The first CM training this year is – Configuration Management June 2024 course.
“A great opportunity for small teams, or a couple of new team members to get started with Configuration Management 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. These courses are tailored and held at your premises / virtually depending on restrictions and requirements and are ideal for getting a team up and running.
Public Configuration Management June 18th to 19th 2024
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 – Configuration Management June 2024 please send an email to salesdetails@threesl.com.
Buy Now
All courses are available for direct purchase online. Buy Now!
Configuration Management December 10th to 11th 2024
The second CM training this year is – Configuration Management December 2024 course.
“A great opportunity for small teams, or a couple of new team members to get started with Configuration Management 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. These courses are tailored and held at your premises / virtually depending on restrictions and requirements and are ideal for getting a team up and running.
Public Configuration Management December 10th to 11th 2024
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 – Configuration Management December 2024 please send an email to salesdetails@threesl.com
Buy Now
All courses are available for direct purchase online. Buy Now!
The Cradle PDM module provides the infrastructure for all other Cradle modules. Its scalability and flexibility create an industrial strength, proven, shared data environment for even the largest projects:
Cradle PDM Module
Databases
Cradle supports any number of databases, each with its own schema, CM system and users. Each database supports many projects. Use the Project Manager tool to organise this environment by user-defined criteria, for example as hierarchies.
Each database stores any number of items, of any number of types (requirements, risks, classes, user stories, functions) defined by a UI. Items have any number of attributes, each of a user-defined type, that manage up to 1 TByte of any type of data, held in Cradle, or referenced in external files, URLs or another tool or environment.
Calculations
User-defined calculations are supported in all parts of Cradle and can be displayed as graphs, in views and user-defined reports. User-defined rules can be applied to automatically set attribute values or perform calculations, to maintain the integrity within and between items.
Cross References
Items can be cross referenced, with optional user-defined link types and groups. Links have user-defined attributes to justify, parametrise, explain or characterise them. You control which links are used to navigate or report traceability, based on link type or group, direction and link attribute values. Links are both direct and indirect, for full lifecycle traceability, impact and coverage analyses.
Process Tailored Environment
You use start pages and a phase hierarchy to build an environment tailored to your process. End users only need to be trained in your interface, reducing training time and costs:
Start pages are text and graphics controls that perform your choice of operations simply and easily
The phase hierarchy shows the process as a hierarchy in which an agile or phase activity, task, sprint, report or document is run by a mouse click. Different parts of the phase hierarchy can be shown to each user or stakeholder group.
Traceability and coverage views are available as trees, nested and pivot tables, matrices and Hierarchy Diagrams. Unique transitive links give traceability across the full system lifecycle.
Configuration Management
Items evolve through versions that are managed in baselines and controlled by a built-in CM system, with mechanisms for review, baseline and version control, full change control, and audit trails.
Cradle can track all changes. Edits can be reversed selectively or by group. Items can be compared across edits and in baselines. Edits can raise alerts to users, and mark related items as suspect. All edits are permanently available, for change logs.
Adaptations
Cradle provides adaptations to allow variants of items. This mechanism is ideal for databases that contain a library of standard items and projects that use the library, and contribute to it.
Access Controls
Access controls apply to all items based on user roles, privileges, security clearances and skills. Users can be grouped in a hierarchy of teams, to create any access control scheme, such as for customers, subcontractors and IV&V. The creation and manipulation of links can be controlled, by item or user.
Cradle is multi-user. It locks information at item level, with automatic database commit after an edit. This maximises users’ interaction with the database and guarantees all data s up-to-date.
Alerts
Cradle’s alert mechanism sends messages by email (SMTP or IMAP), Cradle or both. Alerts can be selectively enabled and disabled. Alerts track events on items, including edit, review and formal change.
Discussions
The Cradle discussion mechanism allows even read-only users to add comments to items. Four other commenting mechanisms are provided.
Project Planning
Cradle can manage project plans and WBS. User task lists are maintained. WBS structures and progress data can be exchanged bidirectionally with external PM tools. Cradle can generate burn-down and earned-value graphs on any user-defined criterion to monitor progress.
API
Cradle is open and extensible. It provides multiple import/export formats, an API, a user-definable event-driven command interface, interfaces with other tools and bidirectional interfaces to Microsoft Office.
Query and Report Data
Cradle provides uniquely powerful data query and visualisation facilities. Each user’s environment can be tailored by defining custom queries, views, forms, navigations, matrices, reports and other facilities. All customisations have a scope, to be specific to the end user, or shared with other users of the same type (such as all customers or all managers), the user’s team, the entire project, or all projects.
Any desired compliance, coverage or traceability report can be created quickly/easily using Cradle’s queries, multi-row views/nested table view, and saved for later use.
Licensing
Cradle has floating, dynamic licensing and low cost read-only users. Open and named user licences are available. Everything described here is free of charge.
Licences, databases and schemas are interchangeable across Linux and Windows 8.1, 10, 11, Server 2012 R2, 2016 and 2019.
Optional support for Oracle and MySQL.
Feature Summary
Feature Summary – PDM
Please contact 3SL for further information about Cradle PDM licences.
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.
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:
Decide on the stages in your process and what each stage means
Create a category code with these stages as its possible values
Assign this category code to the item type(s) that are to follow the process
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
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:
Which users will be involved in the review?
How many of these users must contribute to the review?
How will an approve result be determined from reviewers’ responses?
How will a reject result be determined from reviewers’ responses?
What actions are to be performed for items that are rejected by the review?
What actions are to be performed for items that are approved by the review?
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+:
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?
Cradle items can contain many frames, categories and other attributes that might not necessarily be relevant or required to be shown at different stages of your workflow. An example of which is shown below:
Item showing stage frames
The example provides frames that should only be shown at the relevant stage in the workflow and the Acceptance Criteria, we decided that we wish to show this information at all stages but displayed read-only at stages 2 and 3.
Defining a Stage Category
To start with, create a category to base the workflow on. This must be set as mandatory and have a default value set.
Setup category values
You can then assign this category to the item type. In this example we have used Requirements:
Assign category to item type
Defining the Workflow
In the WorkflowSettings, create a workflow that uses the Stage category to advance to the next stage of the process. In this example, we demonstrate a very simple workflow that advances from Stage 1 to Stage 2 and then Stage 2 to Stage 3. The 3rd level shown here is to then advance to formal review:
Show workflow stages
You can then set this as the default workflow for the item type:
Set default workflow
Note that the Stage Category Form… button becomes active. We will come back to this later as firstly you need to create a form for each stage.
Creating Forms
Using the Form Details dialog, create a form for each stage of the workflow.
Stage 1 Form
The Stage 1 form in this example should show the frame STAGE 1 NOTES but not STAGE 2 NOTES or STAGE 3 NOTES.
Stage 1 form
Stage 2 Form
The Stage 2 form in this example should show the frame STAGE 2 NOTES but not STAGE 1 NOTES or STAGE 3 NOTES. You can also set the Acceptance Criteria frame to only be shown read-only as in the example below:
Stage 2 form
Stage 3 Form
The Stage 3 form in this example should show the frame STAGE 3 NOTES but not STAGE 1 NOTES or STAGE 2 NOTES. You can also set the Acceptance Criteria frame to only be shown read-only as in the example below.
Stage 3 form
Setting the Stage Forms
You can now return to Project Setup and press the Stage Category Form… button:
Stage Category Form button in Project Setup
This will allow you to specify the form to be used at each stage of the workflow.
Stage Category Form dialog
Advancing the Item
When you first create the item, the Stage category is set to Stage 1 as this is the default value for the item. You can see here that the STAGE 1 NOTES frame is shown and the Acceptance Criteria is read-write:
Advance option in ribbon
Pressing the Advance… button closes the item and changes the Stage value to Stage 2 once confirmed in the Advance Operation dialog:
Advance Operation dialog
When you open the item again, you will see that the Stage category is set to Stage 2 and will use the Stage 2 form that shows the STAGE 2 NOTES frame and the Acceptance Criteria is read-only:
Item in form showing stage 2
Advancing the item again uses the form that has been created for Stage 3 and so on.
Summary
WorkBench allows you to create a specific form for each stage of your workflow. This can be particularly useful if the frames, categories or attributes only need to be shown at certain stages of your process. It would simplify the user interface for the users that are modifying the items as they would not be presented with information that might be irrelevant to their task.
The first CM training this year is – Configuration Management June 2023 course.
“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 / virtually depending on restrictions and requirements and are ideal for getting a team up and running.
Public Configuration Management June 20th to 21st 2023
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 – Configuration Management June 2023 please send an email to salesdetails@threesl.com.
Configuration Management December 12th to 13th 2023
The second CM training this year is – Configuration Management December 2023 course.
“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 / virtually depending on restrictions and requirements and are ideal for getting a team up and running.
Public Configuration Management December 12th to 13th 2023
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 – Configuration Management December 2023 please send an email to salesdetails@threesl.com
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 problems in your use of Cradle, please do not hesitate to contact 3SL Support here.
Artemis I
Artemis I Launch
Cradle has been an integral part of the Constellation and Artemis programmes for many years, being central to the toolchains in both government and in industry.
We would like to extend our congratulations to NASA’s Exploration Systems Development mission directorate for the successful launch of Artemis I.
Follow the progress of the Artemis I mission through NASA.
32-Bit vs 64-Bit
For our next major release – Cradle-8.0 – we propose to remove support for:
32-bit Windows
32-bit Microsoft Office
32-bit Linux
We would like to know if this would have adverse effects for any of our current customers and any potential customers. If you believe that removing 32-bit support from Cradle would affect you or your company, then please send your views and opinions to 3SL Supporthere.
Cradle-8.0 will not be released until mid 2023 at the earliest.
New User Training Course
We have a new training course available: Cradle User Course. This course is ideal for:
Anyone who is new to Cradle and needs an overview
Anyone who is joining a team that has been using Cradle for some time
Anyone who has not used Cradle for some time and needs to update their skills
Configuration Management in Cradle, including baselines, workflows, simple reviews, team reviews, formal change, audit trail and how to advance information to the next stage within their lifecycle
The UK government provides the G-Cloud procurement framework for its departments and agencies. G-Cloud 13 is the latest instance of that framework, agreement number RM1557.13, and is available between 9th November 2022 and 8th November 2023.
G-Cloud used to be delivered through the Digital Marketplace. In its latest form, G-Cloud is being delivered through the Public Procurement Gateway (PPG) managed by the Crown Commercial Services (CCS). You can find G-Cloud 13 in the PPG here.
3SL is pleased to announce that we have been accepted into G-Cloud 13, and that Cradle is available as a variety of SaaS services through Lot 2 in this framework, and a range of training and consultancy services are available through Lot 3.
Cradle SaaS Services
A wide range of SaaS services are available through G-Cloud 13 Lot 2. For a summary of this Lot, please see here.
Each service includes Cradle licences, a user-configurable schema, and a comprehensive support package. The SaaS can be delivered for both UNCLASSIFIED (IL0) and OFFICIAL (certified IL3) deployments. The services are:
Agile Collaboration
Agile Software Development
Agile Software Management
Application Lifecycle Development
Application Lifecycle Management
Business Analysis
Business Process Modelling
Defect Tracking
Enterprise Architecture
Integrated Risk Management
Integrated Test Management
Lifecycle Management
MBE Model Based Engineering
MBSE Model Based Software Engineering
MBSE Model Based Systems Engineering
Requirements and Testing
Requirements Engineering
Requirements Management
Risk Assessment
Risk Compliance
Risk Management
SysML Modelling
Systems Engineering
Test Execution
Test Management
Test Planning
UML Modelling
The PPG infrastructure is still in development. CCS have advised that direct links to individual services in the G-Cloud Lots will be available at the end of this year. 3SL will post an update when such links become available.
In the meantime, please contact 3SL here to discuss acquiring a Cradle SaaS through G-Cloud.
Cradle Training/Consultancy
A range of configurable services are available to support a Cradle deployment through G-Cloud 13 Lot 3. For a summary of this Lot, please see here.
These services are:
Consultancy
Administration Training
Fundamentals Training
Advanced Lifecycle Training
The PPG infrastructure is still in development. CCS have advised that direct links to individual services in the G-Cloud Lots will be available at the end of this year. 3SL will post an update when such links become available.
In the meantime, please contact 3SL here to discuss Cradle training and consultancy services through G-Cloud.
3SL would also like to thank all of our customers, evaluators and potential customers who have found the time to send feedback on our services, such as evaluations, training courses, Cradle support and so on.
We understand how busy you are.
Your responses are essentialto help us both monitor and seek to improve the services we provide to you.
Change Requests (CHRs) which are concerned with general statements of the issue to be addressed, or the problem to be solved, or the defect to be corrected
Change Tasks (CHTs) which are concerned with the mechanics of implementing and effecting the change(s) required by one or more CHRs
Both CHRs and CHTs are distinct types of items in the Cradle database and can contain any number of frames. As with standard item types, CHRs and CHTs are provided with some default frames to populate when raising either the CHR or CHT. These are TEXT and NOTES where TEXT is a mandatory frame as this provides the detail.
However, you can also specify in Project Setup whether these item types have any additional frames defined. This can be:
Text
Graphic
Word
PDF
or any other format defined as a frame type:
Project Setup showing Item Types tab
Frame Setup dialog for Change Requests
You can also specify the frames to be mandatory so that the CHR or CHT cannot be raised until those frames are populated. As you can see in the example above the Mandatory checkbox is selected for the JUSTIFICATION frame.
This allows you to ensure that all information is provided for your formal changes.
