Product Range – Cradle-RM Pro

Cradle-RM Pro Overview

Requirements Management across the Systems Lifecycle

Complete Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Requirements Management (RM) and documentation solution for the entire project lifecycle, fully user-definable and applicable to all agile and phase based processes.

  • Supports the full systems development lifecycle at system, subsystem and lower levels
  • Integrates in one product features normally spread across separate tools from different vendors
  • Completely user-definable and user-extensible with point-and-click UIs
  • Manage any information, including requirements, risks, interfaces, tests and verifications
  • Scalable to millions of items of information
  • Full traceability of data to source and generated documents with complete version management
  • Full traceability and coverage analyses
  • User-definable views of data including tables, trees, documents, matrices, diagrams and graphs
  • User-defined metrics and management dashboards

Cradle-RM Pro is a complete solution to manage, trace and document all the data for your agile and phase-based projects.

Capture and Track Information

Capture information from external documents and tools, and track changes in these sources. You can build new sets of requirements, functions, components, interfaces, tests or verifications, and link them to the source data and to each other. Check the quality and structure of this information, and prove the integrity of information with bi-directional coverage and traceability analyses.

Customers’ confidence can be raised with proof that your work satisfies its sources and constraints, and will meet their needs.

Easily track progress with metrics and KPIs and link to your WBS and actual progress to your project planning tools.

Create Databases and Information

Create any number of databases, each with a schema and multiple projects that contain any number of items of any number of user-defined item types. Each item has any number of attributes with up to 1TByte of data, held in Cradle, or referenced in files, URLs or other tools.

All items can be linked with user-defined types of cross reference. The links have attributes to justify, explain or parametise them. Links are direct and indirect, for full lifecycle traceability, impact and coverage analyses.

External documents can be loaded into hierarchies of items. Every item in Cradle is linked to its source in a document. Changes in new document versions are automatically found and the database updated. You can prove the integrity of all source data to your customers with a range of detailed coverage analyses of their documents.

Items can be linear, hierarchical and in many-to-many relationships. Items can be split, merged and reordered. All information can be shared and reused. Cradle can support product ranges, models, variants and builds, and generate comparative analyses between them as tables, pivot tables and matrices.

Track and View Information

Cradle tracks all edits to every requirement, test case, verification and all other information that you want it to hold. Edits can be reversed selectively or by group. Full or partial change logs are readily available.

You define how information is viewed and reported in any number of views, shown as nested tables, trees, matrices, pivot tables and as diagrams.

Generate versions of documents such as a URD, SRD, IRS, SDS and SSDS to match your or your client’s formats with user-defined templates and detailed traceability of which items were published in each document issue.

Manage Projects

Manage your projects with:

  • Metrics, user-defined calculations of items’ values
  • Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), results of metric calculations with colour-coded display bands
  • Bi-directional links to Project, including user task lists and actual progress reporting

Cradle is open. It supports many import/export formats, has several interface mechanisms to link to other tools, and connects to Microsoft Office components Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Project.

Cradle is simple to customise and use. You do not need to learn a scripting language or become a programmer to tailor it to your process. After every change to your schema, Cradle will automatically update collections of queries, views and other definitions that make you productive immediately.

Major Features

The major features are:

Cradle-RM Pro Features
Cradle-RM Pro Features

Supported Platforms

The supported platforms are:

Supported Platforms

Characteristics

The characteristics are:

Cradle-RM Pro Characteristics
Cradle-RM Pro Characteristics

Cradle-RM Pro is part of the Cradle product range. The full, multi-user, product is Cradle Enterprise.

Product Range Highlights

  • Applies to agile and phase projects
  • Application lifecycle management
  • Requirements management
  • Full lifecycle integration
  • V&V
  • Reporting
  • Document publishing
  • Metrics
  • Dashboards
  • Project plans
  • Compliance management
  • Single user

Product Range – Cradle-RM Desktop

Cradle-RM Desktop Overview

Requirements Management across the Systems Lifecycle

Complete Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Requirements Management (RM) solution for the entire project lifecycle, fully user-definable and applicable to all agile and phase based processes.

  • Supports the full systems development lifecycle at system, subsystem and lower levels
  • Integrates in one product features normally spread across separate tools from different vendors
  • Completely user-definable and user-extensible with point-and-click UIs
  • Manage any information, including requirements, risks, interfaces, tests and verifications
  • Scalable to millions of items of information
  • Full traceability of data from external sources and version management of source documents
  • Full traceability and coverage analyses
  • User-definable views of data including tables, trees, documents, matrices, diagrams and graphs
  • User-defined metrics and management dashboards

Cradle-RM Desktop is a complete solution to manage and trace all the data for your agile and phase-based projects.

Capture and Track Information

Capture information from external documents and tools, and track changes in these sources. You can build new sets of requirements, functions, components, interfaces, tests or verifications, and link them to the source data and to each other. Check the quality and structure of this information, and prove the integrity of information with bi-directional coverage and traceability analyses.

Customers’ confidence can be raised with proof that your work satisfies its sources and constraints, and will meet their needs.

Easily track progress with metrics and KPIs and link to your WBS and actual progress to your project planning tools.

Create Databases and Information

Create any number of databases, each with a schema and multiple projects that contain any number of items of any number of user-defined item types. Each item has any number of attributes with up to 1TByte of data, held in Cradle, or referenced in files, URLs or other tools.

All items can be linked with user-defined types of cross reference. The links have attributes to justify, explain or parametise them. Links are direct and indirect, for full lifecycle traceability, impact and coverage analyses.

External documents can be loaded into hierarchies of items. Every item in Cradle is linked to its source in a document. Changes in new document versions are automatically found and the database updated. You can prove the integrity of all source data to your customers with a range of detailed coverage analyses of their documents.

Items can be linear, hierarchical and in many-to-many relationships. Items can be split, merged and reordered. All information can be shared and reused. Cradle can support product ranges, models, variants and builds, and generate comparative analyses between them as tables, pivot tables and matrices.

Track and View Information

Cradle tracks all edits to every requirement, test case, verification and all other information that you want it to hold. Edits can be reversed selectively or by group. Full or partial change logs are readily available.

You define how information is viewed and reported in any number of views, shown as nested tables, trees, matrices, pivot tables and as diagrams.

Manage Projects

Manage your projects with:

  • Metrics, user-defined calculations of items’ values
  • Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), results of metric calculations with colour-coded display bands
  • Bi-directional links to Project, including user task lists and actual progress reporting

Cradle is open. It supports many import/export formats, has several interface mechanisms to link to other tools, and connects to Microsoft Office components Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Project.

Cradle is simple to customise and use. You do not need to learn a scripting language or become a programmer to tailor it to your process. After every change to your schema, Cradle will automatically update collections of queries, views and other definitions that make you productive immediately.

Major Features

The major features are:
Cradle RM Desktop Features

Supported Platforms

The supported platforms are:

Supported Platforms

Characteristics

The characteristics are:

Cradle RM Desktop Characteristics
Cradle RM Desktop Characteristics

Cradle-RM Desktop is part of the Cradle product range. The full, multi-user, product is Cradle Enterprise.

Product Range Highlights

  • Applies to agile and phase projects
  • Application lifecycle management
  • Requirements management
  • Full lifecycle integration
  • V&V
  • Reporting
  • Metrics
  • Dashboards
  • Project plans
  • Compliance management
  • Single user

Cradle Product Range

Cradle Product Range Overview

Integrated Systems Engineering from the Desktop to the Enterprise

Manage all information for the entire lifecycle with full traceability, metrics, quality checks  and performance indicators, all linked to your project schedules.

  • Supports the full systems development lifecycle at system, subsystem and lower levels
  • Integrates in one product features normally spread across separate tools from different vendors
  • Completely user-definable and user-extensible with point-and-click UIs
  • Manage any information, including requirements, models, risks, interfaces, tests and verifications
  • Built-in CM, baselines, formal change control and user-defined workflows
  • Scalable to millions of items of information
  • Scalable from one to thousands of users
  • Web and desktop applications, user-definable UIs
  • Rapid deployment facilities
  • Embed process in tool UIs, minimised user training

Cradle is a complete multi-user solution to manage, trace and document all data in your agile, and phase-based projects.

Capture information from external documents and tools, and track changes. You can build new sets of requirements, analysis, architecture and design models, tests or verifications, and link them to the source data and to each other. Check the consistency and quality of this information, and prove the integrity of the models and other data with bi-directional coverage and traceability analyses.

Customers’ confidence can be raised with proof that your work satisfies its sources and constraints, and will meet their needs.

Easily track progress with metrics and KPIs and link to your WBS and actual progress to your project planning tools.

Manage users’ work with user-defined CM, workflows and access controls, and multi-team collaboration and discussions.

Cradle is a complete product range, from single-user requirements management to enterprise scale, multi-user collaborative environments. All are fully compatible with each other, sharing their architecture, database and I/O formats. You can start with a single-user tool and migrate to the multi-user Cradle Enterprise product, seamlessly and easily.

What does Cradle Include and Support?

All Cradle systems include:

  • Introductory overview
  • Tutorial, to teach the UI
  • Start Page of shortcuts in the UI for new users
  • A guide for creating and working in a new project
  • Example configurations suitable for many different processes, each with its own process guide
  • A range of user guides
  • Fully indexed, searchable help

Cradle supports all variants of Windows and Linux. Different platforms can be mixed in a Cradle deployment. Cradle servers are designed to run 24×7, unattended, and need no administration. No routine upkeep is needed.

Virtual servers and clients are supported. Supports IPv4 and IPv6. Cradle may be served as SaaS using all popular web and non-web remote deployment tools. Can be served through firewalls and from DMZs.

Includes access, security and licence usage logs, and a range of management reporting tools.

Supported Platforms

Supported Platforms
Supported Platforms

Deployment

Cradle systems are installed on your computers. Cradle is also available as SaaS in a subscription where you choose the features required, the number of users to be supported, and how long you want to use Cradle.

Product Characteristics and Features

The characteristics and features of all Cradle products are shown below:

Product Range Overview - Characteristics and Features
Product Characteristics and Features

Product Range Highlights

  • Applies to agile and phase projects
  • Application lifecycle management
  • Requirements management
  • Modelling / MBSE / SysML / UML
  • Test Execution / Risk Management
  • Full lifecycle integration
  • V&V
  • Reporting / document publishing
  • Metrics
  • Dashboards
  • Project plans
  • User-defined UIs
  • Custom web UIs
  • Configuration management
  • Single user and multi-user

June Newsletter 2023

Welcome to the June 2023 newsletter from 3SL!

This newsletter contains a mixture of news and technical information about us, and our requirements management and systems engineering tool “Cradle”. We would especially like to welcome everyone who has purchased Cradle in the past month and those who are currently evaluating Cradle for their projects and processes.

We hope that 3SL and Cradle can deliver real and measurable benefits that help you to improve the information flow within, the quality and timeliness of, and the traceability, compliance and governance for, all of your current and future projects.

If you have any questions about your use of Cradle, please do not hesitate to contact 3SL Support.

Configuration Management

All projects need configuration management, even if only to create protected copies of the items being worked on in one or more baselines. Cradle Configuration Management System (CMS) is a flexible, customisable framework. You can use the CMS to adapt Cradle to your process and the needs of your project.

The CMS contains a variety of features and capabilities. You can use these to configure the CMS to be a simple change manager. You can also configure the CMS to be extremely rigorous in all stages in the evolution of your project information from initial creation through to formal acceptance.

Summary

The CMS provides four basic mechanisms:

The scope and effect of these mechanisms are controlled by privileges and also by workflows.

Simple Process

A simple CM process is typically a series of stages that items will pass through on their way to a baseline. There are typically no formal reviews in this sequence.

The steps to create a simple process are:

  1. Decide on the stages in your process and what each stage means
  2. Create a category code with these stages as its possible values
  3. Assign this category code to the item type(s) that are to follow the process
  4. Create a workflow that references your category code and define the sequence of stages, each step in the workflow will set items’ status to be one of the values in your category code
  5. Assign the workflow to the item type(s)

It is easy to use this workflow. You and your colleagues create items. You change items and link them to other items in the database. At the end of each step, you use the Advance operation to move the items to the next step in the workflow. When items reach the stage of being baselined, someone will need to open a baseline before you can Advance items into it. When everything has been moved into the baseline, it can be closed.

Review Process

A more complex workflow can be for a process that includes reviews. Any number of the steps in a workflow can be a review. You can specify the characteristics of each review. These include:

  1. Which users will be involved in the review?
  2. How many of these users must contribute to the review?
  3. How will an approve result be determined from reviewers’ responses?
  4. How will a reject result be determined from reviewers’ responses?
  5. What actions are to be performed for items that are rejected by the review?
  6. What actions are to be performed for items that are approved by the review?
  7. Is the rework mechanism to be used and if so, how?

The process to implement a review process is the same as for a simple process except that some of the workflow steps require the configuration of reviews.

Managing Changes to Items

You can review items into project baselines and make formal changes to these items. Use of the CMS is therefore fundamentally about progressing items through one or more reviews into baselines, and then subsequently making formal changes to these items, which culminate in new versions of the changed items appearing in new baselines.

The CMS is not concerned with the details of how changes to items occur. It is not concerned with whether 1 or N edits have occurred to effect a change to an item. It is not concerned with recording the before and after values of the attributes that are affected by each edit, but is simply concerned with the high-level process of agreeing that a change is needed (a change request), initiating consequential changes to one or more items (managed in one or more change tasks), recording the formal reviews of the changed items, and ultimately storing the amended items in a new baseline.

Audit Trail / Configuration Log

For many projects, the automatically and transparently recorded audit trail, and the formalism of the use of change requests (CHRs), change tasks (CHTs), formal reviews and formal baselines, is sufficient. For other projects, more detailed records are required.

Public Training

3SL are running a public CM course in June. If you want to learn more about CM in Cradle, book your place now.

PDUIDs

Project Database Unique IDs are an alternate method for identifying items in a Cradle database. PDUIDs are particularly useful for users of the Cradle Application Programming Interface (API) and Web Services Interface (WSI) because they have the same format for all types of information.

We will provide a series of short articles on PDUIDs over the coming weeks. We hope that these will be helpful.

Integrity of 3SL’s SSL Certificates

All of 3SL’s web-based services use HTTPS, the secure form of HTTP.  Wherever possible, all of our Internet-based services also use secure protocols. So this means we need a certificate to confirm our identity that your web browser and other tools check when you visit our website and other services.

We have a certificate for:

*.threesl.com

This includes our website, mail server, shared SaaS and other portals. Certificates have a fixed lifespan and so on 9th June we refreshed our certificate. Our current certificate is issued by Sectigo RSA Domain Validation Secure Server CA. It is valid until 23:59:59 UTC Tuesday, 9th July 2024.

You can check the integrity of a website certificate using Qualys here. You can check 3SL’s website here. Our site is rated A+:

SSL Certificates
Qualys report for 3SL

The King’s Official Birthday (17th June 2023)

Celebrations of the monarch’s official birthday are held in June across the Commonwealth, including the Trooping of the Colour. The date not necessarily correspond to the date of the monarch’s actual birth.

The sovereign’s birthday was first officially marked in the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1748, for King George II. Since then the date of the king or queen’s birthday has been determined by:

  • Royal proclamations issued by the sovereign or viceroy, or
  • Statute laws passed by the local parliament

We will individually mark the King’s birthday and invite others to do so in respect to the Crown.

Social Media

We congratulated @WeAreHII on their record first quarter 2023 revenues and @Siemens on their outstanding performance.

We also congratulated @KBRincorporated on the award of the contract by Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd. This is to implement supercritical solvent deasphalting technology.

Our customer @MIRAEngineering were exhibiting at the Future Mobility Asia Exhibition & Summit. Did you visit stand ME18?

Looking Back

Last month we discussed:

We would also like to thank all attendees on our Test Execution course which we provided in May.

Still to Come this Month

Your Highlights!

If you have any company news or achievements that you would like 3SL to share in any of our newsletters then please let us know.

Creating Tables in Document Publisher

Generating Document Publisher Tables

There are various methods of generating Document Publisher tables. This short post provides a brief explanation of the following methods:

Table Tag

A Table tag allows you to generate uniform tables where the resulting items are reported in rows. This can be a list of individual items or links to other items using a defined hierarchy. Below shows an example definition of both.

  1. Insert a Table tag:

    Insert Table Tag button
    Insert Table Tag button
  2. Add Field tags into the table cells:
    Field Tags
    Field Tags
    Tables in Document Publisher
    Tables in Document Publisher

    This will output the examples below:

    Table showing FEATUREs
    Table showing FEATUREs
Table showing System Requirements
Table showing System Requirements

WorkBench Table Tag

Many tables will probably have been used as a result of queries in WorkBench. For example, one shown here is a list of System Requirements linked to SBS items:

SRs linked to SBS
SRs linked to SBS items

These tables can be used as a WorkBench Table tag in a Document Publisher output:

WorkBench Table Tag button
WorkBench Table Tag button
Example WorkBench Table Tag
Example WorkBench Table Tag
WorkBench Table Tag Properties
WorkBench Table Tag Properties

This is a quick and easy method of producing tables without any need for defining Field tags as the table attributes are already defined in WorkBench. An example output is shown below:

WorkBench Table Output
WorkBench Table Output

Inserting into Table Cells

Document Publisher also provides the ability to insert data into table cells by the use of a special Computed Insert_Table_From_Bkmk Field tag. The steps to achieve this are:

  1. Insert a Word table and format as appropriate:
    Word Insert Table option
    Word Insert Table option

    Inserted Word table
    Inserted Word table
  2. Highlight the table and insert a Word bookmark:

    Insert Word Bookmark option
    Insert Word Bookmark option
  3. Before the table, insert a Paragraph Group tag and define the item type that you would like to shown in the table. For example – FEATURE items:

    Example Paragraph Group tag
    Example Paragraph Group tag
  4. The first Field tag is very important as this specifies that the fields are going to be inserted into the table using the bookmark TABLE_1 that was defined. In this example, we also create a hierarchy to show linked NEED items and PBS items:

    FEATURE hierarchy
    FEATURE hierarchy
  5. In subsequent Field tags, you can insert into a specified row and column of the table. In this first tag, it is inserting the FEATURE identity attribute into cell column 1, row 1:

    Inserting FEATURE identity
    Inserting FEATURE identity
  6. You can see here that another one of the Field tags is inserting the FEATURE TEXT frame into column 1, row 3 of the table:

    Insert FEATURE TEXT frame
    Insert FEATURE TEXT frame

Once you have specified all of the cells to be populated in the table, this can then be published like the example shown below:

FEATURE output
FEATURE output