EA Methodology

The perpetual question for enterprise architects is, which is the best enterprise architecture management tool. I have my favourite based on the past years experience, which I selected after a careful analysis of potential candidates. One of my clients requested a comparison between two tools and I would share the results here. Shortly the two tools are SAMU from Atoll and EA from Sparx. The summary of the comparison is, that they have to exchange the name they have! SAMU (System Architecture Management Utility) is a real enterprise architecture management tool, with all necessary aspects, while EA (Enterprise Architect) is a great system design tool, with very limited capability to be extend to enterprise wide repository.

I saw and heard many times (certainly not at you), that professionality is over in the IT field. Quality falls, deadlines are missed, costs are increasing and the joy of creation lost somewhere on the road. In the past everything was better and so. 

What could be the reason? Large projects are still exists, empowering targets are still there, more money spent then ever - it seems to be a perfect situation to fly and still... I collected you some reasons for those cases when this bad feeling is right. Some ammo for the feeling of 'anno Domini'.

What is the best development methodology? Waterfall? Agile? An iterative model? Something else? Companies and projects are looking to find the best approach to deliver on time and on budget and still keeping the scope. People are arguing in personal discussions and forums highlighting pros and cons about their best one, but I did not see the ultimate answer. Now I can help you to have it!

Each knowledge base about architecture faces the same challenge: find the balance between details and accuracy. The less details would mean simpler maintenance of data while it certainly less usable. If you have limited resources for future maintenance you have to make compromises. This article shows the way you can built up-to-date usable knowledge base with no bad compromises about scope and usability.

All we know applications, which are well design implemented on the right way but need continuous caring; and yes, we met those ones, the "temporary" solutions, which are surviving everything with no caring and no way to be killed. What could be the reason?

All we dream about simple architecture. Everything you always wanted to know about Complexity article described an approach to measure how complex our architecture is. The next question is to find the simplest solution in a multi-variable situation, which usually called project. This article shows an approach which ensures that all functions you implement will be on the best place from overall complexity point of view for greenfield cases, while we will discuss about brownfield situations also.