Month: February 2017

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Cradle-7.2 is Available!

We are pleased to announce the release of Cradle-7.2!

3SL Customers with active maintenance have been sent an e-mail notification of this release, and details of which enhancement requests and bug reports are in it.

New Capabilities

Cradle-7.2 contains a range of new capabilities that are described in its release notes:
https://www.threesl.com/downloads/download.php?version=v7.2&section=documentation&filename=rm00776-V72ReleaseNotes.pdf
Some of the highlights are:

  • Full support for IPv6 networking
  • Availability of 64-bit Cradle for Linux, use of the latest Windows .NET and improved support of Office 2016
  • Locking projects and disconnecting users through Project Manager
  • Improvements in custom web UI components, and the as-supplied Basic web UI
  • Dashboards as dials in WorkBench and in web UIs
  • More flexibility with Change Tasks in the CM system
  • Extended quality checks in the Conformance Checker and for SysML in the Consistency Checker
  • Find and replace
    – Extensions to queries and views
  • New functional modelling options with PADs and IDEF0

Download

Cradle-7.2 available from our website here:  https://www.threesl.com/downloads/software.php

You need a new Security Code for Cradle-7.2, other Security Codes cannot be used. There is a database conversion from 7.1 to 7.2. The converter which run automatically if you install Cradle-7.2 ‘over the top of, in the same directory as, the earlier version of Cradle from which you are upgrading.
You must upgrade all Cradle installations to 7.2. Cradle-7.1 clients cannot connect to a Cradle-7.2 server, and a Cradle-7.2 server cannot serve Cradle-7.1 clients.

We hope that you will welcome the new capabilities in Cradle-7.2!
Cradle Dashboards

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Happy Shrove Tuesday (Pancake Day)

Have a great Pancake Day whatever your Process Flow!

Shows a pancake in a process flow
Pancake Flow Diagram (PFD)

A (PFD) Process Flow Diagram, rather than Pancake Flow Diagram,  can be used to model Each Process Flow Diagram (PFD) shows a particular tasks or processes  that the system can perform. This is termed a flow. Systems may have many flows each of which may have simultaneous or optional elements.

Modelling the flow before you take action can ensure you have thought about, and documented the expected behaviour(s). It can be clear which parts of the system are operating in parallel and which could be bottlenecks awaiting the outcome of previous operations. However, modelling Shrove Tuesday’s pancakes may be a bit over the top…..

 

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3SL/Cradle Videos – Subscribe and Request

Extra Videos

We want to increase the number of videos in our YouTube channel and we need your help. So please:

  1. Subscribe to the channel!
  2. Tell us what types of video would be most helpful, for example:
    • General demos of capabilities, such as traceability, using trees, view, or reviewing items
    • Demos of individual operations, such as capturing source documents or creating a query
    • Building a Cradle schema
    • Or something else!
  3. Tell us your preferred maximum length for a video, for example < 10, 5 or 2 minutes
  4. If English is not your first language:
    • Do you prefer a human voice or a computer-generated voice?
    • Is it helpful to also show text notes inside the video?

If you know some topics that you want to see in a video, tell us what they are!
Thank you for any help that you can provide, either as comments on this discussion, or by e-mails to me at: mark.walker@threesl.com

Screenshot of 3SL YouTube channel
3SL YouTube channel
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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