Segun Alayande (Heathrow IT) & Bob Logan (Rockport Software): EA and SharePoint in ACI ACRIS

The Airports Council International (ACI) initiative on information services (Aviation Community Recommended Information Services or ACRIS) was established to define international standards for information exchange between aviation partners. This ACI Semantic Model is an information model developed and maintained in Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect, to facilitate interoperability between airports, airlines, air traffic management and other aviation suppliers. The model is hosted on a cloud platform and is accessible to ACI members via a SharePoint site. The EA model provides the central repository, and the SharePoint site provides members with a facility to view the model, to download material and to submit change requests. The SharePoint site uses the EA API to communicate directly with the model.

Segun Alayande is senior manager at Heathrow IT with responsibility for delivering enterprise architecture, and Information and Business Intelligence strategy at Heathrow. Principal author of the Airports Council (ACI) Semantic Model, based on Sparx Enterprise Architect.

Bob Logan, Director, Rockport Software, is a Business Intelligence and Data Warehouse consultancy. Contributing author of the ACI Semantic Model and responsible for the development and hosting of the ACI Semantic Model on a cloud platform.

Geert Bellekens: Extending EA with Add-ins or Scripting? Get the best of both worlds with EA-Matic

Enterprise Architect is a great tool, but it can be make much more awesome by extending it and tailoring it to your needs. You can either extends EA with scripting, or with add-ins. We discuss the pro’s and con’s of either approach, and learn how you can get the best of both worlds with EA-Matic. EA-Matic ties the events in EA to the scripting environment and thus makes it possible to make add-ins using scripting only. No more compilers, installations and registry changes needed. All code changes are instantly available to all model users.

Geert Bellekens, owner of Bellekens.com, a Sparx Systems Value Added Reseller, is an acknowledged Enterprise Architect expert. He has written numerous add-ins for Enterprise Architect, including the free open source EA Navigator and the commercial EA-Matic.

Ottmar Bender: Model-based Systems Engineering (MBSE) at Airbus Defence and Space, Electronics

This presentation explains the importance, methods, and experiences of Model-based Systems Engineering (MBSE) at Airbus Defence and Space, Electronics. MBSE is understood at Airbus Defence and Space as systems engineering using modelling  techniques, i.e. creating and executing models to produce the systems engineering artefacts required to develop complex and safety critical systems such as radar or avionics systems. The emphasis of this presentation is on experience, role and importance of system engineering tools. User experience of Enterprise Architect in conjunction with SysML and dedicated profiles is a major subject in this talk.

Ottmar Bender is head of Ground Support Stations at Airbus Defence and Space. He has experience in system and software development in the field of embedded systems for safety and mission critical applications of over 20 years. The main department Ground Support Stations develops systems and software for Ground Stations e.g. Helicopter Mission Planning. Until mid of 2014 he had the role to lead a department which develops software for airborne radars and mission management systems of large projects with international teams. He also leads research activities of the engineering challenge “Modular Safety Assurance ” of the SPES XT Core (Softwareplattform Embedded Systems) programme. The SPES XT Core is a German BMBF (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung) research programme.

Dr. Juliane Blechinger: Cross-functional modelling with EA – A day in the life of a large-scale project

The presentation aims at describing the structured, customized, and extensive usage of Sparx Enterprise Architect and eaDocX within the daily specification and design of a large scale innovation project.

To get familiar with the context of the project, the key facts about time, resources, scope, and project procedure are shortly introduced first. One main challenge of the project lies in balancing the big scope and tough timeline of the project with the need for achieving completeness in the specification. The description of the cross-functional role setup within the interdisciplinary project team completes the introduction to the challenging environment in which Sparx Enterprise Architect and eaDocX are used.

Afterwards, it is illustrated how and where daily needs are already well addressed by the selected working and modelling procedures. This leads to the presentation of a customized modelling standard which was achieved via an own MDG and corresponding profiles. The main focus lies in the explanation of the used diagrams and stereotypes, the document generation mode as well as the methodology of doing adequate functional cuts. In this section, the completeness challenge is especially emphasized by illustrating how this can be addressed by a defined way of tracing between specific modelling elements.

Finally, the previously explained working and modelling mode – which is in use for one year now – is evaluated. The successes are justified by an internal survey. Additionally, potential topics for improvement are constituted. These lie especially in new ideas for the EA built in-glossary, in using versioning via Source Control Tools (MS TFS) as well as in integrating a scenario-driven working mode.

Dr. Juliane Blechinger is the functional lead within a BigData project for the next generation of GfK’s core data harmonization, enrichment, and production system. GfK is one of the worldwide top 5 market research companies processing several terabytes of incoming data from about 100 countries each day.

Ms. Blechinger’s experience regarding data quality and metadata can be tracked from her PHD in computer science (2012) to her day-to-day practical appliance. When she joined GfK in 2012 as business analyst, she started to tailor Sparx Enterprise Architect via the MDG technology and corresponding profiles to project-specific needs in the functional area. Based on that, she also customized the document generation via eaDocX. Since then, several projects already profiteered from her work in these areas.

Her current focus is on structured traceability and pragmatic high-level-models to ensure completeness in large-scale (50+ man-years) projects.

Contact her via  [email protected].

Phil Chudley – Dunstan Thomas Consulting: BPMN 2.0 – Questions, Challenges and Solutions

During this presentation I will pose the problems and challenges facing Business Analysts when modelling process flows, beginning with the fundamental question: “Why should I model Process Flows using BPMN 2.0?”

Then using Enterprise Architect version 12 I will illustrate using worked examples how these problems and challenges can be addressed and providing solutions to the problems facing Business Analysts.

This presentation is not intend to be a “Silver Bullet” for Business Analysts, rather the presentation illustrates how BPMN 2.0 and Enterprise Architect version 12 can greatly assist Business Analysts in their business process modelling endeavours.

An experienced user of Enterprise Architect Phil Chudley is Principal Consultant (TOGAF 9 Certified, OMG Certified UML Professional) at Dunstan Thomas Consulting.

He has used Enterprise Architect for the past 9 years and has extensive practical knowledge of all its functionality, and also how to enhance its functionality through the use of MDGs, Scripts and Extensions. In this time he has also authored numerous white papers and training courses (EA, UML, BPMN/BPEL, SysML, ArchiMate, TOGAF). Phil has also created customised Extensions and UML profiles for Enterprise Architect as well as speaking at the European Enterprise Architect User Group events.

This has positioned Phil as a recognised expert and trusted adviser in the EA user community & DT’s client base.

Ian Mitchell and Jackie Mitchell: Agile Projects in non-Agile Organisations: Successful Collaboration with Enterprise Architect

Agile development approaches are now used for the vast majority of software development projects. But most of the organisations in which this work is done are not very Agile.

The processes and systems they use for governance, legacy systems, support and other functions work to a much longer lifecycle than a sprint. In this presentation Jackie and Ian will draw on their experiences of managing the communications between Agile and Waterfall developments in a large IT organisation to address some of the issues and challenges encountered and describe how collaborating using Enterprise Architect and eaDocX can make a big difference.

A long-standing EA user, business analyst mentor and teacher, Ian Mitchell is the author of the popular eaDocX document generator for EA.

A project and programme manager, consultant and trainer in the Aerospace, Health, Telecoms and IT industries for more than 25 years, Jackie Mitchell has delivered projects using a wide range of different PM approaches, tools and methods. Managing Agile software developments inside non-Agile organisations, Jackie’s experience has helped stakeholders of all kinds support successful project delivery. Now working with Enterprise Architect, she is developing ways to integrate structured system design into end-to-end Project delivery, putting EA model data at the heart of business.

Rodrigo Nascimento: Maintaining an Enterprise Information Model and derive XML schemes for SOA

One of the common challenges for system integration projects is the definition of messages that are going to be exchanged and their alignment with the enterprise view of information. This session presents an approach to support this alignment by deriving system integration services’ XML schemas from an Enterprise Information Model, following OMG’s Model Drive Architecture (MDA) approach and respective functionality in Sparx Enterprise Architect.

The focus of the discussion is around Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach, but they could be easily replicated to other approaches (i.e. the same approach could be used for APIs). The session starts with an introduction to the suggested derivation process and concepts around it, moving to a more practical perspective through a live demonstration using Sparx EA.

Rodrigo Nascimento is an Enterprise and Solution architect with over 20 years of professional experience in IT. His passion for technology started when he was only 7 years old by learning how to code with BASIC language on his ZX Spectrum. He then realised that only learning how to use the technology was not enough. It must have its purpose to exist in our lives, otherwise it will be just an interesting subject to talk about. Based on this belief, he decided to balance technical and business learning to pursue best utilisation of technologies.

It has been a long journey so far, mixing technical training and certifications, academic business studies (Bachelor’s degree in Marketing and Master in Business Administration) and projects that cross different technologies and industries.

Pablo Oliveria Antonino: An overview of IsafE and how it has been used by our customers in the avionic, automotive and medical devices domains.

One big challenge in the development of safety critical systems is on inconsistency between safety requirements, failure models, and the architecture specification. As these artifacts are usually created by different teams and in different moments and environments of the system development, very often, they are completely disassociated. However, the safety requirements often result from a safety analysis of the architecture, and, lately, must be allocated to elements of the architecture. In this regard, the existing inconsistencies and incompleteness result in intensive efforts to update the artefacts impacted by the changes, and, consequently, significantly decrease the efficiency of safety assurance.

To address this challenge, we will present Fraunhofer I-SafE: Integrated Safety Engineering, which is an Enterprise Architect based solution for supporting safety analysis and the establishment of traceability among safety requirements, failure models, and the architecture specification. With respect to the safety analysis, I-SafE supports (i) the creation of failure models of the types Component Fault Trees, Failure Mode and Effect Analysis, and Markov Chains that are tightly integrated with elements of the architecture specification, and (ii) the automated execution of safety analysis based on minimal cut sets, and on top event probability calculations. With respect to the traceability establishment, it offers (i) decision support for specifying safety requirements with natural language that are traceable to failure models and to the architecture, (ii) visualization mechanisms for identifying failure models and architecture elements impacted by a Safety requirements, and (iii) a set of automatic consistencies and completeness checks that, among other, detect Safety Integrity Levels (SIL) inconsistencies. We intend to present an overview of I-SafE, and how it has been used by our customers in the avionic, automotive, and medical devices domain.

Pablo Oliveira Antonino is Computer Scientist at the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE), Germany, since 2009, and, since then, works with architectures of embedded systems, particularly on architecture specification, evaluation and coaching in the Automotive, Avionics, Agricultural, and Medical devices domains. He works with Enterprise Architect since 2010, both modelling architectures of embedded systems, and developing Add-ins for customers in the domains previously mentioned.

Tom O’Reilly: Enterprise Architect Version 12

Exploring the new features and enhancements that were included in the Enterprise Architect version 12 release.

Tom O’Reilly has been with Sparx Systems for 11 years, joining the team in 2004. As COO he has been involved in all aspects of product development and marketing. A regular presenter at international User Group meetings he has also been involved with the international Standards Development Organisations (SDO) who use Enterprise Architect. In this capacity Tom is directly involved in translating the business needs of communities into product features. Meanwhile as COO he holds direct responsibility for many key business processes within Sparx Systems.

Paul Pearson: Experience in the use of EA for the full project lifecycle

As a company delivery Contact Centre solutions, we need to ensure that each of our customer have a robust, scalable and resilient platform delivering award winning functionality. In order to achieve our goals we need a strong Design and Architectural methodology which is modelled and managed in Enterprise Architect. A Contact Centre solution, like other large distributed solutions, requires lots of software, configuration and hardware working together harmony. At Anana we have produced a meta architectural philosophy “the Pattern” allowing for architectures and design details to be abstracted allowing for repeatable implementation. The architectural models describe all configuration and build information, from virtual machine VMware specification, networking, firewall, application installation and configuration.

Using the EA Automation interface we have developed a tool to create and manage the environment patterns, to implement the patterns in to a VMware farm and to automate the creation of a full document suite for the environments. The patterns are managed using files to ensure that a consistent modelling technique is utilised across all designers and architects, leaving them to concentrate on the actual architectural data rather than how to model the information. Once again, using the EA automation interface, we use the Pattern to automatically build a new implementation in a VMware farm, and automatically produce the documentation for it. Plus much, much more……. 

Paul Pearson has been the Platform Practice Manager for Anana LTD (www.anana.com) for 5 years. Before that he worked for 6 years at Orange / EE in the role of Enterprise Architect and Solutions Architect for Contact Centre.

Anana is an award winning systems integrator and solutions vendor of integrated call centre solutions, contact centre solutions and multichannel (omnichannel) customer engagement solutions.  We help enterprises of all shapes and sizes in any industry vertical move away from simple inbound and outbound voice interactions on telephones into the modern realm of multi-channel customer interaction management.  Our solutions are capable of handling just about any interaction type in any interaction media including outbound voice, interactive voice response, email, web chat, instant messaging, facsimile, written mail & other correspondence, parcels, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, SMS, web collaboration, web engagement, co-browsing, chat, mobile applications, skype, Microsoft Lync and many others.

Graham Taylor: User Story – Journey to the Truth!

Enterprise Architect delivers modelling and design tools for users throughout the project lifecycle, but what’s the point in using it unless you can all collaborate?

We started with a couple of Business Analysts getting licences for Enterprise Architect Version 9 and playing around in it as a replacement for Visio to create some process flows. Over the last couple of years this has transitioned into a full scale Enterprise modelling tool used by Business Systems Analysts, Architects, Developers, Testers and Project Managers. There have been some significant challenges; from trying to win over “visio lovers” to working out how to ensure resilience of a rapidly expanding database with an ever changing set of users.

In this presentation I’ll be explaining the journey we’ve taken; some of our achievements, but also the pitfalls and cul-de-sacs that we came across so that hopefully other people won’t get caught out by the same things we did. This is a long way from the end of our journey though so I’ll also talk about the new challenges we’re now facing and how we think we might overcome them.

Graham Taylor – Cofunds. As Analysis Practice Manager for Cofunds Business Unit a Legal and General company he has implemented Enterprise Architect for all analysis and design artefacts. The role began as one focussed on Business Systems Analysis, but has expanded to incorporate all major IT disciplines. He has trained teams on Business Process Modelling using BPMN 2.0 and UML techniques. This has brought structure and discipline to a rapidly expanding team. His experience and pragmatic approach has taken a small pilot exercise through to widespread adoption and embedding Enterprise Architect as a the central repository for all process and system documentation.

Previous roles include Business Analysis consultancy, testing and PMO for the Bank of New York Mellon.

Dr Matthew Thomas: An interest in your health?

Public Health Wales (PHW) is responsible for measuring, protecting and promoting the health of the population in Wales. Information is at the heart of its work, and a range of information systems are its arterial network. Developing systems for PHW is about engaging a diverse and distributed set of stakeholders. This is in large part what makes Health IT projects intrinsically risky, and why Enterprise Architect is such a useful tool in the armoury of the PHW IT department.

This presentation examines how Enterprise Architect aided the successful on-time delivery of a new national system for communicable disease surveillance. It considers how we can build on this work to drive forward the use of Enterprise Architect and it’s add-ins, to transform the way we work and realise even greater benefits.

Dr Matthew Thomas – Public Health Wales. With over 20 years of full life-cycle sysems development experience in a range of settings, Matthew leads a team of developers in Public Health Wales (PHW).