Mr Jason Gorman, in his post "Test-driven Enterprise Architecture" (September 16, 2008) [*], writes:
I've discovered that the most effective way to align business goals with the software and systems we deliver is through heirachies of tests, not through pretty pictures and dotted lines.
I have to disagree, in the essence. It is surely true that most of those dotted lines get drawn without criterion, which is indeed what makes the difference between an Analysis and a bunch of dotted lines. Still, the problem domain and the solution domain do not coincide, rather the latter is a subset/subproduct of the former. In practice, as information engineering tells, the solution domain emerges from the opportunities for automation that come from the process and data models at the business level. Here is a gap, or rather, a "distinction", just like the distinction between syntax and semantics, that must not be neglected, otherwise not only the understanding, but the very quality we are after is gone, with all that in fact counts.
