Category: Hints & Tips

Hints and Tips on using Cradle.

Improve understanding and productivity of the Cradle suite of software.

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Wherever You Are

Local Location, Remote Location?

No matter where Alan is he can get to his project. This remote access could be through WorkBench or Web Access, both part of the Cradle suite.

If you have access to a browser you can configure your installation to allow remote access  to your projects enabling the most common functions to be performed from anywhere in the world.

For full power (offering all the requirements management software and systems engineering tools available), users access the same projects via the WorkBench application. Provided the network allows, a client installation of WorkBench can also access the CDS (Cradle Database Server) from around the globe, but a Citrix installation may be more desirable allowing remote access to a server / multi client installation.

Iamge showing Cradle connectivity
Cradle connectivity

The tool provided to web users is really the contents of web pages displayed in their browsers. These pages are created by the CWS from:

  • A set of HTML templates, at least one for each type of item in the database
  • A set of page designs supplied with the CWS
  • The items in your database

The user has full control of the contents of these HTML templates, e.g.:

  • What the web interface looks like
  • What facilities it provides
  • How these facilities are accessed
showing same item in Web Access and in WorkBench
WorkBench or Web Access
Article Updated 04/02/2019 – Added Image showing connectivity and more info about Web Access
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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.

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Alerts in Cradle WorkBench

All Change – Tell me now!

Keep abreast of what changes are going on in a project by setting alerts. These can reflect system level changes such as a schema change, or can be set for individual items.

Recipients

You can control who gets the alert by selecting the recipient to be:

  • The default distribution
  • A particular user or
  • User list

Additionally item level alerts can be controlled by setting a category value containing the user name of the recipient, (We advise this category is set to ‘mandatory’ to ensure users fill it in, as the fallback will be to all in the project).

Direct

You can eve enter an alert directly from the using the “New…” button if you need to communicate to other users.

Setting alerts
Alerts and Settings

Priority Settings

You can choose the priority setting for alerts in the Project schema. They can be set as Urgent, High, Normal or Low

setting alert priorities and viewing the results
Alert Priorities

When the alerts are shown in the user’s Alerts dialog, they are coloured appropriately, until they have been read and then they are marked in black. An additional “Sort by”  allow the user to order by Priority, Type, Date or Status making it easier to keep up to date with what’ and when things are changing in a project.

Article Updated 13/07/2018 – Cradle 7.4 Priority settings for Alerts
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Database Size Calculator

We have produced a simple Excel spreadsheet that automates the database sizing formulae from the ‘Database Sizing’ section of Chapter 5 – ‘Hardware Sizing’ in the Cradle System Administration Guide.

You enter estimates for:

– The number and size of the items in your database
– The number of cross references
– The number of baselines you expect to create over the lifetime of the project, and
– The amount of new and changed information in each baseline

and you will see an estimate of the size of your Cradle database at the end of the project.

You can experiment with these values to explore upper and lower bounds for the eventual database size.

If you would like a copy of this spreadsheet, leave a comment below, or send an e-mail to me at: mark.walker@threesl.com

We will include this spreadsheet in future Cradle releases.
Database Size Calculator

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Add an Image Attribute to Items

It is often helpful to be able to store image(s) inside items in a Cradle database.

This is easy to set up. You simply add one or more new image ‘frame’ attribute(s) to the type of item in which you want to store images, such as your test cases, or your System Breakdown Structure (SBS). To do this:

1. Start WorkBench and login to your database as a user with PROJECT privilege so you can change the schema
2. Select ‘Project Setup’ from the ‘Project’ tab to open the schema
3. With ‘Options’ set to ‘Item Definitions’, select the ‘Item’ type (this is the default)
4. Select the item type and select ‘Frames…’
5. Select ‘New…’ and enter the name of the new image attribute, such as: figure
6. Set the new attribute’s frame type to be an image (with no frame type, the frame stores plain text), such as GIF or JPEG (provided with all Cradle systems)
7. Select ‘OK’ to close the schema

Now any/all items of your chosen item type can have a figure frame that can contain an image. When you view the attribute, the image will appear. You can capture images from external documents into the attribute using Document Loader. You can include the images in reports and in documents published by Document Publisher. If you edit the image, then the change history will store the images from before and after each edit.

We hope that this is helpful!

Add an Image Attribute to Items
Article updated 22/10/2018 – Made image bigger
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User information

Who?

User information can be used to show such things as who has created an item, edited an item and when the item was created.

Chances are in a big project not every user will know all the other users on a project. If you need to know a bit more about who edited an item, you can hover over the changer for a tool-tip in a Cradle Form in WorkBench. This will show the additional information held for each of the users in the User Setup dialog.

To set User Profile details, this is done via “User Setup”  as you can see in the screenshot below showing the Description of the User and the Location of the user.

 

Screenshot showing User Setup dialog
User Setup

These details are then shown when hovering over the user in areas such as Forms to show when the user last modified this item.

user tooltip showing details
Show user information

When / What ?

There are many more fields that will give you additional information information, dates and times will show the full underlying UTC, categories will show their description,  go on have a hover and discover.

Article Updated 04/02/2019 – Added extra information