Day: 23 February 2017

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Safeguarding Against Unintended Data Loss

Your project’s data is important and obviously you do not want to lose or damage any of it.

We recommend the following steps to help guard against accidental deletions of, or damage to, your project data:

  1. Turn on the ‘Enable recovery of deleted items’ option in your schema. Doing so ensures that items are only marked ‘recoverable’ when you delete them. So they can be restored if their deletion was a mistake.
  2. Enable change histories for items wherever possible. Doing so ensures that when cross references are deleted. The items at both ends of the link will have entries added to their change histories recording the deletion of the link between them.
  3. Do not grant BASELINE_RW or ACCESS_BYPASS privilege to any user unless it is absolutely necessary. In general, it is preferable to use the user profile MANAGER for operations where these privileges are needed, rather than to give them to a user who can use them at any time.
  4. Avoid using the MANAGER login account whenever possible. This user profile has all privileges and maximum security clearance. Therefore, you can ANYTHING when logged-in with this user profile, including deleting everything in your database!
  5. Create a separate administrative account, perhaps called MGR, ADMIN or ROOT, and give this account all privileges except ACCESS_BYPASS and BASELINE_RW
  6. We recommend not giving the delete privilege to every user

Safeguarding Against Unintended Data Loss

Article updated 05/12/2018 – Added recommendation to not give every user delete priv
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Highlight Important Values with Colour

Handling masses amount of data within a project can be very challenging. Especially when only wanting to see certain values. Adding colour to these values is not only simple but very effective.

It is usual for most types of information, particularly user stories, features, needs, requirements, test cases and test results to have attributes that characterise the items, such as:

– The priority or release cycle of a user story
– The result of a test
– The responsibility of a system requirement
– The severity of a risk

It is helpful to colour-code these values and to display the attributes with background or foreground colours set from the attributes’ values. To do this:

1. Define colours for the category code’s values in the schema
2. When the category is shown in a view cell, enable use of colour, either foreground or background

You can choose any colours for your values, but there are obvious advantages in using ‘traffic light’ based colours to convey items that are important, delinquent, serious or failures (typically red) and optional, low, OK, satisfactory or pass (typically green), with orange and yellow used for intermediate values. We typically use a bright blue for unset values, simply because they ‘stand out’.

Highlight Important Values with Colour
Highlight Important Values with Colour

Hopefully after this you can start to implment colour into projects making it easier for everyone locating key data. The cradle help offers in depth detail on topics relating to values in colour.

Article Updated 04/02/2019 – Added intro and conclusion
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Control Users’ Sharing of Cradle Modules

Cradle is modular. Each module has a licence. Most of Cradle’s functionality is in the PDM (project data management) module which is free. Users can do 80% of their work for FREE. You can add new users at ZERO cost. You pay for the other modules’ licences. These licences are shared dynamically between all the logged-in users, moving to and from users as they work.

If your Cradle system allows many simultaneous users, you may want to restrict which users can use those features controlled by licences that cost money. For example, your Cradle system may allow 25 concurrent users, but you may only have 5 REQ licences. You want to share these 5 licences between 10 of the 25 people, which means that there are 25 – 10 = 15 people who should never be able to use a REQ licence.

Each user’s login account (called a ‘user profile’) contains a set of ‘Module Access Rights’. You can use these to optionally deny some users the ability to use any of the chargeable Cradle licences. Doing this ensures there are fewer concurrent users who can use these modules’ licences, so the licences are shared between fewer concurrent users, and so are more likely to be available to those users who need to use them.

Control Users Sharing of Cradle Modules
Control Users Sharing of Cradle Modules

To do this:

1. Start WorkBench and login to your database as a user with RW access to the user profiles whose access is to be changed. Typically this means to login as the leader of a team (user in the team who has TEAM_LEADER privilege) or a user with ACCESS_BYPASS privilege such as MANAGER.
2. Select ‘User Setup’ from the ‘Project’ tab
3. Choose the user profile to be changed from the drop-down list
4. Select ‘Privileges’ and ‘Module Access Rights’
5. Clear the checkboxes for those modules that this user is not to access
6. Save the modified user profile

Cradle will display an error message if a user tries to do anything that requires a module licence that they cannot use.

We hope that this is helpful!

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Cradle History

Problem

Back after a coffee break?  You log-in to Cradle and can’t remember which item you were editing?

Solution

Then use the History sidebar, you will see the queries, items, matrices etc. that you have run in the past listed chronologically. You can remove an erroneously opened item from the history by selecting the text, rather than the icon, and right-clicking, you will be given the option to ‘Delete’ the entry.

For further information on retracing your steps.