Ed Lobo wrote:

I have been confronted with 27 interfaces from all over the university. The more I looked the more I realised there were undocumented pieces of integration, all of them using the current legacy system in one way or another.  I also had the joy of discovering that none of the transformation took into consideration many of such integration components. There came the point where we realized we could not decommission the legacy system until we took care of all integration pieces.

So, here I am, I have 2 developers and 8 months to re-build all interfaces. Good as they are, my guys could not possible cope with the amount of design and build that needs to be taken care of. My boss realized that and immediately approved for me to contract another 2 SOA specialists to help us out. Great, so now I need to put it all together.

The first area I needed was to create a control source view of the enterprise and group all interfaces in logical segments ort business areas:  Enrolments, applications, Unit selection, etc. And baseline all the work but as you probably know when you are looking at all this together the view is too high, I just do not have enough to get better estimations of what needs to be done, who by and how long it will take. There is always the old SWAG estimation but let’s be honest, that is not good enough.

So I turned to EA high level designs and made a control source pout of it. When I moved to the builder view I made a rough plan of each service and out of it came a catalogue. Each service as a package and each operation as a sub package. But that was as far as I could go without the help from my developers. These are the guys who can really answer the questions.

At this point I thought what if I export each package (with all my diagrams) and give my developers each service? They can explain the full functionality, requirements and issues of each. So I did.

Not only did they give me their answers explained on a line by line and connection by connection, but Id gave me time to actually create a catalogue template. All I needed to do was import their changes into each package and voila! A catalogue was made within the day. How cool was that?

I have to say that this feature is an absolute must have from now on. Not only does this make my life easier, it also makes my team’s life (and my manager’s) easier too.