Implementation of a continuous delivery pipeline for enterprise architecture model evolution

The discipline of enterprise architecture (EA) is an established approach to model and manage the interaction of business processes and IT in an organization. Thereby, the EA model as a central artifact of EA is subject to a continuous evolution caused by multiple sources of changes. The continuous evolution requires a lot of effort in controlling and managing the evolution of the EA model. This is especially true when merging the induced changes from different sources in the EA model. Additionally, the lack of tool and automation support makes this a very time-consuming and error-prone task. The evolutionary character and the automated quality assessment of artifacts is a well-known challenge in the software development domain as well. To meet these challenges, the discipline of continuous delivery (CD) has emerged to be very useful. The evolution of EA model artifacts shows similarities to the evolution of software artifacts. Therefore, we leveraged practices of CD to practices of EA maintenance. Thus, we created a conceptual framework for automated EA model maintenance. The concepts were realized in a first prototype and were evaluated in a fictitious case study against equivalence classes based on EA model metrics and a set of several requirements for automated EA model maintenance from research. Overall, the concepts prove to be a promising basis for further refinement, implementation, and evaluation in research in an industrial context.