3SL Blog (Structured Software Systems Ltd)

7th February 201719th July 2018

From Now to Goal – Requirements Management

Goal

If you don’t know where you are currently, or how you arrived or what your ultimate goal is, how do you know in which direction to head? Requirements Management is a skill made easier by the full traceability of tools such as Cradle.

From – Now – Goal

Build Me a Home

Starting a project without having a base understanding of the situation is a like building a house on unstable foundations. When the walls start to wander you’ll have no idea whether it was because the foundations were not level or were inappropriate or whether the direction of the wall is simply wrong.

Not knowing the ultimate goal could lead to a double height wall being built for a bungalow.

If you have no measure of how high the wall currently stands, you’ll have no chance of estimating how long it will take to finish.

Baseline, Elicit and Measure

It may sound obvious when applied to the ‘simple’ task of building a home. It appears ridiculous to start building without knowing whether our goal is a bungalow, house or flat. Yet many projects start with a very loose understanding between stakeholders and producers and can head off in the wrong direction.

Baseline

Do we know the current situation? Do the foundations exist, is this a single storey build that needs extending with an upper floor or are we to start from scratch. Are there any assumptions we need to record, this project assumes that there bedrock will be found within a metre.

Elicit Requirements

Have we investigated what the customer / stakeholder actually wants? We could achieve the same m² with two storeys or one larger floor. No point building a house and then finding mobility restrictions mean a bungalow was needed. Do they actually need a house. The baseline may show they actually have somewhere to live and all they need is some more storage. We could provide them with a shed and achieve their goal. This honesty in not selling them a new house may mean we have a smaller turnover, but a far better reputation. This should lead to repeat and new business as knowledgeable supplier.

Measure

This needs to be done at each stage. Internally we need to know that we are meeting the design. When do we stop building the walls? Externally we need to know that the customer is going to be happy. Milestones and intermediate reviews will prevent big surprises at the end. Whilst we want to avoid requirements creep, we have no intention to build a mansion for the price of a flat, customer requirements change and to remain agile, we need to build in steps to accommodate change.

Summary

If you can see the sense in this simplistic example you have every justification you need to correctly control and manage your project. If you can’t see the point, you’re likely to return to your back of envelope calculations and assumptions of what your customer needs. Good luck to you, but we’d prefer you to take steps to de-risk your plans. Put yourself on the receiving end, a 20 storey building each with a floor of 1m*1m and a ladder pinned to the outside. It fulfils the requirements, but you try sleeping in your new bedsit.

6th February 201726th July 2018

Making Space – Maximized Data Display Area

I Need More Space

There is a lot of information in the WorkBench UI (User Interface). Sometimes you want a concentrate on one aspect, and it many not be possible to see everything you want in one go. You may be using Cradle on a laptop or tablet with a small screen and a limited display resolution. If so, you may want a maximised data display area, by reducing the screen area occupied by the Cradle UI controls. Make space in Cradle’s WorkBench interface by closing sidebars and the ribbon, status bar and Quick Access Bar (QAB).

Maximised Data Display Area

You can do several things to maximise what you can see in the WorkBench UI. In general, these are all to minimise or hide parts of the WorkBench UI. You can make many of these changes permanent by setting your preferences. To set yourpreferences, select Preferences in the Home tab, make the changes (typically in the UI Control group) and finally, click OK.

set UI preferences in 3SL Cradle RM SE Tool — Setting UI Preferences

Hide the Sidebar

You can hide the sidebar on the left of the UI by clicking whichever sidebar’s button is currently selected. This will make the sidebar disappear.

You can prevent a sidebar being shown when WorkBench starts by setting the Default sidebar user preference to None:

maximised data display area in 3SL Cradle RM SE Tool — Set No Sidebar

Hide the Quick Access Bar

The Quick Access Bar is a horizontal menu of buttons that provides easy access to sets of queries that Cradle creates automatically when you define item types in your database schema.

You can hide the quick access bar from the Window group in the ribbon:

You can prevent the quick access bar being shown when WorkBench starts by de-selecting the preference Show quick access bar when WorkBench starts:

Hide the Status Bar

The Status Bar is a horizontal collection of status indicators shown across the bottom of the UI. You can hide the status bar from the Window group in the ribbon:

Minimise the Ribbon

You can minimise the ribbon across the top of the UI by double-clicking to the right of the tabs, typically to the right of the Help tab.

Maximise Diagram Area

When you edit or view a diagram in any model, Cradle will display it in a form. This form includes the diagram’s symbols in a drawing area. It also includes other diagram attributes. You can set the preference so that you only see the diagram’s symbols when a diagram is first drawn:

Press A to toggle the display of the other diagram attributes.

Normal Display Area

For illustration, a typical WorkBench UI showing a query with a simple view in Table style would appear like this:

Maximium Display Area

If you use all of the tips described here, the UI will have a maximised data display area and will appear like this:

This is a useful increase in the screen area used to display information.

Article Updated: More details 26/07/2018

3rd February 201711th May 2017

Dashboard Dials

Coming soon….

Sneek peek of a printout from the new Dashboard Dials coming to Cradle-7.2

2nd February 201730th March 2020

Manual ‘ V’ Cradle

Compare

When it comes to managing your requirements and designs there really is no contest between a manual based system and a tool based system. A cross referenced and baselined design in Cradle is your ultimate goal.

Manual

A manual based system at worst is a set of paper requirements, managed in folders with paper-clips and sticky notes. An electronic system may include a number of word processor documents, drawings and spreadsheets. These have very limited, or manually updated meta data to describe how they interlink.

RM tool

A Requirements Management and Systems Engineering software tool brings these elements together in one place and provides the meta data and traceability that binds them together into a successful project.

Paper and pencil versus Cradle — Manual versus Cradle

27th January 201722nd October 2018

Move from ‘bdd’ to ‘ibd’

It is easy to traverse a SysML bdd (block definition diagram) to an ibd (internal block diagram). This is achieved via the cross references between the specification, holding the details, and its use on each diagram. A common piece of data represented in different ways on different diagrams. A case of record once, use many.

Article updated 22/10/2018 – Added links to Cradle online help

26th January 20179th October 2018

Switching Between Cradle Login Accounts

It is often the case that the accounts within a project have more than one role. For example an “engineer” role and a “team leader” role. Different privileges are needed for these roles, so it is possible that people will have more than one user account. This could create a problem if the user repeatedly needs to logout and re-enter credentials for each of their accounts. If a user needs to repeatedly change user profiles, these steps can become very time consuming.

Instead, a user can use the ‘Switch’ option in the ‘User’ group in the ‘Home’ tab. A similar mechanism is available in Cradle custom web UIs.

Cradle presents a list of other user profiles that the user can ‘switch’ to. When the user chooses one of these user profiles, he/she is logged-out from the current login account and logged-in to the chosen login account, without any use of the Login dialog, with no need to enter the new user’s username, and with no need to enter the password for the new login account.

This mechanism can be used to allow any number of users can to switch between any number of users in the SAME database.

23rd January 201722nd October 2018

Publish a Table

From Query to Print

The Publish Table function in Cradle gives a simple way to produce html (Hypertext mark-up Language) , rtf (Rich Text Format) or csv (Comma Separated Values) output.

Publish a table from within WorkBench — Publishing a table

Tip: Saving as html will maintain the formatting to directly open in Excel.

Article updated 22/10/2018 – Added tip

20th January 201720th April 2017

Managing Projects

Managing Projects in Cradle

When you have a large number of projects and users it can get difficult to track them all. Project Manager, part of the Cradle suite, provides a method to hierarchically organise, categorise and sort your projects.

Project Manager showing projects in folder organisation. — Organise projects in Project Manager

Classification / Categorisation

A Project may belong to more than one sub category, “Mechanical Department” and “Current Project”, you can place a link to the project in each of these folders. In the future the link may be in the “Mechanical Department” and “Completed” folders, its up to you. Project manager can also add a host of user defined categorisations and references. This will help identify a project and its associated contracts or references, now and in years to come.

Attributes

You can set attributes for each project. These can provide extra details about the project’s purpose, status, dates and so on. Project Manager ships with nine default attributes, however, you can add your own or change those supplied.

Alias ‘Alias ID for the project, such as an alternative project ID number’
Division ‘General Description such as the company division doing the project’
Branch ‘General description such as the company branch doing the project’
Customer ‘General description such as the name of the customer for the project’
Reference ‘General Description such as the RFP or ITT reference number’
‘Inception Date’ ‘General description such as the start date of the project’
Purpose ‘General project description, used in any manner found to be useful’
Summary ‘General project description, used in any manner found to be useful’
Description ‘General project description, used in any manner found to be useful’

Showing the range of Project Attributes that can be set for a project

Setting Project Attributes

Continue reading “Managing Projects”

19th January 201723rd August 2022

Ways to Make a Cross Reference

Make Links

There are multiple ways to create cross reference links in Cradle.

Drag and drop the items to create a cross reference link, use the Link Details dialog to manually enter, or use the ‘Make Link To‘ and the ‘Make Link From‘ option. The video above demonstrates how quick and simple these methods are.

A slightly more graphic method of producing cross references is to double-click, or right click and choose Create Cross Reference on the inter linking cell in a Matrix.

Image of cross reference creation — Create Cross Reference in a Matrix

The cell also gives access to the items from the column and row that are referenced at the intersection, or details of the existing link between them

Rules

What can link to what, by whom and with what link type is controlled by link rules. Covered in this blog article.cross ref

Cross Reference Attributes

Each of these options creates a link. Each one can have sixteen user defined link attributes. These are defined in the Project Schema, if you don’t define any, Cradle will default to providing “Reason, Rationale, Reference and Note” for the first four attributes to get you started.

18th January 20177th December 2022

Check Cradle Files are Free From Viruses

Every organisation that deploys Cradle will want to satisfy itself that Cradle is safe to install. One free resource that can help is VirusTotal, at:

https://www.virustotal.com/

You can submit files or URLs to this free checking service and have it checked against a wide range of Anti-Virus (AV) products and resources. An example of a check of the Cradle Database Server (CDS), the file: crsvr.exe, is shown in the figure.