Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect Reviews and Ratings
Rating: 8.3 out of 10
Score
8.3 out of 10
Community insights
TrustRadius Insights for Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Recommendations
Based on user feedback, here are the most common recommendations for the software:
Consider seeking assistance from a consultant during the introduction and initial setup of the software.
Look for a product that provides more flexible and complex documentation based on the software's repository, as the default document generator is considered too basic.
Improve guidance for baselining and version control within the software to help users effectively manage changes and versions of their design artifacts.
These recommendations focus on seeking external expertise, enhancing documentation capabilities, and improving baselining and version control guidance to optimize the software's functionality.
I used Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect to deliver services to clients. It enables our Enterprise Architecture work.
Pros
Easy to get started
Easy to share content
It supports TOGAF and UML.
Cons
It requires knowledge of Enterprise Architecture.
You need a proper plugin to deliver Enterprise Architecture.
Likelihood to Recommend
Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect is well suited for a client that does not have any Enterprise Architecture or Business Process and that needs to get started. The information is available in Excel and you can get started by importing the artifacts in the proper structure. Word documents can also be imported by using the proper plugins. It can be used as a jump-start for a team of five people that can share a common repository.
Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect's typical usage scenarios comprise the capturing of business requirements, of more detailed use cases and scenarios that mimic required business situations and processes in a comprehensive way that is understood by business stakeholders as well as IT analysts. Business requirements can be then further translated to business logic (models, algorithms, process flows/workflows, business data objects, and other artifacts) that are linked to a high level as well as low-level ICT design (application logic, integration models, data models, etc.). The main reason and advantage for putting all the above into one IT solution (Enterprise Architect) is to provide a set of business and IT models, that are interrelated and any change to components such as process, data entity, integration service, business requirement, etc., can be traced to all other components. This would be the best practice - to have a tool that keeps track of any change you plan to do to your systems and helps indicates impacted components and relations. In practice, there are several obstacles to reaching this best usage practice.
Pros
Enables recording and managmenet of all changes/requirements on ICT solutions.
Improves transparency of relations among models.
Helps to manage complexity of documentation.
Supports well team collaboration (server version with shared database) and allows to manage user access rules.
Essential tool for enterprise, application, integration and data architects.
Is well thought through in respect to user experience, it is easy to work in the tool for both, business occasional users as well as seasoned IT analysts.
Cons
Management of change requests or business requirements is much better implemented in JIRA or Confluence, there is an option to integrate EA artifacts with Confluence/JIRA specifications, via third party solution, in my experience this works one-directional, from EA to Confluence. Maybe there exists other solutions with a full synchronization. The result today is that you can share e.g. architectures designed in Enterprise Architect in Confluence.
Model governance, especially by working on large scale projects with lots of people, requires double checking of any major change you want to do to the models, e.g. deleting of a particular item/component. Some feature to make deleting "more safe" would be nice.
Likelihood to Recommend
Enterprise Architect can be used to capture business requirements, design and management of all successive models, algorithms, process flows/workflows, design of business data objects and other artifacts. The strong point is the ability to link the items in all models with each other, the more time the analysts and designers "invest" into making nice and clearly defined models, the higher the future pay-off by any successive changes to the systems.
Enterprise Architect is not a good tool for capturing rather unstructured business requirements, use e.g. Confluence or other solutions instead. EA should comprise the extracted models with very little unstructured information.
Management of the changes process should not be done in Enterprise Architect, rather use JIRA/Confluence or similar.
We use Enterprise Architect in the Software Development department. We manage all the architecture of our applications with this software. It's an excellent tool to manage UML diagrams. Enterprise Architect supports MDA transforms of PIM Class structures to PSM Class structures.
Pros
Enterprise Architect supports Data Modeling from the Conceptual to Physical levels, Forward and Reverse Engineering of Database Schemas
Enterprise Architect provides an Integrated Development Environment that supports code editing, for Building, Debugging and Code Testing all from within the model.
Cons
Enterprise Architect's user interface is outdated... It should be more fresh and clean
Likelihood to Recommend
Enterprise Architect is an excellent option for modeling the data structure of your applications.
Sparx EA is being used as a centralized single source of truth of architectural specifications, representations and related information and meta-information.
The user interface provides a set of customized views of the information, appropriate to the individual user's role and expertise.
As gatekeeper, I ensure proper governance, auditing and guide its evolution and use.
Pros
Open Architecture - A wide and extensive set of options, plug-ins and customization options make Sparx EA more of a tool kit than just a tool. Most tools allow customization but Sparx EA is built from the ground up with this in mind.
Wide variety of formats, lexicons, standards and data import export capabilities allow different roles to interact with the information in different ways.
Automated report generation allows architects and designers to spend less taking on word processing and more time on performing architecture and design.
Cons
It is not necessarily a user friendly tool, but then again neither are any of the others EA tools. They provide excellent tutorials and webinars. They should keep adding those.
The RTF document templates can be challenging to create.
Setting the sort ordering of searches in model views is complex(require a custom SQL query)
Likelihood to Recommend
You need to have a Sparx EA go to person to help socialize the tool and ensure it is properly used (but again, this is true for most tools). IF a company is looking for a tool they can just buy an have people use they should stick to Visio because any true modeling tool requires expertise.
In an environment where you do not have a highly trained group of architects who are familiar with all the standards and strategies of modeling, Sparx EA , more than most tools, allows you to wrap user friendly menus,and windows around it to make it easier to use.
Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect (EA) is being used to model all of the layers of operation within the business. This starts with the highest level of business modeling. Major business processes are modeled, then the more detailed processes within the business areas. This then drills down to the systems supporting the business functions then on to the systems architecture that delivers the systems.
This is used to ensure that a complete map of operational processes maps to a supported system and that architecture update plans are consistent with software upgrades and hardware lifecycles.
Pros
Descriptions of business processes, actors, actions, outcomes and outputs
Mapping of all systems to business processes
Collation of all architectural elements that comprise individual systems
Cons
Needs someone that is very conversant with business modelling terminology
Likelihood to Recommend
EA is well suited to modeling business processes. This allows operational architects to design or re-design the business processes with a view to interaction between operational elements.
Modelling of systems architecture can be very self-absorbing with no real business benefit. A clear scope of outcomes is required before starting an EA project.
