Displaying items by tag: enterprise architect

Veteran Project Manager and user of Enterprise Architect in 100+ projects since 2001, Herminio Lourenço has recently published some illuminating articles regarding toolsets for systems development.

This article was orginally published on Mr. Lourenço's LinkedIn profile on November 22nd, reprinted on the Sparx Systems Community site with permission from the author.

Firstly, tool is something that enables, facilitates, gives bigger productivity to one or more activities. The tool works for us. We dedicate some effort and as a result we have a lot of work done. That said, I will suggest a set of tools to give productivity and quality to systems development.

A concept being introduced is the ALM: Application Lifecycle Management. According to Wikipedia, is the marriage between business management with software engineering, which became viable thanks to tools that facilitate and integrate processes such as requirements analysis, architectural modeling, code development, change management, test management and managing of versions of products accomplished. Each one of these processes is part of a stage of a software life cycle.

This can be achieved through a framework, as the Jazz from IBM or Microsoft TFS, among other options, which integrates specialized tools to manage: requirements; code repository; construction; architecture and coding; tests and quality, versions and components.

In that effort to implement multiple tools, the company may have to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars and dozens of months in software settings and in training.One of the options that brings fastest return in productivity and quality is the Enterprise Architect (EA) from Sparx Systems. With this tool you can manage and analyze requirements, with automatic control of traceability of the requirements until the code and vice versa, besides producing the models of analysis and design and code as much classes as databases.

Support for testing and integration with configuration and release managers practically complete the required skills. Furthermore, EA has tools like KANBAN and task planning that help you plan and control the progress of work.

Other tools like Jira and Subversion can help complete the spectrum.

Of course that the biggest suppliers will try to convince IT managers that this solution may not be as good and complete as their offers, but this solution has more than 300,000 users developers across the planet. Theirs might have a few hundred followers. I will not discuss what is the perfect solution because it doesn't exist.

The adoption of a good, solid and tested set of tools is crucial to obtain the desired productivity in systems development.

Save the Date: 21.2. – 22.2.2017

Enterprise Architect 13 is full of new functionalities that we would love to show and explain to you. So, for the first time ever, we will be presenting EA 13 as a combination of numerous Workshops in a two-day format. We're looking forward to seeing you there, and to showing you how to use the new EA 13 to your advantage!

This event caters primarily to German-speaking users; therefore, please be aware that all presentations will be delivered in German.

For more details, please visit the Sparx Systems Central Europe website: http://www.sparxsystems.de/ea-practice-days/

With the initial release of the Airline Industry Data Model (AIDM), and with an increasing number of airline industry standardization workgroups leveraging and adding to the data model, a training consortium of Sparx Systems’ Training Partners will support the data model with a global training program designed specifically for the airline industry.

This training will provide guidance and skills to individuals involved in the development of Airline Industry Data Exchange standards, as well as organizations or individuals wanting to use the models in the AIDM for development of their IT systems.

Public Training Schedule for 2017:

• 27-28.March.2017
• 11-12.September.2017

For more details, please visit the Sparx Systems Central Europe website

This webinar will show you how to make the most of Dynamic Documents to create simple, yet effective reports.The 'Dynamic Document' tab of the Document Window helps you to instantly generate a document on a selected element, using one of a range of templates. A style template consists of one or more command lines, each of which defines an element type (or all element types) and the document template to apply to the generated document.

In this LIVE webinar session, you will learn how to:

• Create your own style templates and document templates
• Understand how selectors and style templates work
• Use the Template editor to create rich and engaging document templates

We are trialling a new webinar technology based on YouTube Live streaming.

Visit Webinar Page - Watch live or catch up later!

Read Part 1 of this Case Study

We’re attempting a “crowdsourced bad driver reporting system” this semester, and because we need to be really productive, we’re using Enterprise Architect to model the project, field-test the Resilient Agile process, and to coordinate all of the student homework.  Students communicate with each other and with me using a shared EA model.

This semester I’m working with a group of 15 Masters students and an aggregate effective time budget of 80 student hours per week.  We’ve got about 12 usable weeks of student time, so it works out to a time budget of roughly 1000 student hours (that’s about half-a-person-year at 40 hours a week) over a 3 month schedule.

Resilient Agile is a flexible process in that it can be employed with traditional Scrum/Kanban sprints and backlogs, or alternatively we can leverage parallelism, and each student can be assigned a use case and develop their use case independently. 

I’ve been a big fan of leveraging parallelism in software development since I was a programmer at NASA/JPL way back in the 80s when I rescued a late project using a “divide-and-conquer” coding strategy, so we’re trying to see how far we can push the limits on massively parallel development with student projects at USC.  Communication and well-defined interfaces are key when team members are working in parallel, so the shared EA model is critically important.

Parallel modeling and development has also been a theme of our ICONIX JumpStart classes for the last 20 years, where we go into industry and work a client’s real project by splitting the class up into “lab teams”.  Typically in ICONIX JumpStart classes we put 3 or 4 students on a package of use cases, whereas on this project each student got a single use case.

If you’re going to leverage parallelism in development you have to do things a little bit differently.  Here’s an overview of the process we’re following:

1.     Plan for Parallelism (identify dependencies and architect for parallelism)

2.     Build the Right System (discover requirements, prototype areas of technical risk, and agree on conceptual designs)

3.     Build the System Right (carefully review detailed designs)

4.     Integrate as often as necessary

Enterprise Architect is a key enabler of the above process.   I would never attempt this approach without a good solid modeling tool at the heart of it. This article will show how we’ve used EA to accomplish the 4 steps above. 

 Read Part 3 of this Case Study

The final Enterprise Architect User Group event in Europe for 2016 will be held on November 11th at the Folksam, Bohusgatan 14, 106 60 Stockholm.

Tickets available now for the upcoming Swedish Enterprise Architect User Group, full schedule published with presentations based on separate User Story and Technical tracks

For just €75, join with other Enterprise Architect users for the last European User Group Event of 2016. Presentations will be in English and Swedish.

Meet other users, and share practical insights, advice, experience and inspiration.

Full event information, including directions to the venue, agenda and presentation abstracts, plus links to buy tickets are available now at www.eausergroup.com

Global publication CIOReview has identified Sparx Systems as a stand-out Productivity Solution Provider, including the company in their annual '20 Most Promising Productivity Solution Providers 2016' list.

CIOReview has highlighted the importance of productivity solutions with the corporate landscape, citing that '... state-of-the-art productivity tools, no longer does an ‘upgrade’ from IT mean ‘rip-and-replace the infrastructure.’ Rather, it involves an easy add-on to the existing hardware, which seamlessly collaborates with the already functional, process-oriented software, without the high upfront capital expenses.' 

“We are happy to announce Sparx Systems as one among the 20 Most Promising Productivity Solution Providers 2016,” said Jeevan George, Managing Editor of CIOReview. “Sparx systems have a long and proven track record in a wide range of industries for providing high value, end to end modeling tools that help individuals, groups and large organizations model and manage complex information.”

The publication also inteviewed CEO and founder of Sparx Systems, Geoffrey Sparks in this month's magazine, who provided some insight why Enterprise Architect is regarded so highly in the productivity domain; “Our platform has been engineered with appropriate levels of abstraction to support deeply layered architectures and processes that capture the full end-to-end spectrum of knowledge and behavior, within a particular business or domain,” explains Geoffrey. “It operates across several distinct but essentially linked layers.”

To read CIOReview's full interview with Geoffrey Sparks, titled 'Sparx Systems - Architecting the Visual Enterprise', simply download the attachment from the link at the top of this article.  

Sparx Systems' Enterprise Architect has been featured in a recently published SD Times article, Online and Social Media Editor Madison Moore identifies the emerging influence of DevOps and Agile within the ALM domain... and the software that is supporting Enterprises to master their future evolution.

"Market disruptions such as mobile and the Internet of Things (IoT), as well as the digital and omnichannel trend as a whole, have contributed to this evolution of ALM. Once these disruptions happen in areas like DevOps and agile, they change the way companies build their applications."

Enterprise Architect has been identified as a platform that is "... a comprehensive team-based modeling environment that helps organizations analyze, design and construct reliable, well-understood systems." The feature rich toolset supports project teams to communicate and capture essential business information, to transform the Enterprise into a standards compliant entity, therfore realizing the potential for interoperability and future agility.

To read the full article by Madison Moore, please visit the SD Times website 

In a candid interview with Arun Kant from CIOReview, Sparx Systems' CEO Geoffrey Sparks highlights how Enterprise Architecture has become an imperative for survival in the ever-changing and globalized corporate landscape.

CIOReview has also included Sparx Systems in their '20 Most Promising Enterprise Architecture Technology Providers 2016' list, resulting from a robust selection process actioned by a highly qualified panel of domain experts. The in-depth interview with Geoffrey Sparks is the featured article in this month's edition of CIOReview, where Geoffrey discusses the Sparx Systems tradition of continual development of the Enterprise Architect platform, while maintaining the highly competitive price-point that enables affordable outfitting for all project stakeholders.

Geoffrey Sparx, Founder and CEO, Sparx Systems

To read the full featured article, simply download the PDF attachment at the top of this article.

Sparx Systems is proud to announce the full release of Enterprise Architect Version 13.

This groundbreaking build focuses on streamlining the user interface, agile teams, model management and parametric simulation.

In its 15 years of continuous development, Enterprise Architect has become the pre-eminent visual modeling platform, bringing together all aspects of the development cycle. Its feature-set has evolved to provide traceability, from the initial design phase through to deployment, maintenance, testing and change control. Version 13 delivers significant new capabilities in these areas and delivers them, in a streamlined and agile interface.

Enterprise Architect 13, represents many years of research, consultation and development - working with a broad community of customers, partners and industry observers. This has helped make this release what Sparx Systems has identified as truly defining.

Sparx Systems is confident, that the combination of distributed agile modeling and design, cloud based repository, Kanban project management, simulation, software development and database engineering capabilities of Version 13, will represent a powerful platform for realizing even the most ambitious projects.

A full list of updates and enhancements in Enterprise Architect 13 can be found at the Sparx Systems website.

Additional resources:

• Webinar Recording - Enterprise Architect 13 Release Highlights: Visit Webinars Section
• Enterprise Architect Product Brochure: Download Brochure Here
• Newsletter - Enterprise Architect 13 Released: View Newsletter Here