On Monday January 13th 2020, I attended an event organized by Cyberwayfinder. The event thema was about the different types of architecture required to take care of business strategy, data, technology, security and risk in order to design a Digital Enterprise in a structured way.
The inspection process
At some point one of the presenters talked about an important process for Enterprise/Business/IT/Application Architects : the inspection of the delivery.
This is a well-known problem in IT projects: the target architecture is very often not respected for many good and bad reasons.
This raises the question of “inspection”. When do we inspect the work in progress as Enterprise Architects ? Do we have a mandate for inspection ?
Continuous or punctual inspection ?
We could imagine two types of inspection: continuous or punctual. The continuous inspection requires much more time but is maybe the only way in the context of agile projects…
What to do with deviations ?
At the end of an inspection, deviations could be identified. What can we do with such deviations ?
We accept the deviation and re-integrate it in the “AS-BUILT” architecture
We can ask an immediate rework because the deviation is not acceptable (e.g. bad implementation of security constraints)
We don’t accept the deviation but we don’t force the immediate rework : we register a “technical debt”.
Last year I wrote 2 jArchi scrips. Those scripts allow to add functionality to the Archimate toolkit. (The Archimate toolkit is a a tool which allow Business and IT Architects to model the Business/Enterprise/IT architectutes using the Archimate notation.)
I always need to search for my own scripts so I post them here also.
Script to add a note to a diagram:
/*
* New Archi Script
*/
console.log("AddNote Started !");
//var date = new Date();
//console.log(date.toString());
//var note = archimateView.createObject("note", 10, 200, -1, -1);
//note.setText("This is a note.\n\nHello World!");
//var note = visualObject.createObject("note", 10, 200, -1, -1);
// Get the first view in the current selection
var view = selection.filter("archimate-diagram-model").first();
// Get current date
var currentDate = new Date();
// Create a new note and set its text
var note = view.createObject("note", 10, 10, 300, -1);
note.text = view.name + "\n" + currentDate.toString() +"\n" + "Jean-Francois Declercq";
note.fillColor = "#e2e2be";
console.log("Note added to " + view.name);
Script to export a diagram as picture with the name of the view as proposed image name:
//Export View as image (PNG) with date and diagram name in filename.
// Get the first view in the model
//var view = $("view").first();
var view = selection.filter("archimate-diagram-model").first();
// Get the Base64 bytes of the view in PNG format. Can use "PNG", "BMP", "JPG" or "GIF"
// Options are scale (1 - 4) and margin (pixel value)
var bytes = $.model.renderViewAsBase64(view, "JPG", {scale: 1, margin: 20});
var date = new Date();
// Ask for a file name
var fileName = window.promptSaveFile( { title: "Save View", filterExtensions: [ "*.jpg" ], fileName: ""+ date.toISOString().replace(":","").replace("T","-").slice(0,15)+ "-" + view.name + ".jpg" } );
if(fileName) {
// Write to file
$.fs.writeFile(fileName, bytes, "BASE64");
}
