Month: February 2017

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Linux or Windows

Spot the difference

Cradle is supported on whichever platform your business uses. Cradle WorkBench will run on Linux/Windows  Cradle Database Server (CDS) is equally at home on a Linux or Windows box. Of course Web Access is available wherever you browser runs. As you can see from the screenshots there is no need for users to learn a new UI between versions.

Screenshots in Linux and Windows
Windows or Linux

Convert Later?

Yes absolutely you can convert between versions. That’s great news for your IT department, if they decide to change the server machine they’ll need to port the data across to the new installation and then chat to salesdetails@threesl.com to obtain a new licence.

Continue reading “Linux or Windows”

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Linked Items in a Form

Seeing other linked items

When you want to see the other items that are linked to the current item in a Cradle display, you can do so by showing the linked items in a Form. This is an effective way to get a comprehensive overview of the interconnections in a formatted and repeatable way.

Linked items shown in a form
Items that are linked to the current item

You can find more information on setting up a form to display this links in this Cradle help article.

Alternatives

You can see items that are linked to the subject item in a number of different ways including:

  • Configure a View to show a linked items column
  • Use the right click context menu and select  Show  Linked  Items
  • Double click the item in a Table View to expand extra rows
  • Follow the [+] expansions in a tree view

The View method is as repeatable as setting in a form, the other methods are transient.

Article updated 05/12/2018 – Added link to Cradle help
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Clear Requirements

The Problem

The teacher, or your customer, envisages a house built on a hill, they see this as their requirements. In their mind they understand what they want, they have an inherent understanding of how a house should be oriented.

The pupil,  or supplier, may not have the same inherent understanding and this can disappoint the customer.

House 'on' in the loose sense, a hill
Requirement for a house ‘on’ a hill

The Managed Requirements Solution

Managing requirements, managing expectations, ensuring clear and unambiguous understanding creates a successful project and a happy customer.

Furthermore, following a defined process of elicitation, discussion, refinement and validation will ensure all parties are kept in the picture throughout the process. There should be no surprises.

The stages can be generalised as:

  • recording the Customer requirements (what the teacher said);
  • connecting these to System Requirements (what the pupil thinks is the right way to place a house on the hill);
  • reviewing and verifying with the customer that all is clear and understood (the teacher has a chance to see that the relative orientation has not been considered);
  • correction and update;
  • build and validate;
  • Happy customer!

Equally we live in the real world and thing need and do change. A process needs to cope with and manage those changes. These may be customer initiated, corrections as part of the refinement and understanding stage, or external influences.

Control and Managing Change

This could be through a set of documents, but this is not very scalable. The more complex and numerous the requirements, the more difficult it is to manage the inter dependencies between different parts of the document set.

Imagine the simple case in our example:

  • “The foundations shall comply with building regulation ABC”.

It is easy enough to imagine one chapter with some dimensions for the foundations and one building regulation document.

Remaining with the simplistic house:

  • “Kitchen wiring shall provide one outlet for each of the 12 appliances in accordance with regulation GHI(i)”,
  • “Lounge wiring shall provide a multiple in window bay and one outlet in each of the other corners in accordance with regulation GHI(i)”,
  • “Bedroom 1 shall provide one outlet in each corner of the room in accordance with regulation GHI(i)”,
  • “Bedroom2….”

It is still possible to get your head round the interconnects. It will be a bit more time consuming when GHI(i) is up-released to GHI(ii) and building work hasn’t started and you have to check all the items ordered for the socket outlets still comply in each room.

Conclusion

With a small scale step the complexity the above can soon become unmanageable. Our house may only have seven rooms, but what if these were tens of different compartments on a submarine, hundreds shops owned by a national retailer? GHI(ii)- sub section ‘Public accessible spaces’ is upgraded after a regulatory consultation. How many room specifications are affected?

In a managed solution, a simple report on elements dependent on GHI will give a quick way of calculating the cost impact of altering all the specified outlets. If the power outlets had been categorised when the requirements were written with say Public / Employee / Private access, the number affected, and thus the impact to your customer, could have been further refined.

Article Updated 30/01/2019 – Updated formatting

 

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Make a Hierarchy Diagram (HID)

What is a Hierarchy Diagram (HID)?

A Hierarchy Diagram (HID) is a diagram style that is used to graphically show cross references between items. A HID is a tree that starts with the item of interest (source item) and shows the items that are linked to it by cross references. Each of these items’ cross references can be shown with their cross referenced items.

What’s linked to what?

Generate a HID (Hierarchy Diagram) in Cradle for a clear graphical representation of how your items interconnect. Simple to see what depends on what at many levels.

 

Hierarchy Diagram Options and Information

When a HID is opened, the Control sidebar is refreshed to show the following tabs:

  • Starmap – Is a highly zoomed view of the diagram.
Starmap
Starmap
  • From Item – Shows details of the from item.
From Item
From Item
  • Hierarchy – Ability to define a hierarchy and set the links to follow for each item type.
Hierarchy
Hierarchy
  • Diagram Summary Information – Shows the number of items, cross references, levels and symbols in the current HID.
Diagram Summary
Diagram Summary

If you would like more information on Hierarchy Diagrams and how you can use them, you may find this Cradle help article useful.

Article Updtaed29/01/2019 –  Added more information and examples
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Cradle-7.1 has been certified for Citrix XenApp 7.6

Cradle-7.1 has been certified for Citrix XenApp 7.6 and can be accessed through the Citrix Ready Marketplace: https://citrixready.citrix.com/structured-software-systems-ltd/cradle-7-1.html.

Product Details

Cradle-7.1 integrates requirements management and systems engineering with full MBSE (including SysML, UML, BPM) for collaboration in agile and phase-based projects.
3SL’s Cradle is a tool to load, create, inter-link and publish information for all stages in a systems engineering project using agile, iterative or phase-based approaches and using any process. It is completely user-definable, scalable, flexible and secure. It can be deployed locally in your organisation or project, deployed to remote sites or partners, or delivered through SaaS from any private or public cloud. Cradle can support all your requirements management and systems engineering work in one tool, including:

  • Load information from external sources
  • Manage needs, user stories, requirements and a product backlog
  • Analyse the user needs, optionally with models (MBSE)
  • Define the design constraints
  • Define the architecture, optionally with models
  • Create the design, optionally with models
  • Define and track tests, issues and defects at all levels
  • Manage user acceptance and system validation
  • Conduct traceability and coverage analyses across all information in the entire lifecycle or any part of it
  • Publish documentation with user-defined layouts and templates
  • Manage work breakdown structures and user task lists, record actual progress, and link bi-directionally to project planning tools
  • Reuse and share information between projects

Cradle is available as a range of single-user products and the multi-user Enterprise product that adds configuration management, unlimited scalability and floating and dynamic concurrent user licensing. All Cradle products can be customised to your project and to your process. Cradle Enterprise provides additional customisation facilities to replace large parts of the Cradle UI with your own start pages and phase hierarchy that optimise Cradle to your process and your way of working. You can define web UIs for each stakeholder group that present the information needed by each group with the features and controls needed by that group to do their work.

Features

  • Full lifecycle systems engineering environment
  • Completely userdefined database with unlimited item types, items, attributes, data, link types, and cross reference links
  • Manages information source documents, through needs and requirements into architecture and functionality/behaviour to testing, V&V and acceptance
  • Massively scalable for small to large, distributed teams
  • Full traceability from source documents, through any engineering process into all published documentation
  • Usable across all industry sectors and government agencies
  • Can manage contractual relationships in entire supply chain

For more information, click here.

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Shoulds and Shalls

Conformance Checker

Do you need to validate the quality of your Requirements?  Using Cradle’s Conformance Checker will help you sort the to sort the “shoulds” from the “shalls”. Validate your items’ text  with a set of regular expressions to ensure you have clear statements.

Picture of conformance checker output
Conformance check your “Shoulds” and “Shalls”

Language Analysis

There are numerous aspects you can search for in the Cradle Conformance Checker.

  1. Stipulations such as Shall and Must
  2. Expectations such as Should
  3. Desires such as Might
  4. Continuations such as  As Follows
  5. Exemplifications such as e.g.
  6. Detractions such as Around
  7. Incompletes such as TBD

These can all be altered to suit your language and product / engineering domain. They are written as Regular Expressions (Regexes) through the project setup.

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All Linked or Cross Referenced Items?

What’s the difference between “All linked items” and “All cross referenced items”

If you’ve ever wondered what the difference is between these link types in a view in Cradle, this should clarify:

  • Cross references are actual links that have their own properties and can be tailored by the user. They have rules to control their creation, modification and deletion.
  • Links include Cross References, but also include pseudo associative links. An example would be a Specification that is associated with a Diagram by its identity.

    Shows difference between linked and cross referenced items
    Linked or Cross Referenced
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February 2017 Newsletter

Happy Chinese New Year

新年快乐！
3SL 祝愿我们的所有客户，合作伙伴和供应商2017吉祥如意！

Regulation, Compliance and Traceability from Cradle

Discovery, Implementation, Demonstration, is this really what making a product is all about?

From a product development point of view, Elicitation, Analysis, Specification and Validation may be terms an engineer is more familiar with. However, we work in a world where regulation and compliance are hugely important factors in a product’s lifecycle.

As developers and producers we must discover the sets of codes, regulations and standards that form the non functional requirements of our product. We must the implement the changes to our product design to ensure the end product is compliant. Before delivery we must be able to trace our designs and decisions to demonstrate how we comply.

For further discussion on the parallel paths that a product lifecyle must comply, please read one of the 3SL’s whitepapers here.

Twitter Tips

Thanks to those extra follows from January, don’t forget to retweet whenever you find a tip helpful and keep using those #3SL and #Cradle tags.

Baseline Past and Present

Whenever a project reaches a defining moment it is advisable for the project to be baselined. A line in the sand to say ‘we are at this point’, a point from which further development and changes can stem.

However, sometimes we want to return to and extract a particular baseline, say to use as the starting point for a new project variant. See how to export this information in our linked in article

Cradle is Citrix Ready

Large or complex deployment, centrally managed? A number of our customers use Cradle deployed in a Citrix environment.

Cradle 7.1 has been certified for Citrix XenApp 7.6 and can be accessed through the Citrix Ready Marketplace

False Positives

Any software developers out there? We’re gathering experiences, encountered while developing and distributing software, of the eternal battle between virus protection, legitimate development and malware hackers. Please join the discussion here on LinkedIn or see it in the ‘Cradle – RM/SE Tool from 3SL’ group.

Many Roles

Do you sit as a person with many hats? Today you are Engineer, tomorrow you are QA Manager? In smaller organisations many people find they wear a number of hats, but like to keep their operations separate. Whether this is from an administration and traceability point of view, or just to prevent a change being made to data accidentally by a role with an elevated privilege (think sudo in Linux). It may also be the case that you want all these roles to exist in the future, but while the embryonic project is being set up and developed there is only a small team working on it. These roles are later handed over to new colleagues.

Cradle allows you to set up all the users individually and then provide a common alias or in Cradle terms a ‘Switch Identity’. The user can then switch between the various roles without the more time consuming logout – remember different password – login loop.

This is further illustrated in our LinkedIn discussion.

MBSE Buzz!

Model Based System Engineering is all the rage at the likes of the NASA / JPL symposium 25th – 27th Jan. Why not have a look at Cradle’s New MBSE Reference in our improved 3SL website.

Hints of the Month

Here are some links to helpful topics since our last newsletter, they should improve your Cradle experience:

Need to estimate your hardware requirements over the life of a project see the Database Size Calculator.

Want to show every user a special message before they start? Use the Login Messages and User Acknowledgement facility.

Happy about installing, IT want to know everything is OK, drop in at VirusTotal – see Check Cradle Files are Free From Viruses.

New to managing documents and statements you can Avoid Problems Opening Source Documents and Statements here.

Seeing an odd Word error ? Read all about it Word Error – Ambiguous name detected: TmpDDE.

Don’t worry if you computer raises a False Positive from Symantec and Trend Micro Office Scan.  AV Products will explain why.

The world still revolves round documents (paper or electronic) it’s an easy way for humans to deal with data, from Cradle you can Publish a Formal Document.

Installation issues? A few of articles that may help Installation Issues With .NET Framework, Installation Issue With Windows C Runtime, Installation Issue With Office 2016 / 365 / ClickToRun

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False Positives from Symantec

False positives were recently reported by the Symantec and Trend Micro Office Scan Anti-Virus (AV) products. In both cases, they falsely reported a problem with the c_image.exe executable (which simply displays images, such as the Cradle splash screen).

We have arrangements with these and other AV vendors to pre-qualify Cradle executables before release. We do not know why these products have started to produce false positives for c_image.exe, since this executable has not changed and has previously been included in these products’ whitelists.

We have reported this problem to both vendors and can confirm that c_image.exe is in the whitelists of these products as of 11.1.17.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Cradle Splashscreen