Bachelor Thesis Tobias Schrade

A Visual Tool for Conflict Resolution in EA Repositories

Abstract

In an ever-changing world enterprises are forced to adapt and change not only their business processes but also the infrastructure behind these processes on a frequent basis. These changes require exact planning which is a task of the enterprise architecture (EA) management. Fields of EA management are not only knowing the as is state but also designing the plan state and performing the transformation. A difficult part is the transformation and merge of the as is state and the plan state. It is inevitable that conflicts, which cannot be solved automatically, occur during the merge. In this case further input from the EA architects is required. Algorithms to detect these conflicts and provide conflict resolution tasks already exist and we will use these and enrich the outcome by adding visualizations of the conflicts.

In the first part of the work we will analyze several existing approaches and applications for conflict visualizations. Based on our analysis we will then derive the requirements for such visualizations with a focus on scalability for large (<=1k Objects) EA models. Furthermore we will develop a design for our own visualization with the goal to enhance the process of solving conflicts by adding relevant context information. This visualization will not only include the model itself but also information about the roles who designed the parts which led to the conflict to improve collaboration. In addition to this we will add a change memory to solve similar conflicts in one batch. At the end of the work we will provide a prototype implementation with the functions described above.

Research Objective

Research Questions

Final Presentation

Literature

[Fa13]
Farwick, M., Hauder, M., Roth, S., Matthes, F., Breu, R.: Enterprise Architecture Documentation: Empirical Analysis of Information Sources for Automation, 46th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 46), Maui, Hawaii, 2013.
[Ro13a]
Roth, S., Hauder, M., Farwick, M., Matthes, F., Breu, R.: Enterprise Architecture Documentation: Current Practices and Future Directions, 11th International Conference on Wirtschaftsinformatik (WI), Leipzig, Germany, 2013.
[Ro13b]
Roth, S., Matthes, F.: Future Research Topics in Enterprise Architectures Evolution Analysis, Design for Future (DFF) Workshop, 2013.
[Ro13c]
Roth, S., Hauder, M., Matthes, F.: Evolution of Enterprise Architecture Models through Stakeholder Engagement: Facilitating Conflict Resolution with Tasks, MRT Workshop, Miami, 2013 (in submission)
[HMR12]
Hauder, M., Matthes, F., Roth, S.: Challenges for Automated Enterprise Architecture Documentation. In: 7th International Workshop on Trends in Enterprise Architecture Research (TEAR), Barcelona, Spain, 2012.
[Wie12]
Wieland, K.. Langer, P., Seidl, M., Wimer, M., Kappel, G.: Turning Conflicts into Collaboration, Computer Supported Cooperative Work: The Journal of Collaborative Computing, tba:1-52, 2012