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 businesses processes and IT in an organization. The EA model as a central artifact of EA is thereby affected by continuous evolution caused by multiple sources of changes. This requires a lot of effort in controlling and managing the evolution of the EA model, especially in 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 wellknown challenge in the software development domain as well. The discipline of Continuous Delivery (CD) has emerged to be very useful in meeting this challenge. As the evolution of EA model artifacts shows similarities to the evolution of software artifacts, this thesis maps the discipline of CD to the process of EA model maintenance as a concept for an automated approach to support the evolution of EA models. As a proof of concept, a prototype with JARVIS, a framework for the development of continuous software delivery systems, is developed and applied to a conceptual development model for EA artifacts. Both concepts are evaluated in a fictitious case study based on 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.