EA anamnesis

Abstract

ArchiMate [4] is a Domain Specific Language (DSL) to model an enterprise from a holistic perspective, showing not only the IT infrastructure of an organization, but also how this IT infrastructure supports business processes and contributes to the realization of products and (commercial) services.Yet, ArchiMate lacks the capability to capture the design decisions behind the models. Capturing such decisions is important to improve the design teaching and communication after the design process. This is what we refer to as EA Anamnesis. People who can benefit from EA Anamnesis are e.g. persons that are foreign to a given architecture, such as external Enterprise architects.In this paper, we introduce an approach to capture design decisions. For the moment we target our approach primarily on capturing design decisions in the context of Archi-Mate models. Specifically, we (1) introduce a metamodel for capturing architectural design decisions. This metamodel is grounded in DSLs for capturing rationales in software engineering. (2) Finally, we provide a fictitious use case scenario for the insurance industry to illustrate the use of our approach.

Evaluating the capabilities of Enterprise Architecture modeling tools for Visual Analysis.

“…metamodel conformity, attributes without values, or duplicate objects. Traceability of Analysis: An analysis tool should provide mechanisms that record decisions and their rationale (see Anamnesis, [PdKP12]), and in general, of the whole analysis process, including annotations on the elements and groups of the model.…”