No Magic MagicDraw Room for Improvement

LY
SCM Build/Release Manager at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

It is pretty versatile, but that versatility also brings some complications. Sometimes, it can be overly complicated to do some trivial things. It would be helpful if they gave you some best practices in their toolset.

They don't really support code engineering, and that's why we have to move to Enterprise Architect. MagicDraw is stuck at C++03 standards, whereas most C++ programs today want to use the latest definition of the C++ standards. We were at C++11, and we wanted to do code engineering with C++11 or 17, but they didn't support it. That pushed us into a different tool, which is Sparx Enterprise Architect.

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TJ
President at I2R, Inc.

The software is a little more challenging if you haven't been trained on how to use it.  No Magic has developed many guides and documents to assist your learning effort, but it doesn't replace that good ole fashion hands-on classroom training.  With No Magic, you are basically give a blank canvas then you choose the modeling perspective you are going to use for your model.  

To me, one of the one of the big keys to understanding the modeling environment, is understanding and knowing what perspectives and tools to use and where due to the fact that there are tons of ways that you can model something. While there is not necessarily a right or wrong way to modeling, you need a standard approach, but you still don't use all the tools that are necessarily available in that set. It can get confusing.

When you go into creating a model, you select the perspective you want to use.  However, if you crossover perspectives, as I sometimes do, to get to different modeling elements, I have had problems with my symbology changing without being able to reverse it.  I thinks there are opportunities for improvement and will be for some time to come.  But I believe that at some point in the future, the modeling symbology will be more standardize across the various modeling perspectives.  

One of the biggest problems with model-based systems engineering is that there just isn't enough training. There are certain colleges beginning to introduce it and use it in the classroom. There's just not been a whole lot of training out there for it like there is in a lot of other areas.

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Korhan Candan - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a aerospace/defense firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

One potential area for improvement is the recommendation feature. At times, we face challenges in locating specific features, and we have to reach out for assistance in finding the information we need.

So, the recommendation could be enhanced.

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March 2024
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JOSETRELLES - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Refrigeration Product Development Division at Indurama

It would be better if the User Interface were updated. At the moment, it's a classic environment. It reminds me of the old Windows interface, for example, Windows 95. It would be better to make it more user-friendly. It would also be better if it could integrate with SAP solutions.

It isn't easy to find experts in the field. It's hard to find people around the globe that have the necessary skills and expertise to manage this solution. For example, in our case, we needed someone with refrigeration knowledge that also knew how to use the tool, and that was a challenge. We also had issues relating to erasing. Sometimes, it kept it in the background and didn't erase it at all. We had to review the entire list to ensure that the item was deleted.

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TJ
President at I2R, Inc.

I would like to see the ability to deploy live business process models and capture real-time data (without the need for another product tool) so you don't have to be dependent on other products for this functionality.

The bottom line is that it's very frustrating to have to acquire multiple tools to build a business process automation capability. Magic Draw, with all its capability, comes the closest, at least in my opinion, to providing a complete product that supports both the business and engineering sides of the equation. 

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DR
Systems Engineer at Marinha do Brasil (Oficial)

The product is very expensive. There could be a trial version for students. It will be helpful.

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MH
Director, Strategy and Consulting at a university with 5,001-10,000 employees

The documentation for MagicDraw and the video tutorials compared to those of the other companies are really a big area for improvement.

The other area would be having some profiles and ready-to-use patterns. It's something that is missing in MagicDraw compared to that in other tools. I think that it would be very helpful to have such profiles and ready-to-use patterns that would kickstart any architecture asset.

Licensing is expensive for this solution.

I believe that the overall UX needs to be completely reformed. The UI UX of the tool is not really user-friendly.

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PF
Director at a engineering company with 11-50 employees

The price of the solution could be reduced.

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it_user161658 - PeerSpot reviewer
enterprise architect, IT architect, freelancer at Dr. Nink IT Consulting

As an architect who switches abstraction levels between enterprise architecture, project architecture, and system architecture I would highly appreciate standardized integration with EAM tools like Alfabet (formerly planningIT) e.g. using XMI.

The MagicDraw Teamwork Server allows for collaboration of modelers throughout an organization or even enterprise. But model size and concurrency are restricted due to the storage system. A real database storage layer in combination with lazy loading is needed to get rid of the necessity to split models in handy chunks today. Larger models slow you down; committing, updating, merging of branches and comparing of models (diff) do not scale yet; issues will hopefully be solved with upcoming V19.

Moreover, for EAM it is very important to not think in tons of models, but in an enterprise-wide repository (one database) instead with access via web portal and roles & rights management and alike enterprise features. Such features are subsequently built into the product (teamwork cloud, enterprise data warehouse) and will hopefully be merged in an upcoming version.

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WL
Systems Engeriner/Owner at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

I wouldn't say anything negative about No Magic MagicDraw. But there is a steep learning curve. The steep learning curve applies to two things - system engineering and INCOSE. INCOSE, I-N-C-O-S-E international systems engineering. INCOSE is what most people use today for system engineering, for building systems, and deploying and maintaining them in a full life cycle. For MagicDraw there is a steep learning curve if you don't have the system engineering domain experience because a lot of folks go in there and say, "Okay, I'm going to do model-based system engineering." MagicDraw has a model-based system engineering tool but it only allows you to draw the diagram or the model. Then you need to understand the relationships between the processes and activities.

So some people can pick it up, but it's a steep learning curve. You have to do the correct keystrokes to portray what it is you're really trying to do. You take a picture, an ER diagram, Entity Relationship diagram, which is a diagram that shows all the components and how they relate to each other, not just an arrow. You can say this component influences another component or another component enables integration, etc... Things like that. You have to know what your relationships are and MagicDraw allows you to do that really well.

But they do provide manuals. They have a lot of manuals that you can go through for each plug-in they have. You have the system engineering piece, and then you have the DoDAAC, which is the DOD architecture. They use what they call a UPDM, that's a DoDAAC standard. You also have the UAF. System Ellis is the base for everything, but you've got other pieces for the government first. When working for the government, they require that you do your architecture using the DoDAAC. So it has the DoDAAC too, because the government likes certain things. It depends on who your customer is and what they want.

For the next releases, I would like to have them import requirements from other sources. They could make it very easy to do that because there are a lot requirements management tools like DOORS, D-O-O-R-S, Dynamic Object Oriented Management. A lot of folks use DOORS to create a requirement. For those requirements you allocate them to a component in the architecture and a verification method for that requirement. It would be good if we could import those into MagicDraw as components so you don't have to manually do these things.

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KC
Expert System Engineer at a transportation company with 51-200 employees

The cost of upgrading the product should be lower.

It would be useful if there were a way of comparing the production and design models. It is not necessary because there are other tools to validate the design but having it included would be good.

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WM
Adjunct Professor at a university with 501-1,000 employees

I dabble with the OMG (object management group) in terms of definitions of standard. OMG is now working on SysML version 2.0 and there is significant work that needs to be done to eliminate some of the ambiguities and foibles in the standard itself.

The user interface could have better quality tutorials. When I go to the manual, I can hyperlink along, but there are subtleties that you literally have to find by trying and doing.

One of the issues I am currently experiencing is with one of my environments. I use a Windows environment and a Mac environment. When I am working with my Mac and I right-click to copy and paste, it doesn't work. 

I find myself going back to the old control characters like Ctrl-C to copy and Ctrl-V to paste. Also, some of the ways that one can create elements and move more at a hierarchy in the model of view and the browser, don't work. I finally found an approach that has worked. 

In the next release, it would be better to have cleaner manuals that lead people along in a simpler way.

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James Towers - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

The technical support is not very good and hasn't been since the company was bought out. It's difficult to raise a ticket, and they don't always respond.

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MH
Director, Strategy and Consulting at a university with 5,001-10,000 employees

The documentation for MagicDraw and the video tutorials compared to other competitors is an area for improvement.

In the next release, I would like to see more profiles and ready to use patterns. Rather than working from scratch, I would like to be able to tap into these patterns.

Some of the other competitors have that capability and I think that it is extremely helpful.

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TJ
President at I2R, Inc.

For the most part, No Magic is a great tool for modeling. However, there are some technical features that you have to study and do research on to be able to understand.

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AP
CEO at SEP Consulting kft.

The licenses are expensive compared to similar tools. At the moment, the user is open to using MagicDraw if it's 15% more than other solutions. If it were to cost any more, they wouldn't use it. 

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James Towers - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
Buyer's Guide
Business Process Design
March 2024
Find out what your peers are saying about Dassault, Sparx Systems, Microsoft and others in Business Process Design. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.