Navigation:  Reports > Matrix Reports > Using the EA Relationship Matrix

In case you are not already a user of the EA Relationship Matrix, it's a great way of getting another view into your EA model, focusing the relationships between things, rather than on the things themselves.

For example, it may be the standard in your model that every Requirement has a owner. You could just create a Tagged Value for each Requirement, with the name of the owner, but that would make it harder to see all the requirements for a person.

Instead, let's say you decided to link each person to a Requirement with a simple 'Dependency' link:

With a small set of data like this, it's easy to see which people don't own and Requirements, and fairly easy to see where they are Requirements with no owner.

But what if we have 10s or 100s of requirements, and 10s of possible owners. Drawing diagrams for each one will be tedious, and won't help us to see the bigger picture.

The EA Relationship Matrix lets us get a much better view of the same information:

The EA Relationship Matrix also allows us to create and delete the 'Dependency' relationships between people and Requirements, just by clicking the appropriate cell. This is MUCH faster that drawing diagrams, and a good reason to keep to the standard, un-stereotyped links between elements. We'd like to use a <<owns>>Dependency relationship ,but that would be hard to draw using the EA Relationship Matrix, as it doesn't support stereotypes very well.