Overview to Procead EA Extension

Driving your development process in-model, by-model

Procead  is an Add-In for the Sparx® Enterprise Architect which seamlessly integrates your process model with the project model and ensures compliance with all its workflow and qualification rules during the ongoing development activities.

Your process is defined by means of project execution and product qualification work flows.

You tell Procead in simple UML Diagrams the rules to monitor during the ongoing development activities.

Procead  recognizes changes to elements, detects rule breaches, offers corrective actions and supports activities like decision making, baselining and tracing of code realisations.

From now on Procead maintains the version and status fields of model elements to give you reliable information of quantitative and qualitative progress as well as the basis to exact configuration management.

Intrinsic at project, package and element level.

Working with Procead

  1. Define your project decision gates (aka stages aka quality gates)
  2. Draw your project execution strategy (aka flow)
  3. Define your product (quality) states
  4. Draw your product qualification flow
  5. Make your first project decision to target a decision gate.
  6. Work on your Model (Procead is now watching):
    • Modify elements/packages
    • Promote/Demote elements/packages via its status fields.
  7. Initiate project progress decisions to finalize project stages. Procead may automatically create configuration baselines, stores your decisions and baseline information to the model.

Each time you break the rules, Procead notifies you to accept or decline a corrective action.

Defining Project Execution

Model your project execution strategy to your needs. Diagrams, predefined patterns and stereotype elements are part of Proceads' MDG.

  • The project execution strategy is defined by decision gates in a state diagram.
  • Transitions between decision gates represent your work between project stages and are used to rule your process flow and versioning.
  • Decision gates may be associated with work products to simultaneously define reference configurations and decision criteria.
  • A configuration is defined by a set of dependencies to its configuration items - your work products. Any element or package may become a configuration item.

Procead is now set up to guide you through your ongoing work quantitavely. Work products aligned by this methodology will be set at a baseline once a progress ruling has been made at the referenced decision gate

Defining Product Qualification

Model your product qualification process to your needs. Diagrams, predefined patterns and stereotype elements are part of Proceads' MDG.

  • The product qualification process is defined by product states in a state diagram.
  • Each product state gets a quality level assigned, expressed by a normalized integer number.
  • Relative larger numbers map to higher quality levels regardless of absolute degree – they are solely used to determine qualification (promotion) or disqualification (demotion).
  • And again – same as in the execution strategy – transitions rule the flow between product states.

This completes your setup and adds rules to cope with changes on elements with respect to their qualification.