Transversal Requirements Management in Sparx EA: Unifying Requirements Across Projects

Introduction

In complex organizations, requirements are rarely isolated to a single project. Regulatory, security, and architectural mandates often cut across multiple initiatives, teams, and systems. Managing such transversal requirements—those that span many projects—requires a structured approach and the right tooling. Sparx Enterprise Architect (EA) offers powerful capabilities to manage and trace these requirements across models and repositories.

This guide explores how to implement transversal requirements management using Sparx EA effectively, with a focus on structure, reusability, traceability, and governance.

1. What Are Transversal Requirements?

Transversal requirements are common to multiple projects or domains. Examples include:

• GDPR compliance
• Authentication and access control policies
• Cloud provider constraints
• Enterprise-wide service quality benchmarks

These requirements should not be redefined or duplicated in every project—they should be centralized and linked to ensure consistency.

2. Structuring Requirements in EA

Sparx EA provides several ways to structure and manage transversal requirements:

• Create a dedicated Requirements Package at the top level of the repository (e.g., "Global Requirements")
• Use Requirement elements with custom stereotypes (e.g., EnterpriseStandard, SecurityRequirement)
• Organize by domains like legal, data, infrastructure, or user experience
• Tag each requirement with metadata such as priority, applicability, and owner

3. Linking Requirements Across Projects

• Use Realization links from project-specific requirements or system functions to global requirements
• Establish Trace relationships to capture dependencies and rationales
• Generate traceability matrices or dynamic views using EA’s Relationship Matrix or Custom SQL
• Use Prolaborate dashboards to visualize transversal traceability for stakeholders

4. Avoiding Duplication and Silos

Duplicate requirements increase the risk of inconsistency and compliance failure. Best practices include:

• Store global requirements in a read-only shared repository or base project
• Link rather than copy—use diagrams and links to reference instead of creating clones
• Periodically run scripts to detect identical or conflicting requirement texts

5. Enabling Impact Analysis and Compliance Reporting

With centralized requirements, EA enables powerful impact analysis:

• Which systems rely on a common data encryption requirement?
• What projects must be updated if the retention period changes?
• Which capabilities are not yet linked to critical enterprise policies?

Use built-in reports or SQL-based custom dashboards to surface gaps and risks.

6. Versioning and Change Management

Transversal requirements evolve. EA helps track and govern changes:

• Baseline requirement packages using EA’s versioning feature
• Link requirements to change requests via Change elements
• Use discussion threads and model mail to communicate updates
• Document rationale in element notes or external documents linked via URLs

7. Automation and Scripting Support

Use EA scripting or jScript (via jArchi) to:

• Enforce naming and tagging conventions
• Generate audit logs for transversal compliance
• Validate linkage completeness across all projects

Conclusion

Managing transversal requirements in Sparx EA ensures consistency, compliance, and traceability across the enterprise. By leveraging EA’s powerful modeling, linking, and reporting capabilities, organizations can centralize critical requirements and ensure their correct implementation across all project boundaries. The result is more robust systems, reduced duplication, and better alignment with regulatory and architectural goals.

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