Enterprise Architect Reviews & Product Details

Being a software developer and architect in the Automotive domain for the last 10 years, I can easily say EA is a must tool for every architecture task.

I have been using the tool in different Automotive companies, different projects internally, and with OEMs (BMW, Mercedes Benz, and others) and it has great features and capabilities:

1. Requirements traceability and baselines. Many tools provide traceability and REQs like DOORs, but with EA, it's a good advantage that you can create different REQs, link it in the same tool with your design, and in some cases also link it to the code. Hence, you have all in the same tool and can get good traceability reports.

2. Model different diagrams (Use cases, Sequence diagrams, Domain diagrams, ..etc). EA supports different schemas, and UML is the most common one that we use for different Models and diagrams. Colors and options that you can change are great (For example, the layout of the diagram to be automatically aligned is a great feature in complex projects).

3. Generate reports and codes for complex state machines. It's not an easy task to configure EA and generate Code, but for business use cases this is something that the company invested in for long-term benefits, so when you need to change the code, you just change the state machine in EA and generate it. However, not a very optimized code for Automotive, but a step that saves a lot of time.

4. Free available community and training is something that not all closed source tools provide, it's great to still have a community of users that can support and answer your questions, and this is organized on the EA website. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As mentioned above some features are great but:

1. Need time and effort to get a baseline for them due to their complexity.

2. A template from EA to make that task more manageable and be an integration effort not reinvent every time.

3. For small diagrams, It's not a plug-and-play tool, rather using basic tools is much better for small-size projects/Use cases. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Scripting features to customise everything is pretty good. We used that feature quite a lot. Traceability is very good from Process to table. Entity Drawing features are very easy. Creating relationship link with Requirement and the case which will give a visual representation for all the use case and requirements. Using Stereotypes to organise Class Attributes and Methods. Using the relationship matrix to create multiple connectors to Elements Advanced search functionality VB Script library to automate many tasks. Providing logical separation for various projects. Multi user design/development support Support for PDF and Image printing of the Model Diagram. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

When model is large and it is bit slow to render. Also sometime it is difficult (selecting and holding it) to move a single attribute from one entity in the diagram to another. At times check-in and check-out procedures are slow. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Supports code editing with syntex highlighter and Intellisense Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sometime its bit slow in operation and takes time to open Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Ease of adding the various artifacts to Architecture Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The tool is not available with a floating license. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Support for multiple methodologies including ArchiMate and UML Repository - keeping objects in structured way Web presentation - there is easy to generate full website of the repository Flexibility how to use diagrams, object, custom types Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Document generation is quite terrible for more than simple dump of the repository structure Help and documentation is very simplistic and not very helpful UI and functionality seems to be not updated regularly and going to be out of date. Editor for object notes is really simple and hard to be used to create real documentation Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Great online publishing presence. End user who sees the EA artifacts can click around with ease to see AV, OV, and SV documents Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Editing tools can be confusing. We once lost a couple of hours of work due to glitches in the software. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sparx EA is the essential CASE tool for information system engineers, software architects, developers, and business analysts providing powerful, fully featured, repository based modeling and parametric simulation capabilities and full control over the organization and level of model compliance at an affordable price. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Setting up for version control is cumbersome Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Intuitive interface, ease of use (although there is a learning curve) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

When exporting the diagrams as images, wide diagrams becomes too tiny Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Use-case diagrams, classes diagrams, sequence diagrams, intercomponent links and dependency, ability to create matrix of dependencies and so on. Quite good code generation. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Quite cumbersome, interface is not always intuitive, eats a lot of resources. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Enterprise Architect is a UML design and modeling tool that stands out for being easy to use and the integration it has with software development environments such as Visual Studio or Eclipse. With Enterprise Architect you will feel that your ideas come to life because up to now it has never been so easy to capture every detail in your UML diagrams Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We needed an exhaustive control of the databases that were kept in production, preproduction and development Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.