Each tool has its own unique strengths and weaknesses. EA is very much a diagram and model driven tool. In EA, items are placed on a diagram and thus created in the project hierarchy. The diagrams are “rich” in that they can contain a lot of metadata that describes the model in more detail.
EA often appeals to the technical/development side of the house because they work with things that can be well described with rich diagrams.
You can add additional information in the property pages behind each shape. While some of this information is quite structured (like use case steps), I think it’s fair to say that EA’s strengths are on the front end – the diagramming component.
CaseComplete has diagramming capabilities as well, but the diagrams are not the overarching feature of the tool. Rather, CC has two big strengths that set it apart:
- Ease of getting requirements INTO the tool and
- A sophisticated reporting engine to generate reports from this data (e.g. get information OUT of the tool).
When it comes to requirements, diagrams are useful but not definitive. For example, a use case diagram is a great roadmap, but contains a small amount of information. The richest part of a requirements model is typically in the text – the words used to describe steps, behaviors, and attributes.
The focus of CC has been on the speed and ease of getting that textual information into the tool. It may sound like nuance at first, but if the UI doesn’t feel completely natural and intuitive to the way an analyst needs to work – requirements won’t get put into the tool properly. If it’s a chore, users will either avoid doing it or not do it well. We’ve tried to make a tool that analysts love to use, and in my biased view, we’ve achieved some level of success here. ;-)
Thus, CC appeals to the analyst side of the house – the folks who are typically gathering textual information in Word and Excel and perhaps supplementing diagrams with Visio. From that perspective, CC is a much better approach.
The other thing CC does very well is generate reports and documents. Since this is a large part of the analyst’s work, this is also what makes it appealing to them. No tool is perfect at everything, but the reporting framework in CC is as powerful as it is flexible. Analysts can extract precisely the information they want from their requirements model and automatically generate a report with it – a report that will look exactly the way they want.
Anyhow, it’s not our style to bash competitors, but it’s fair to say that each tool has unique strengths. It’s also a reason we built the feature to export use cases out of CC and import them into EA, where the technical team can take it over from there.