The humble mark of a human. We’ve moved a long way from chipping runes in stones, scratching Roman wax tablets, one significant find was that of a special form of carbon. Borrowdale is well known for its beautiful scenery and scrummy tea bread especially served with cheese. However, in around 1565 a ‘lead like’ substance was discovered that could be used to make a clean defined mark. This was ultimately the birth of the pencil, and an industry in Keswick. If you visit there really is a museum for all things pencil.
Surprising how many pencils are in my desk tidy
Pencil day seeks to reconnect us with the humble pencil. The tool used by artists, designers and writers for hundreds of years. Why not take a picture of the chewed, blunt, or exquisite drawing tools and post them (#PencilDay).
Whilst we would definitely advocate Cradle as a preferred design tool, allowing cross references and traceability, not something you get on paper**. The humble sketch is still a goto design tool. And we should remember that.
Take a 5 minute coffee break; Sketch what your product does or your company makes, with a pencil and paper and then post it! (#PencilDay).
Cradle Operations
We found some handy suggestions of other ways to celebrate here at pens.com. Go on, celebrate pencil day and sketch away!
**Updating manual cross references between your sketches and text is possible with pencil and eraser, but easier if the database looks after it!
3SL are offering a number of Cradle public training courses in 2020.
Course
These are subject to change and additional courses may be added as required. Booking will become available through the website shop for credit/debit card transactions prior to each course. For purchase orders and transfer payments please contact 3SL.
3SL are pleased to announce the dates for this year’s first training course – Requirements Management May 2020
“A great opportunity for small teams, or a couple of new team members to get started with RM and Cradle”
Online Course
Businesses that are introducing Cradle and full Requirements Management processes into their operations, can book training for all aspects of the roll-out, from the basics through to specialist administration courses – See here. These courses are tailored and held at your premises and are ideal for getting a team up and running.
Public Requirements Management Training Course May 2020
If, however, you have one or two people new to a project or only have a very small team, this may not be a viable solution. With 3SL’s public online courses, you’ll benefit from all the normal learning, but will have the chance to network and share with other virtual attendees from other industries. This can be a cost effective solution to get you up to speed with Cradle and Requirements Management.
PC/Laptop – internet browser & Cradle installed **
Soft copy course materials, and printed certificate
If you would like to be kept in touch with the details for this Training Course – Requirements Management May 2020, please send an email to salesdetails@threesl.com
Love Engineering, Love Requirements Management, Love Cradle!
Love Cradle
Cradle is THE tool for massively scalable Requirements Engineering, combined with Model Based Systems Engineering capabilities (MBSE). From your first requirements, through design to delivery and beyond!
Cradle Enterprise allows you to share the love of engineering with collaboration from the whole team. Licence components are tailored to your team needs.
If you work independently you can still share in the love of good Requirements Management discipline with a number of pre packaged Single User versions.
You can own and install it yourself or opt for SaaS hosting. From the initial inception of your project through the elicitation, analysis, design, testing and documentation phases of your project, Cradle is there to support you. With this great offer we’re giving you even better value, or allowing you to share the love with a charity – see ‘Enterprise licences’.
Use the special Valentine’s discount voucher code to get £50** off any single user product. If you’re not already on the latest version of Cradle, we’d love you to upgrade using this year’s Valentine offer.
All you need to do is enter the £50** discount voucher code in the “Discount Code” field at the bottom of the shop checkout page during the Valentine’s week deal.
Enterprise Licences
We will offer £50** off EACH licence purchased during the offer period. For SaaS the discount will be taken off the per-user fee***. This may be taken as a lovely discount from your invoice or you can show some love and nominate a registered charity of your choice and 3SL will make an equivalent donation. If you find your project is expanding and you add a single REQ licence for another engineer you can claim one £50** Valentine’s discount / donation. If you are buying a new set of licences for a project say 5-REQ, 2-SYS and 1-MET that’s a total of 8*£50 = £400 off the licence cost, or a lovely donation to a charity of your choice.
Structured Software Systems Limited (3SL) are happy to say that we have been successful in our re-assessment under the Cyber Essentials
scheme for another year.
Cyber Essentials Badge
Cyber Essentials is a Government-backed, industry-supported scheme to help organisations protect themselves against common online threats.
IASME Assessment
Assessment for the IASME standard including GDPR were also successfully renewed.
IASME and GDPR Logo
The IASME Governance standard, based on international best practice, is risk-based and includes aspects such as physical security, staff awareness, and data backup. It is recognised as the best cyber security standard for small companies by the UK Government when in consultation with trade associations and industry groups.
Best Practice
We believe this sort of assessment will give our customers confidence when dealing with 3SL. It is a good reality check, and we would encourage our customers use similar precautions for their businesses. Whilst these assessments can provide confidence in your data security, the unexpected may happen. Whether this is a malicious attack, or simply a power loss and failure of your UPS resulting in disk corruption. Alongside good data security, we would also recommend you always have a good backup plan for your Cradle data.
节日祝福, С Новым годом и Рождеством, Saudações da temporada, Prettige Feestdagen, Frohe Festtage, Cyfarchion y Tymor, 계절의 인사, Joyeuses Fêtes.
3SL Star
Whatever your beliefs and however you celebrate the end of 2019, 3SL would like to wish all its customers, potential customers, distributors, partners and staff, Season’s Greetings, a Happy Christmas and peaceful family times over the festive season. We’ll see you again in the new year.
The UK offices will be closed, from end of business on Tuesday 24th December to 2nd January 2020. During that time there will be no one manning the phones. However, you can send support enquiries to support@threesl.com and we’ll deal with them as soon as we can.
We were given a warm welcome at #HIEX_Barrow, while final preparations and tidy ups continue. The facility has a great set of meeting rooms along with plush accommodation, food and bar facilities. All hosted in a friendly informal atmosphere.
Training
What better time to consider whether you would benefit from some Cradle training, and a few days away near the English Lake District! Whether you are a requirements manager, a quality controller, a systems administrator or system design engineer, call us now to discuss your requirements.
Bookings
The Holiday Inn can be booked directly. Please contact 3SL for details of rates.
Cradle combines a hugely powerful Requirements Management tool for massively scalable requirements engineering, with Model Based Systems Engineering capabilities (MBSE). It is available in a number of single user versions, or as tailored multi user enterprise packages. You can own and install it yourself or opt for SaaS hosting. From the initial inception of your project through the elicitation, analysis, design, testing and documentation phases of your project, Cradle is there to support you. With this great offer we’re giving you even better value, or offering to support a charity – see ‘Enterprise licences’.
Single User Product Discount
Use the special discount voucher code to get £50** off any single user product. If you’re not already on the latest version of Cradle, this year’s Black Friday is an ideal opportunity to upgrade.
All you need to do is enter the £50** discount voucher code in the “Discount Code” field at the bottom of the shop checkout page during the Black Friday / Cyber Monday 2019 flash deal.
Enterprise Licences
We will offer £50** off EACH licence purchased during the offer period. For SaaS the discount will be taken off the per-user fee***. This may be taken as a discount from your invoice or you can nominate a registered charity of your choice and 3SL will make an equivalent donation. If you find your project is expanding and you add a single REQ licence for another engineer you can claim one £50** discount / donation. If you are buying a new set of licences for a project say 5-REQ, 2-SYS and 1-MET that’s a total of 8*£50 = £400 off the licence cost, or a lovely donation to a charity of your choice.
My week placement from Furness College at 3SL started with an introduction to the company’s employees, courtesy of Jan. She briefly addressed their roles and explained the layout of the office, before showing me to my desk. There was a laptop set up ready, and it was on this I’d be working for the rest of the week.
The first task given to me was to work through Cradle’s comprehensive tutorial, so I could learn its functionality through experience. This knowledge, albeit gradually gained, would serve me well over the following days.
Day 2:
Cradle Development Database
My second day began with one of 3SL’s Support Engineers, Cam, explaining how to operate their development database. It was very intuitive, being another instance of the Cradle software. If anything demonstrates a company has confidence in its product; it’s the fact that they use it themselves.
On here, the company had prepared a series of tests for me to perform across many of Cradle’s various facets. These helped to expand my understanding of Cradle’s applications, and gave me a valuable insight into the procedures involved in testing a software product.
Day 3:
Features requested by customers
The third day, I was taught again by Cam on how to navigate and utilise the support call database, where the company logs any exchanges they have with their customers. One feature of this particular service is said database’s external accessibility – which, if they’re so inclined, allows Cradle users to see how their call is progressing.
Some calls may reveal flaws in the software; either by exposing bugs overlooked during testing, or by bringing to light new issues.
Customers may also call to investigate whether Cradle provides a certain feature they’ve found themselves needing. If it doesn’t, the suggested feature is filed into a list of those potentially included in the future. As this list is weighted by demand, periodic reviews are held to consider Cradle’s direction with these requests in mind.
I also learned about the internal testing, performed by the support department prior to software release.
Day 4:
Command Prompt
On day four, I had the opportunity to meet the company’s programmers. They provided me with a document of both requirements and background information to their current project; then asked me to consider how I would approach the same problem. I was told to consider how elements of the software already present could be reused to accomplish a different objective – one of the key skills for any developer to have. This is because modularised code is not only far more versatile; but far more stable too.
De-constructing, the method by which a goal is achieved into componential steps (allocating a minimalistic concern per element) allows one to maintain track of all the necessary inputs and outputs at each. With these in isolation, another programmer – or even the selfsame at a later date – need not know exactly how a particular element of the broader system works in order to utilise it effectively; as they know what to feed into it and what it will produce in return.
I also learned one of the reasons bugs can appear only on the user’s version of the program, is that the optimisation processes of the IDE-external compiler can make alterations to the finalised code. Whilst this is typically a positive thing, there are instances whereby the structural changes may interfere with the core functionality of the software.
Day 5:
My final day of work experience at 3SL consisted of: watching a pair of videos explaining software as a service; being given a tour of the company’s social media, including some of the behind-the-scenes on how posts are produced; and writing this blog post to record everything I’ve learned this week.
