Author: Saurabh Mittal, PhD

An EA is a complex endeavor and involves people, processes, artifacts, technologies and data-exchanges. A lot of effort goes into EA design and requirements development. Consequently, requirement satisfaction is an integral part of EA engineering. Testing and evaluation (T&E) of any system or an enterprise architecture for that matter, begins with requirements. It is the backdrop on which the testing is performed and the architecture is evaluated.

T&E needs to be applied to each aspect of the EA, for example, governance, business processes, data and information artifacts, technology, software, etc. Methodologies are available that can do T&E for a particular aspect, however, an end-to-end T&E needs new approaches.

Another similar concept is verification and validation (V&V). While V&V relate more closely to models and software, T&E relates to actual systems and architectures. It is hard to perform V&V with Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) and Government-off-the-shelf (GOTS) when they become components in larger systems or architectures, due to the black-box nature of the various components. Consequently, T&E is performed to ensure that the requirements are satisfied when the conceptual EA goes into design and implementation phase.

Various T&E approaches for EA, not limited to: model-based testing, automated test-case generation, requirements traceability, analytic architectures, test-suite automation and dashboards development, need to defined for effective EA analytics.

Further Reading

1. Hoffman, M., Analysis of the current state of Enterprise Architecture Evaluation Methods and Practices, Proceedings of the European Conference on Information Management and Evaluation (ECIME), 2007
2. Gartner, Return on Enterprise Architecture: Measure it in Asset Productivity. Gartner G2 Report. Stamford, USA, Gartner, Inc.
3. Cane, S.A., McCarthy, R., Measuring the Impact of Enterprise Architecture, 7(2), Issues in Information Systems, 2007.
4. Morganwalp, J.M., Sage, A.P., Enterprise Architecture Measures of Effectiveness, International Journal of Technology, Policy and Management, 4(1), 2004.