From concept to creation
You can add your own messages into the Cradle Login dialog to communicate important information to your Cradle users.
You can also add a checkbox to the Login dialog that users must select before they can login. This includes users who use Single-Sign-On (SSO) to login to Cradle.
This checkbox can be used to, for example, ensure that users have acknowledged that they understand their security and confidentiality obligations every time that they login to Cradle.
You can capture information from Word documents into items in a Cradle database. The items are linked to the ‘source statements’ inside the document. You can follow a link from the item to the paragraph, table, or table row or cell that is the origin of the requirement. When you do this, Word will open to show the source document, correctly positioned to show the source statement.
If you see an error about a command, such as EditGoTo not being available as the document is read-only, then you need to clear the ‘open e-mail attachments read-only’ setting in Word, as shown in the figure.
We hope that this helps!
Each Cradle database contains different sets of information. These can be imagined as layers, where each layer uses the data in the layers below it. For example, cross references cannot exist until the items exist whose relationships are shown by the cross reference. These layers are, highest to lowest:
1. Cross references – the links between the data
2. Items – the data
3. Definitions – how to find, view and report the data
4. User profiles – who can own and access the data
5. Schema – the structure of the data
You can export/import each layer individually, or in any combination, or all layers. You should only import a layer of information if the lower layers already exist in the database (unless you know that it is safe).
To initialise a new database from an existing database, you need as a minimum:
– The schema
– Definitions
User profiles are needed to use a database and may be needed for some parts of the schema (such as workflows and alerts) and definitions (user and personal scopes).
Has your project grown? Is it too big for a single user? Do you need to work in an enterprise environment?
When you first start with a project you may just need one person working away at the initial Requirements (single-user environment). However, when more stakeholders, designers, reviewers and managers join (an enterprise environment) the installation needs to grow.
The good news is that in Cradle this is simply a reconfiguration of your Cradle licence for an Enterprise version and then you can all carry on with the same project.
Cradle is supported on whichever platform your business uses. Cradle WorkBench will run on Linux/Windows Cradle Database Server (CDS) is equally at home on a Linux or Windows box. Of course Web Access is available wherever you browser runs. As you can see from the screenshots there is no need for users to learn a new UI between versions.
Yes absolutely you can convert between versions. That’s great news for your IT department, if they decide to change the server machine they’ll need to port the data across to the new installation and then chat to salesdetails@threesl.com to obtain a new licence.
When you want to see the other items that are linked to the current item in a Cradle display, you can do so by showing the linked items in a Form. This is an effective way to get a comprehensive overview of the interconnections in a formatted and repeatable way.
You can find more information on setting up a form to display this links in this Cradle help article.
You can see items that are linked to the subject item in a number of different ways including:
The View method is as repeatable as setting in a form, the other methods are transient.
The teacher, or your customer, envisages a house built on a hill, they see this as their requirements. In their mind they understand what they want, they have an inherent understanding of how a house should be oriented.
The pupil, or supplier, may not have the same inherent understanding and this can disappoint the customer.
Managing requirements, managing expectations, ensuring clear and unambiguous understanding creates a successful project and a happy customer.
Furthermore, following a defined process of elicitation, discussion, refinement and validation will ensure all parties are kept in the picture throughout the process. There should be no surprises.
The stages can be generalised as:
Equally we live in the real world and thing need and do change. A process needs to cope with and manage those changes. These may be customer initiated, corrections as part of the refinement and understanding stage, or external influences.
This could be through a set of documents, but this is not very scalable. The more complex and numerous the requirements, the more difficult it is to manage the inter dependencies between different parts of the document set.
Imagine the simple case in our example:
It is easy enough to imagine one chapter with some dimensions for the foundations and one building regulation document.
Remaining with the simplistic house:
It is still possible to get your head round the interconnects. It will be a bit more time consuming when GHI(i) is up-released to GHI(ii) and building work hasn’t started and you have to check all the items ordered for the socket outlets still comply in each room.
With a small scale step the complexity the above can soon become unmanageable. Our house may only have seven rooms, but what if these were tens of different compartments on a submarine, hundreds shops owned by a national retailer? GHI(ii)- sub section ‘Public accessible spaces’ is upgraded after a regulatory consultation. How many room specifications are affected?
In a managed solution, a simple report on elements dependent on GHI will give a quick way of calculating the cost impact of altering all the specified outlets. If the power outlets had been categorised when the requirements were written with say Public / Employee / Private access, the number affected, and thus the impact to your customer, could have been further refined.
A Hierarchy Diagram (HID) is a diagram style that is used to graphically show cross references between items. A HID is a tree that starts with the item of interest (source item) and shows the items that are linked to it by cross references. Each of these items’ cross references can be shown with their cross referenced items.
Generate a HID (Hierarchy Diagram) in Cradle for a clear graphical representation of how your items interconnect. Simple to see what depends on what at many levels.
When a HID is opened, the Control sidebar is refreshed to show the following tabs:
If you would like more information on Hierarchy Diagrams and how you can use them, you may find this Cradle help article useful.
Cradle-7.1 has been certified for Citrix XenApp 7.6 and can be accessed through the Citrix Ready Marketplace: https://citrixready.citrix.com/structured-software-systems-ltd/cradle-7-1.html.
Cradle-7.1 integrates requirements management and systems engineering with full MBSE (including SysML, UML, BPM) for collaboration in agile and phase-based projects.
3SL’s Cradle is a tool to load, create, inter-link and publish information for all stages in a systems engineering project using agile, iterative or phase-based approaches and using any process. It is completely user-definable, scalable, flexible and secure. It can be deployed locally in your organisation or project, deployed to remote sites or partners, or delivered through SaaS from any private or public cloud. Cradle can support all your requirements management and systems engineering work in one tool, including:
Cradle is available as a range of single-user products and the multi-user Enterprise product that adds configuration management, unlimited scalability and floating and dynamic concurrent user licensing. All Cradle products can be customised to your project and to your process. Cradle Enterprise provides additional customisation facilities to replace large parts of the Cradle UI with your own start pages and phase hierarchy that optimise Cradle to your process and your way of working. You can define web UIs for each stakeholder group that present the information needed by each group with the features and controls needed by that group to do their work.
For more information, click here.
Do you need to validate the quality of your Requirements? Using Cradle’s Conformance Checker will help you sort the to sort the “shoulds” from the “shalls”. Validate your items’ text with a set of regular expressions to ensure you have clear statements.
There are numerous aspects you can search for in the Cradle Conformance Checker.
These can all be altered to suit your language and product / engineering domain. They are written as Regular Expressions (Regexes) through the project setup.