Textual Analysis and UI Improvements

[Kevin Brennan]

I was looking at a similar product, Visual Paradigm. They have a couple of really nice features for someone, like me, who works primarily at the requirements end of system development.

Their support for textual analysis (see http://www.visual-paradigm.com/textualanalysis/index.html) is something I would very much like to see emulated in EA. They also have a better UI for documenting use cases, as it's specialized for requirements capture.

They have a couple of other nice UI features as well. Selecting an diagram element brings up tools that let you pick all of the things that could validly connect to it (ArgoUML does this too).  

On the whole, I'm sticking with EA, because it has three major benefits over Visual Paradigm--support for UML 2.0, the ability to generate .rtf files, and the ability to model the program UI. But the features I mentioned above are a pretty big deal to me and I'd love to see something similar in EA.

[Kevin Brennan]

I've come across a very nice program for managing use cases: Case Complete at http://www.serliosoft.com. It only handles use cases and is far more expensive than EA, but it has a wonderful UI for use case and actor capturing.

If EA could handle use case text like this does I would never need another tool--heck, not even Word. Right now, the handling of this in EA is somewhat clunky, as it's just an extension of the class diagrams.

Another very good application for use cases is Use Case Studio, from http://www.rewrittensoftware.com/.

Having these kinds of capabilities in EA, or the capability to integrate them, would be very useful to me.

[thomaskilian]

Kevin,
I use the methodology described in http://www.usecasemodeling.com/ to document my use cases. In EA each use case has a scenario tab where I write the basic path and all alternate paths. Indeed it's a bit inconvenient not to have more support for numbering/labeling. However the resulting docu is nearly what you expect from a use case docu. For the rest I'm (still) working on a post processor to format the text according to meta tags.

[Kevin Brennan]

Thomas,

That's pretty much what I've been doing. It works well enough, but I see no reason not to push for improvements if there's a chance of getting them.  

For me, these kind of things are the difference between EA being a good product and a great one.

[thomaskilian]

You're right  

[Kevin Brennan]

I mostly use EA as a requirements management tool, so there's a number of things I would like to see it do better.

I'd like to have the ability to create a requirement matrix that lets me document in the model how various elements impact one another, and check it if things change. I also want to be able to trace a requirement from a feature list, to a use case, to a class model, to a test case. EA sort of does this but the current implementation is awkward and only really handles parts of this cleanly.

The ability to easily generate a report that shows me what has changed since a certain version or date and list both the change and the reason for it. The change documentation should be robust but not onerous--meaning make it easy to access when I update the diagram but don't force it on me every time. Ideally, I'd like to be able to compare "versions" and have it tell me what changed, and let me decide if it needs to be called attention to.

Again, EA is halfway there. I can document changes but it's a little awkward to get to, and the report tools don't make it easy to limit to just the changed elements. I can get the info I want, but it's hard to get JUST a list of the changed information to give the developers.

The ability to generate a testing matrix from the requirements and document test cases using the matrix. EA has some support for testing (more than most) but it's relatively unsophisticated. This is probably the least important matter of all the stuff I've brought up.

I'd be happy to specify these more precisely if there's a chance of them being implemented.  

[thomaskilian]

I second that request since requirements management is also my main intention in using  EA. In that respect I'd like to have also better documentation features. As by now I'm forced to do a lot of programming by myself (luckily this is possible at all ).

[mchiuminatto]

Regarding to model elements, it would be great that  the notes, descriptions and the like were treated as html with the possibility to insert links to other model elements and glossary entries.

Besides all the UML support, the documentation features are one of the key features for non-technical stakeholders who are an important part of a development team, and sometimes they are the ones who got the money to buy tools, like EA, aren't they?

Am I asking too much?