, nastiest, most frustrating purposeless, unpleasant little things make it impossible to get anything to work and the result is always to make some rotten compromise with functionality the result.

Those horrible little tags....AARRRGH!

So we had to give up at Amgen - what an account that could have been for Sparx!! It was humiliating not to be able to deliver anything worthy of their consideration after a month's work!!

And no help or sympathy from Sparx!!!

Now I'm in it again because I agreed to use it on another account.

For a week I'm trying to get three simple reports organized.

The way they have it set up the entire arrangement of the EA packages and everything in it has to be pre-organized just for the printing process. No possible deviations!!

And those stupid little tags!!! can't move them, delete them format them, and they must all be numbered. just to enter a new line between them you have to export to word and then import back into EA and if you don't get it right you have to start over.

Then today I'm trying to get a table for displaying contstraints not to print if there are no constraints. So I'm using the template provided and I've been working on it for 4 hours. ONE Simple Little TABLE with three rows in it!!! every thing I try crashes and I have to start over. then it looks Like it's going to work but it only prints out the stupid yellow tags!!! or the elements go away!!! or every thing gets assigned that special style for tags. I've started over on these 20 little adjustments over 200 times this afternoon!

I read the manual, I joined the forums, I tried it and tried it and tried it. In three years, I've not run into anyone who knew even half as much as me about this app.

I've been in this business 30 years and I've used every nasty database, editor, language, platform, tool, device and thingy every made!!

Nothing has every been so totally wasteful of my life as this tool!! And my career is supposed to depend on this crap????

I'm sure they've got some $45 RTF control they bought back in 1993 sitting under that report writer!

So, tell me, has anyone ever got this app to work? or is it just that they buy a bunch of copies and people use if for a cheap visio trick?

I'm dying to know.

Thanks,

Kimball Johnson

[«Midnight»]

Don't know what your problem really is.

While I agree there are serious limitations to the EA report writer, it used to be much worse (in days before the current writer was born).

I've several times whipped together my own report writer via automation. While this involves some serious work, it is certainly well below the amount of effort you describe.

Why not take the time to solve the problem, instead of repeatedly - you use the word "every" several times - abandoning work? Given your wealth of experience across such a broad domain - again I am relying on your claim - this should be well within your capabilities.

And yes, I've been able to make it work.

[AxNut]

Have to agree with Midnight. I've been using EA for close on 5 years now and have been very successful. I've specified and designed several complex systems from nothing to full blown functional specs etc. and been successful every time. When I compare EA to other similar CASE tools, nothing comes close. RTF templates can be frustrating at first but once nailed are fantastic...Requirements management side could be a bit better....

[kimballjohnson]

Well, that's encouraging!

So, regardless if it was worse in the past, or the size of the system you were able to build, or the success with other aspects of the application...

Let me ask some specifics:

Have you ever had any of the specific difficulties that I describe?

In particular, general wierdness when editing the template and difficulties with the tags so that you have to continually save each step and then throw versions away go back to previous versions and start over again and again? If so, how often have you experienced this and how long does it take to discover and memorize all the workarounds?

Do you make extensive modifcations to the documents using the built-in template editor?

Do you have to format your packages and the items in them so that the object model in the editor gets them in the proper order during printout? or do you generalize your templates so that one template prints out any arrangement?

Do you put specific tasks and times in your project plans for this particular area of effort? If so, how long?


Thank you for your help,

[thomaskilian]

Hi,
as always I can't give detailed answers to your questions, but I have also been very successful with EA since several years. Regarding the documentation: my conclusion once was that all this RTF is scrap and I created my own documentation style using TeX. The output simply looks professional and I can create it the wa I like it. Of course you'll be pissed if your customer wants specially formated Word (argh!) documents. But the problem is definitely not EA - it's Microsoft.

[rsteins]

But the problem is definitely not EA - it's Microsoft.

Hmm...
As Microsoft is the defacto standard, the problem should be solved.

[cpns]

One of the reasons I have started using EA is because the document generation is so much better than ARTiSAN which really sucks!

[gwieser]

Hmm...
As Microsoft is the defacto standard, the problem should be solved.

but as there is little to none documentation provided by microsoft the path to solving this problem is well-controlled by them.....

[erixon]

I have experienced some of the "weirdness" that you described when I first got started with the RTF editor. It took some getting used to but once I got it figured out I realized that there are some pretty cool things you can do with it. Yes, there are still annoying limitations. We also have to set up packages in a certain way but as long as you set standards then your reports will come out looking good!

I have gotten very creative with the RTF editor using styles, tables, and a lot of interesting formatting techniques.  

Given the troubles you describe, my recommendation is to always copy the "basic" template and modify it to suit your needs.

We generate several different reports in EA and then run a macro in word to combine them into one final document.

[kimballjohnson]

Well OK Then!

I want to say how grateful I am for all of you who have taken time to give me some hope.

I now realize that this is a major obstacle to adoption of the platform for others as well as myself.

Therefore I am going to solve using a typical manager's techique: I'm going to spread the problem, I mean 'responsibility', around the organization!

For now I'm going to simple use the standard reports - what you see is what you get.

Then we'll look into the things that have been mentioned here like the automation tools, word macros etc.

And as for the problems I have had, I'm just going to declare them to be Vista issues and get on with my life.

Thanks to all of you!

Kimball Johnson

[«Midnight»]

Nice approach,

Remind them that "What you see is all you get" until they are willing to participate (i.e. put resources towards improvements). This will get you a funded business case pretty fast. After all, it they don't need something enough to work (or pay) for it they won't get it.

And as for the problems I have had, I'm just going to declare them to be Vista issues and get on with my life.

But you cannot just blame everything on Vista. For those who are still running XP, you should place the blame on IE 7. For those not using either, blame it on the legacy environment.

David

[Dave_Bullet]

Kim,

I agree with your views on the RTF system within EA.  The editor is stable but RTF generation is flakey and often crashes my EA.

To work around the above, I am currently toying with the following:
1. Use Macros in MS Word to post-process and tidy the documentation
2. Use EA's XMI export then use XSLT to generate the document

For any CASE tool that generates documentation, the organisation needs to decide on whether it would rather have:
a) the prettiest easiest to read documentation that is probably out of date
b) the ugliest documentation that contains one point of current and correct truth.

Most organisations are "conditioned" to a).  Much as we were conditioned to PCs crashing each day under Windows 3.1.  Most organisations won't naturally move to b) as they are lazy.  They will expect and wait for tools to solve everything.  After all, to err is to be human and to be lazy even more so.

Sorry the above isn't really constructive....

What would be helpful is for others (if willing) to post their RTF templates somewhere.  I mean really complex ones with sample output attached so we can learn by example (where documentation is light)?  What say you all?

Cheers,
David.

[gwieser]

What would be helpful is for others (if willing) to post their RTF templates somewhere.  I mean really complex ones with sample output attached so we can learn by example (where documentation is light)?  What say you all?

that's a good proposal, and it would definitely help all of us! perfect idea!

[Paolo F Cantoni]

that's a good proposal, and it would definitely help all of us! perfect idea!

Put them on the [size=13]EA User Group Wiki[/size]!

Paolo

[sl@sh]

As of yet I haven't looked into EAs documentation facilities. I do have some experience with another UML tool though, one that comes at a much steeper price I might add.

Said experience was with an embedded software system, and the decision to use abovementioned tool was based on it's capability to properly model, change and code-engineer our system with the least possible effort. As a result we got a model that we could change and then generate an executable out of it with the push of a single button. Literally.

As a side effect, and to get a little more mileage out of the investment into this product, the company managers wanted us to also automate the generation of requirements documents out of the use cases. The advantage we had is that the stakeholders for these documents were within the company itself, so we could define the exact format of the resulting document within rather loose limits. But it had to be MS Word! (so much for 'loose' limits...)

It turned out that even though we had a lot of wiggle room with the exact formats, making the UML tool generate exactly the information that we needed and omit everything we didn't want was a difficult task in itself. After quite some effort put in to that task and less than satisfactory results, the managers finally decided to contact the UML tool's company and pay an expert to help with the task.

In the end, we did get something useful out of this, but we needed a lot of help from the UML tool designers and also had to cope with some major restrictions concerning our formats and order of information within the documents. (ok, we could probably have worked around the latter, given enough time, but as it was we already way too much money on this issue).

Once the templates were done and the limitations to both the way we organised our model and what we could and could not put in our documents were made clear to everyone involved, we did have a decent system and probably saved some effort in creating future documents. It was a huge investment to get there however.

What this has to do with this thread is this: I simply wouldn't go down the same road again! If I was asked to do a similar thing with EA, the first thing *I* would do is search the Web for a cheap tool capabale of turning *something* into a decently formatted word document. I'd never try to do that by myself. Once I find such a tool, I will try to make EA generate the information that needs to be put in such a docment in a format that the first tool could easily recognize - software tools are so much less stringent on input formats, I expect it would be a lot easier for me to get this far. Or in other words: make EA export the information that you want in your documents, but never try to make the formats match. Use another tool for the formatting.

I have no idea if such a tool exists, but if it doesn't it would probably be still less effort for you to actually write one by yourself than make EA do all the formatting.