Enterprise Architect comes standard with an Find Orphans search, which is supposed to give you a list of all elements that are no longer used in the model, and thus better be removed from the model altogether.
The problem with this search is that it will only report elements that are not shown on a diagram; which should not be the only criterion to determine if an element is an orphan or not. Not being on a diagram is just fine.… Read more
How can I find out where an element or one of its specialized elements is used on a diagram in Enteprise Architect?
With this SQL search you can answer that question immediately and in a useful way.
Suppose we have modeled an inheritance hierarchy of animals as such
And our animals are being used as the classifier of Activity partitions in various Activity diagrams
And on the occasional Sequence diagram
Even with a simple example like this one it is not trivial to find all diagrams that use a rodent, or a bird.… Read more
One of the major benefits of using a tool such as Enterprise Architect is that you create traceability. You store the relations between different model elements in your model.
The tricky part is to effectively use that traceability for your impact analyses. Following these instructions you can create SQL Searches in EA that instantly show the impact a certain element has on the rest of the model and present them in a clear and useful way.
In order to do impact analysis you have to know, and preferable document, your meta model.… Read more
Enterprise Architect from Sparx Systems is the UML CASE tool I use day-to-day to get my analysis done.
One of the great features of EA is that it allows you to define your own searches using SQL. Because EA runs on pretty much any type of database (the standard for local models is MS Access) defining your searches in SQL can be very powerful.
On of the problems with working on a big (as in 50.000 elements) model is the ability to quickly find the elements you need.… Read more