An academic study on students’ experiences of using Archi

Started by ville_seppanen, November 06, 2021, 09:14:37 AM

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ville_seppanen

Hi,

I think some of you might find this interesting. We conducted a little study on Information Systems bachelor students' experiences on learning to model enterprise architecture using Archi and two other (intentionally different) tools. The paper was published in the 50th IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference. You can find the open access version of the paper here:

https://jyx.jyu.fi/bitstream/handle/123456789/73015/-1/c2_enterprise_FIE.pdf

If any of you is interested in the educational context of the EA, do not hesitate to contact me.


Phil Beauvoir

#1
Hi, thanks for sharing this, I read it and found it quite interesting.

The survey was done in Spring 2019. Archi has come a long way since then and we now have jArchi, coArchi, and Herve Jouin's plug-ins and these partially address the following comment:

QuoteHowever, due to (Archi's) current technical limitations (e.g., the lack of database repository, and multi-user support) it obviously has its shortcomings when considering more complex and demanding use cases akin to real-world EA modeling problems.

Generally, Archi is received positively:

QuoteIn this regard, the students quite unanimously agreed that Archi was the easiest to learn, and also that the logic of Archi was the easiest to understand.

...students found Archi easier to learn and use than Arter Arc and Microsoft Visio. Furthermore, Archi was seen to more effectively facilitate the process of learning modeling than the other tools. We concluded that it is crucial for information technology students to understand the high level view, and to learn to model enterprise architecture landscapes with more than just one tool in order to facilitate deep understanding of modeling languages and convention.

Another interesting finding:

QuoteFor the ability to support communication between the different EA stakeholders (e.g., business and IT), the otherwise well-evaluated Archi was assessed to perform quite poorly in this regard combined mean 1.95). This is probably due to its strong orientation towards the ArchiMate modeling, which students considered not being an optimal medium for communicating with business stakeholders.

I think that might be a point that some people might agree or disagree with. I think it depends on how the model is designed and presented, what views and viewpoints are used for different target stakeholders, how well annotated, etc.

Thanks again!
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Jean-Baptiste Sarrodie

Hi,

Thank you for sharing this. Really interesting indeed.

I have one remark though: the paper says:
QuoteArchi, on the other hand, is built on the ArchiMate metamodel and therefore allows a user to only create models that adhere to the standard (although there are some errors in the current implementation).

I can say for sure that there are (and were) no errors in Archi which implements strickly the ArchiMate specification (which turned out to be faulty in their 3.0 version and were corrected in the 3.0.1), so could you provide more information about these "errors" mentioned?

Regards,

JB
If you value and use Archi, please consider making a donation!
Ask your ArchiMate related questions to the ArchiMate Community's Discussion Board.

ville_seppanen

QuoteI can say for sure that there are (and were) no errors in Archi which implements strickly the ArchiMate specification (which turned out to be faulty in their 3.0 version and were corrected in the 3.0.1), so could you provide more information about these "errors" mentioned?

Sorry, this was poorly worded by us and "errors" refer to the ArchiMate specification and not to that how Archi implements it.

BR,
Ville