As-is (baseline) and to-be (target)

[Stefan Norberg]

Hi,
I'm an EA newbie. and wonder how you guys go about modeling different life cycles of a system.

I need to be able to communicate both the as-is and the to-be states of my system.

What's the best practice of doing this in Enterprise Architect?

Thanks in advance.
Stefan

[Sunshine]

There are a number of ways I've used to show the baseline and target state diagrams.

1) The first is to draw two diagrams which I used to do before version 8.0 of Enterprise Architect.

2) Draw one diagram and use diagram filters. With version 8.0 you can draw one diagram and use diagram filters on any of the standard element attributes. I use the phase attribute to filter. You can then grey-out, hide or make transparent elements that you don't want in the diagram. Note that the diagram filters only work on elements not connectors so if you want to show differences between the two states just for connectors then you will need to use colours or draw two diagrams.

3) Draw one diagram with elements coloured according to phase/state

As regards to which is best practice I think the answer is it depends on the what and how you want to communicate the concepts between the two states. I prefer the 2nd option but find I have to resort to the other two if changes are dramatic or too complicated to show with diagram filters.

Hope that helps

[Stefan Norberg]

Thanks Sunshine!

Ok, I guess that component dependency reports and relationship matrices are quite useless then, as there is no concept of time on a relationship?

Is there a trick to structure this type of modeling to make RTF reports and dependency matrices more useful? Like containing the views for as-is and to-be in separate packages etc?

Any help or advice would be very helpful.

Thanks again,
Stefan

[Sunshine]

Stefan,
Sorry for the late reply, I've just noticed your question today by accident when searching on another topic. My bad not keeping an eye on these things.
To answer your question, yes I tend to create separate packages for current and future states to generated documents. It may be possible to do it another way once V9 is released as they are adding filters on relationships as well as elements as in V8.