Model Management

By Ian Mitchell Sparx partner, Model Expert and eaDocX Product Owner

The challenge of maintaining model quality and consistency grows exponentially as our models and modelling teams grow. This presentation will offer an approach to find and fix problems, and help your team model right first time.

Session Recording

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Model Management for EA Global Summit 2020 (PDF)

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Model Expert - understand, manage and improve the quality of your EA model content

Questions and Answers

Does the Model Expert link with status change workflows to prevent approval without passing a quality standard?

No. There is no workflow in Model Expert. We looked at this, and decided it was too variable between organisations.

Is the quality score saved as metric in the repository?

We can save all the errors as elements. I can't remember if we save the total value. Don't want to start writing data into the main model.

Your dashboard showed a "complexity" chart. I was interested in how you consider model complexity (number of elements, hierarchy - information theoretic concepts?)

I must say now that I'm a mechanical engineer, not a CompSci person. I just divide the number of nodes by the number of links. It's quite a good measure

How do you record and accumulate the results of checking with Model Expert?

Each time you check a diagram, we create a copy of the diagram, with all the 'errors'. There is also an option to show these as a list, and save that list in EA as elements.

Is the example EAP model available to review?

I think the GetLost model is on the eaDocX website - somewhere. but it is much more fun to use it on your own models.

Could you please give a reference to the instance-based team work topic?

Please email me at ian@eadocx.com, and I will try to put you in touch with the team who are doing this. I'm sure they will be happy to help

Where can I find more information about that workshop?

Drop a mail to enquiries@abilityengineering.co.uk and we can give you more information. Here’s an outline of contents http://www.abilityengineering.co.uk/index.php/training/ea-for-teams

For a large organisation, do you think they need an EA Administrator / Librarian to train users, promote team models to shared models etc.? Also, would a separate role be required for EA integration to other tools in the organisation?

So, as I said in the session, yes and yes. But buy the roles, don't train them

I'm doing enterprise architecture modeling framework and starting to model systems and mostly their integrations and data models for a large organization. Future modelers are not going to be geeks who love it all. They need to have it as simple as possible. Given the future profile of users (not going to be EA experts), what is your experience in what approach works best to introduce such people to modeling? like what sequence of skillsets: basics of business analysis, basics of UML, the reasons why enterprise architecture is made, explaining them what is in it for them on the long run... what do you find as the "low hanging fruit" to pick in such circumstances....? (I find Model Expert to be a great tool for governance, I'm going to suggest it)

That was a lot of questions all together . I think the key is to find where they feel pain, and fix it. So, for example, we all hate creating deliverable documents, so either (1) get them to use Prolaborate, so there aren't so many documents, or (2) if you have documents, show them how EA/eaDocX can create better ones faster. Once they see that happening, they soon get the idea that more knowledge into EA means better insights, which makes them look (and feel) better.

One of the challenges I would see in running different projects in different repositories is the projects are running concurrently and where there are interdependencies between them. E.g one project is creating an interface that another one is going to use, but both projects are in design so the interface isn't "current state" yet. I am sure you've overcome this scenario, so would be interested to hear your thoughts. In our case we've used the single repo to house both current state and in-flight change and allowed these projects to cross refer to each other's designs?

I envisage a large Enterprise with a large portfolio : it's perfectly reasonable to take an Epic and refine the user stories in a Coproduction workspace and bring that back then for cross-impacts. Besides, it's not as if the Coproducers don't include stakeholders from within the organisation.

How about tagged values? If you export tagged values to the document, will it be possible for a reader to change or add tagged values and eaDocX will take them into the model?

Yes tagged values will be updated in the same way as all other element attributes.

How generated document version relates to elements versioning / baselines?

They are independent, but can obviously be connected through your governance process

Speaker Bio

Ian Mitchell

Sparx partner, Model Expert and eaDocx Product Owner

Ian is a Sparx partner who has been teaching and consulting in business analysis and architecture using EA for many years. He writes the EA extensions eaDocX and Model Expert.