Anteon Corporation and Integrate IT Architects Release CMMI White paper

Earlier this year Anteon Corporation and Florida-based consultant Ramsay Millar, of Integrate IT Architects released a white paper examining how SPARX Enterprise Architect could be used to support the Capability Maturity Model® Integration (CMMI®) during large-scale software-development projects.

For those unfamiliar, CMMI is a well-defined business process improvement approach developed by Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute (with Pentagon funding).  CMMI was developed to provide military contractors with a standardized set of  tools for quality-control and accountability for software systems.  In a military setting reliable software is literally a life-and-death matter.

Anteon Corporation does a great deal of software development on military projects, and CMMI is built in to its standard practices.  The white paper describes an evaluation project where Anteon’s CMMI lead appraisers measured Enterprise Architect against a set of pre-determined functional standards.

At the outset of this evaluation project Anteon was only just beginning to use Enterprise Architect.  Consultant Ramsay Millar, on the other hand, had been using EA for several years.  During those years Millar assisted dozens of corporate and government clients while they introduced EA to their IT toolkit.

Millar’s own “conversion” to EA is an interesting story in itself – and typical of many of SPARX’ 75,000 users.  He first began using modelling tools for software development in 1988.   By 1999 he had settled his consulting practice on Rational Rose and Borland’s Together as his standard modeling software.

In 2000 – while using Rose and Together to teach a week-long course in object-oriented analysis and design – the client asked Millar to use Enterprise Architect in class.  At the time he was only vaguely aware of EA.  As Millar describes it, every night after class they compared EA to the older tools, and by the end of the week he was completely convinced that EA was “best of breed.”

“I immediately recognized this was the next generation UML case tool” said Millar.  “It was actually much more than a modelling tool – it was a “work-solution’ tool.  I’d never seen anything like it.” 

After that workshop, Enterprise Architect became Millar’s tool of choice.  “When my clients discover what EA can do, they also become excited, they become passionate and they join the community,” he said. 

“They love EA because it actually understands the IT work-flow from business process modelling to software requirements to screen design to object and data modelling,” said Millar.  “And they love that it documents every step to provide them with full work-item traceability.”

Even today – more than five years after Millar discovered Enterprise Architect – he still encounters the same excitement and passion with clients who are new to EA.  That is exactly what happened when he began working with Anteon. 

“They started off looking for an efficient modelling tool – not realizing it did so much more.”

Millar initially spent a week with a group of Anteon programmers, developers, project managers and business analysts, first exploring EA’s functions with tutorial data, and later plugging in data from a real-life Anteon project.

What started out as simply an intensive workshop into best practices using Enterprise Architect to model software for one of world’s largest payroll systems became the first step in an evaluation project and white paper.  “It was really the SPARX software itself that inspired everyone to take this to the next step,” said Millar.

“I see this again and again when I take a client through the learning curve,” said Millar.  “When we get a group in the room working together, it’s ‘I can’t believe it does this!’ and ‘Rational Rose and Together can’t do that!’ ”

A copy of the white paper and the flash demo movie version is available at Ramsay Millar’s website.