Anyone using SPARX EA Tool and Prolaborate for EA: can you share about your journey and how long have you been using this tool? Are you happy with the visualization?

We have been SPARX users for a number of years and the tool is fantastic, but it doesn't hold anyone's hand. You have to plan, and execute within the tool in a consistent manner and make sure everyone using the tool understands its NOT VISIO. It's a relational database of connected objects. Everything else is layered on that.

Prolaborate is a separate company and tool, that takes your SPARX diagrams, turns them into web pages which Prolaborate will serve up. Prolaborate is complex, highly configurable, provides mechanisms to send email and establish discussions and get reviews from users through a web interface - thus bypassing the huge learning curve for SPARX, and ensuring no one corrupts your diagrams unwittingly. Prolaborate does some things well, and misses the boat on a number of functions which must then be hand built - you get the feeling that no one who built Prolaborate had to use it for actually doing architecture - but once you have it in place, it's solid and works well. Documentation for the tool is abysmal. But the SPARX folks help us when we need to get past issues.

Hope this helps!

Aaron

How has Prolaborate contributed to make SPARX EA work better in your organization?

We are using Sparx EA tool, but not Prolaborate. It's journey has been... fascinating. I enjoy the features and repository-based work (as we come from the standalone Archi tool), but we've been having a lot of challenges on performance, collaboration implications (people messing about where you hoped they wouldn't), lack of versioning, etc. However, I do have the impression that a lot has to do with rules and guidelines that we're still missing internally. The tool's been 'thrown at us' a bit more than I'd hoped.

Visualization is a bit worse than what I've known from Archi tool, mostly because the tool is rather white-space hungry on the drawings. However, we've learned that we can update the visualizations through so-called MDGs which can make this much, much better. It's something we'll hope to get by end of the year.

I'm using Archimate and i think it's sufficiant to produce architectures views and follow Togaf cycle, Sparx EA do the same job and has useful functionnalies to deal with granularity and complexity,  in addition to that you can easilly ingrate it with other tools like Jira or Jama to ensure requirement's traceability, there is also other intresting functionnalities to measure effort (Cocomo method, Ifpug, Cosmic..) . the price of the licence depends on those options. Hope those informations will be helpful