Is Enterprise Architect a good drawing tool for Archimate 2

The first time I was trying to model a system in Archimate using Enterprise Architect, I experienced some difficulties in expressing the system using the language.
Today I decided to try to draw the model from Archimate's website (shown in my previous example) using Enterprise Architect.
Though the example on Archimate's website is actually too simple to reflect any real-world problems, still Enterprise Architect feels a bit difficult to use.
The problem was after modelling each layer, to create an overall view I almost had to do everything again. The Diagram Frame feature was distorting the elements and was not showing links such as realizations between layers.
So to actually reproduce that diagram I had to link to every element in a new diagram. That was where I stopped because I expected to be able to aggregate layers into one diagram and link them.

Though in real life this problem does not show up that often because having a single diagram will all layers detailed is sometimes getting too crowded to be useful. But the general feeling you get using Enterprise Architect is a diagram drawing software that different standards have been defined in it without tailoring the software enough to make drawing the diagrams easy for these new standards.

Here is the Archimate Example

and this is what I came up with without having to spend an extra hour working around the issues in the Enterprise Architect

The links between layers are missing and the Technology Layer layout is totally broken. The main Technology layer is fine, but the Frame is distorting the layout. 

I like to see how other tools behave trying to draw this

Do we really need ArchiMate? UML vs BPMN vs ArchiMate (Example)

It is useful to have a look at Archimate website's Example and understand what benefits Archimate provide that is can not be achieved by UML and BPMN. 

The Archimate community is sharing very few examples of Archimate modelling, so we try to take the most of this example

http://www.archimate.nl/en/about_archimate/example.html

As an engineer with an MBA degree I can see that this example is no where near real-life complexities both from Technology and Application layer or business layer. 

Archimate is trying to act as normative framework to document the following

• Business Roles & Actors,
• Business Services
• Business Processes
• Application Services
• Application Components
• Infrastructure Services
• Infrastructure Instances

This is very useful when trying to very high-level view of the IT system in the organization. 

It is important to remember that there is no way we can put all the details for even one system or business services in a single diagram without having thousands of boxes and lines almost going from any box to the other one. 

UMLDeployment or Component diagram can come into competion modelling the 'Technoloyg' and 'Application' Layers while BPMN can be used to model the processes in the 'Business' layer. 

UML Usecases can be used to model usage of the system, but they fall short on easily modelling how different actors are using different usecases to follow a business process. 

Unfortunately there is no standard way to link a BPMN documentation along UML documentations. 

Can TDD be not so good for MES Customization?

Test Driven Development (TDD) has attracted a lot of support and affection. I don't need to write to show how good it is. It has so many fans and sometimes the fans sound a bit like religious people. To them, TDD is the best for every project type and any problem in Automated Test goes back to the "Bad Execution" of the TDD and nothing can be wrong about TDD. If you cast any doubt to the holiness of TDD, they call you an "unbeliever" and label you as the one who does not care about quality at a ll. Also like a religion, they have  non-questionable assumptions and the promises are something sound too good to be true (eternal heaven of no bugs)

Before starting, I like to make it clear that I am an advocate of smart automated testing and this writing is only focusing on blind Automated testing in .Net using test, mocking, expectation and continuous build frameworks trying to achieve a 100% coverage in small teams.

The criticism here are not global and does not apply to every project. In MES projects we need to do small once-off coding projects with moderate mission criticality and these criticisms apply more to these types of projects. I am not talking about a transaction processing system for a bank or stock-exchange or health records system. 

Now Let's Start:

A. Automated Tests are Untested Codes

Automated tests can get quite complex and just like any other code they need testing themselves before being trusted. Should we write unit-tests that test Unit-tests? I've heard some saying "A code without automated unit test is like a code that is not written yet". Does that mean auto-unit-tests are considered not written?. going to the religion analogy, if everything needs to be "created", who created the "creator"? TDD fans, tend to imply that tests are bug-free and their bug-freeness flows down to the code. Ore are we sweeping the problem somewhere else? 

B. Automated Tests Take Time to Write:

Hello-World examples of test/mock/validation frameworks show how easy it is to test with their over-simplified examples. But many times in reality it becomes very difficult to write a true test and even more difficult if you insist on using these frameworks. Unless you are already in heaven, you have limited project time and the time you spend on Automatic tests is competing with the time you could use to do manual tests. Their first defence is that the automated test is going to take zero time to execute and over time you actually save time. But they just assumed the test is going to run for many times, while in reality the change in the requirements or design or a dozen of other things can kill a test before it runs even once on a release version. 

C. Automated Tests Worsens Encapsulation:

The design in a TDD usually has to do serve a double purpose: Functionality and Maximizing Testability. You can end up loosing encapsulation to make code testable. You finds ways to avoid this, but they don't come free. Unless one day .Net and .Net languages are changed to support TDD so that you can test a method without making it visible to normal code, this problem will exist. A Symptom of this is usually having Interfaces for objects for no other reason than being able to write tests easier. 

Again, I know there are ways, techniques, platforms and etc.  to alleviate that, but in reality may Devs sacrifice the encapsulation to do tasks in time. The unmeasurable encapsulation is sold in favour of measurable coverage. 

 D. Automated Tests Need DI:

Do you think DI (Dependacy Injection) or RoC (Reversion of Control) is always a good thing regardless of automatic testing? Well not always. They used to be frowned at because DI usages sometimes can be summarized as using a bucket (Container) of objects or object makers (Factories) that have to abide to certain rules so that the DI creates them in the correct way. More often than you think this "buket" just becomes a badly implemented Context object and acts as an "anti-pattern". The DI framework adds complexity and becomes the core of your solution and affects (ruins?) your object creation design patterns. Bugs in object creation which is an important aspect of an application become more difficult to trace and debug. This is because of a very simple situation: The code you write for object creation, is no longer actually creating the object. You get exception in a misleading location

E  Automated Tests Kill Agility:

Writing tests that go red first and you make them green by implementing means only one thing: You are investing (by writing  test code) in a design that may need to change once you try to implement or showcase it. Implementing a design casts light on issues in the design. Showcasing an implementation casts lights on issues in requirement understanding and subsequently the design and implementation. The idea behind being Agile is to shorten the lifecycle so that we discover the issues earlier. Writing a full test often requires definintion of all interfaces which locks down the design. any change in design means changing all interfaces and automated tests.

F. Automated Tests Mean More Moving Parts:

Signing up for TDD usually requires using more libraries which exposes the project to bugs in these libraries. In an enterprise environments, their usage might not be actually allowed if their support cannot be guaranteed. And once we limit ourselves to the white list, we start having problem writing tests quickly, easily or without breaking the design principles. 

G. It  Too Much Attention Because It Is Quantitative

TDD Fanatics don't deny that the amount of automated tests and percentage of code coverage are not the only important code quality merits, but in reality some of them put too much emphasis on it. The measurable things gets more attention than qualitative merits. This is a common human error. As an example, unless we are a pro, when buying a camera, we tend to put too much emphasis on the camera's resolution because it is a number while the quality of the lens is hard to quantify and gets less attention.  

At the end of the day your code is used by a user which is a human. Or used by another Developer if it is library. Can we write a test that measures how human readable an exception is? Too much TDD focus can causes lack of attention to 

1. Graceful error handling and display
2. UI layout and user input validation
3. Code design (lower level design) and Code comments and readability
4. Variable , Method and Class naming and organizing

In cases, TDD advocates may end up having 100s of tests checking the business logic, but the Button not being visible to user to actually invoke it due to layout issues.

H. Time/Resource Management Hazard

With test development put first, Devs, Seeing the deadline away spent too much of time writing auto-tests in the beginning of their tasks. Apart from the fact that this results in delays in having any first initial versions, this causes some other issues. The development tasks or subprojects roughly can be divided into two time periods, or as some joke about it the first 90% and the second 90%. We as developers simply suffer from under-estimating and in the first 90% try to do things in the right way and rush up in the second to finish the work.
I call the first half the precious half where you fix something just because you want your work to be perfect. In the second half you fix only if your tester complains, or does not compile or your automatic test is failing. You may even comment out an automatic test in the second half!. 

The quality of code in the first half is much higher than the second. Too much TDD ends up having beautifully crafted tests testing terrible code and until last day the developer could not put himself in the user's shoe to deliver something that he himself as user enjoys. 

Final Words

Again, This is not about all project types, team sizes, and development environments. It is very specific about MES customization. 

Do we really need ArchiMate? UML vs BPMN vs ArchiMate

UML and BPMN are two well known modelling languages that when used in combination in software solution delivery project, they can cover a very wide spectrum ranging from cross-organizational business processes to classes that can be used to generate executable code.
The question I am facing now is the necessity of utilizing the ArchiMate modelling language.
While I realize that some elements in ArchiMate do not have direct equivalents in BPMN or UML, but do they actually create enough value to justify introduction of another modelling language?
Some googling shows that the language is used with a vast level of divergence by system architects which questions the clarity and usefulness of the language. After all, for a modelling language to be more effective than natural language, it is expected to provide a consistent and normative way of describing the idea or the physical reality.
Almost every ArchiMate diagram that I've seen, although not being wrong, has been a surprise and difficult to verify and understand.
The current guidelines in ArchiMate about defining the system in three layers are too vague to actually produce good quality design artifacts by system architects.

I have provided an example in a later post

The MES Solutions designed for the food, beverage and the pharmaceutical industries need to cover few extra requirements to be used along with eBRS systems. These requirements are mainly driven by regulatory requirements about how process data should be stored and protected to be able to be used as part of batch records.

The US FDA’s CFR 21 Part 11 has become the baseline requirement for MES system used in these industry even outside the US.

http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFRSearch.cfm?CFRPart=11

An important section of this regulation is the requirement for linking records and signatures :

Electronic signatures and handwritten signatures executed to electronic records shall be linked to their respective electronic records to ensure that the signatures cannot be excised, copied, or otherwise transferred to falsify an electronic record by ordinary means  

MES Systems generally use Encryption Algorithms for Digital Signatures to satisfy this requirement. This means anyone who does not have the ‘Private’ key, will not be able to forge the signature and it is assumed that having access to the Primary Key is not considered ‘ordinary’.

While not explicitly said, using Database level security is not usually considered enough protection against ordinary tempering of the signature and that is mostly because of the preventable but prevalent loose security in DB level in industries.

Engineers frequently ask for and successfully acquire higher access rights that they needed for commissioning, maintenance and debugging systems. By having the access rights to add/update/delete records,  a user can easily clone signature data if they are not digitally signed. 

Recently I was in an MES bootcamp and in interesting debate started among representatives from two companies working in two different domains.
The debate started around relative complexity of Production tracking solutions and Inventory tracking solutions.
To understand the problem it is important to have some basic understanding of the meaning of these two terms in the context that people were using it:
Production tracking is recording the information about activities performed in a plant to make a product or deliver a service. for example the number of tonnes passed through a washing machine can be a production figure.
On the other hand, Inventory tracking is trying to provide information about quantity and quality of materials in a plant or more precisely in storage locations. going back to the washing machine example, the amount of material before and after the washing machine work-cell would be an inventory information.

by my example it sounds like the inventory tracking is a more advanced and challenging task, especially because we know that we can 'infer' the production tonnes if we know the inventories over time.

This is like trying to compare Derivatives and Integrals in calculus. It is probably a useless argument anyway. We know in some industries like food or high-tech, the production process is very complex while little or of little value inventory is maintained.
In contrast, going to bulk material processes, usually the production processes are very simple, but the value of the inventory is of more interest.

This may sound a simple and easy resolution, but in reality things are never that easy!
In projects that I have worked in, although theoretically these two sets of data could be inferred from each other, but as a matter of fact they tend to live independently and most of the time in an inconsistent manner.
It is a good practice to think why this happens and how we can marry these two data sets. Is it even possible and wise?

Material Model for Grain

Recently I had a very heated argument with a customer representative about how a material grade should be modelled in ISA 95 model. To make question clear let's have a look at ISA 95 standard for material class and definition. It's basically a class diagram in UML for classes without method or property.

As you should've expected. there is nothing domain specific there and that is open to interpretation. And this is how it should be. But ISA 95 standard gives an example that models Aluminium as a Material Class and A Grade Aluminium as Material Definition. This example is provided out of any solution context.

We were discussing how different grain grades such as APH2-Wheat or FEED-Wheat should be modelled. To my colleague it was obvious that they should be modelled as different material definitions to adhere to ISA 95 standard.  These are few arguments supporting this model
1. We can model commodities like 'Wheat' as material classes,
2. The example from ISA 95 shows this is probably how standard is meant to be used
3. The ISA 95 does not have any other pre-defined structure close to grade concept

So why I even doubted that? Maybe because I'm also a software engineer and I might be able to read some implicit info out a UML diagram. While it's not very complicated, but understanding OO concepts is crucial to understand the above diagram and any ISA 95 model.
In my opinion (Which I will defend next) , 'Grain' is a material class and 'Wheat' is a material definition. What is the 'Grade'? It's simply a quality target or quality criteria. The 'Grade' concept should not and can not be forged into above object model. And it's not even required for ISA 95 compliance. Extensibility is the beauty of Object Oriented design.

What are my reasons for thinking like that?

1. In contrast to something like aluminium, grain can be mixed with minimum effort. let's say A-Grade and C-Grade wheat get mixed and form B-Grade which is still Wheat. modelling grades as materials according to above UML chart means objects of type A-Grade and C-Grade are replaced with an object of type B-Grade. Knowing that no business entity has been deleted or created and instead they are just sitting next to each other makes such a model un-necessarily irrelevant to physical reality. E.g. if you put enough of A-Grade then type of result object can change or even become undetermined. This does not match Object Oriented principals where type of objects are defined and can not change.
If you model grade as quality criteria, then two objects of type 'Wheat' one fulfilling quality criteria of 'A-Grade' and the other one fulfilling quality criteria of 'C-Grade' form a set that now fulfils quality criteria of 'B-Grade'. I see this model closer to reality. I know if I put too much of A-Grade then resulting set will tend to satisfy 'A-Grade' and my model supports that.

2 Overlapping Grades
We know wheat can be categorized to two different grades. For example APH2 wheat can also be assumed to be Feed Wheat. Same material falls into different grades depending on specification and standard used. different countries on different years have different specifications.
looing closely at above chart shows every lot can only have one material associated to it. This means either we will have to ignore this real-life fact or our model will not comply with ISA 95 standard!
But if we have grades as separate objects, every lot can get associated with multiple grades and we won't need to break ISA 95 model

I probably could list few more reasons, but after all it's a reality of an engineer's life that sometimes designs are imposed to him. I wish we had more education on ISA 95 before actually starting to design the solution