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, essentially. It is certainly 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!
On the other hand, tests cannot drive solution development: the problem domain and the solution domain just do not map one-to-one to each other, rather the latter is a sub-product of the former. In practice, as information engineering teaches, the solution domain emerges out of the opportunities for automation identified within process and data models at the business level. Here is 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.