Summer is on the Way (Spring 2017)

Vernal (Spring) Equinox 2017-03-20

Summer’s on the way for those in the Northern Hemisphere.  The Vernal (Spring) Equinox is marking the first day astronomical spring. Explained further on TimeandDate.com

Why not consider a spring clean, remove all those dusty files full of project requirements version 1 to version 9. Why? Will you really be able to find what you are looking for without a way of searching? Consider whether you can sensibly access the details of those designs sitting rolled up in mailing tubes. Do you have the means to edit them electronically any more. Does anyone know where the file is kept?

NOTE: If you live in the Southern Hemisphere you don’t have to wait until spring you could have an Autumn clean !

sunrise picture
Sunrise

Cradle can help save your day!

With all the data for your project in one convenient tool, everything from the requirements through the project plan, the design and the test results conveniently linked together. Isn’t that much nicer than a set of files on shelves?

From under £250 (Current Requirements Management Desktop price March 2017) you could bring order where there was chaos. See the comparison chart for details of which tool suits best and the shop for current price details.

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day 2017

Wishing all our customers, suppliers and followers a Happy St. Patrick’s day 2017 from 3SL.

State Chart Diagrams (SCD)

Whatever process you are modelling, if there are stages or states that form the process you can represent these in a SCD.

Classes, in this case “a day” that have a distinct lifecycle. They exhibit a different external behaviour in different circumstances “Special day for celebration”  may be augmented by a Statechart Diagram (SCD).
An SCD is a finite-state-machine that describes how the class responds to external stimuli (the triggers here are the end of work on the 17th). The stimuli are the receipt of messages by instances of the class, in the form of calls of the class’s operations. Internally dynamic behaviour is described in terms of a set of states, (The status of the glass) the transitions between these states (Time for Another?)

State Chart Diagram showing Irish stout refill
St. Patrick State Chart Diagram (SCD)

 

Happy Pi Day 2017

Misunderstood Requirement Number 3.14159

“The system shall use Pie to calculate the….”

OK so it’s a homophone, caused by a typo. But misunderstood requirements can have a big impact.

Pi Day itself can throw up the question which part of the world do you live in? Today 14/03/2017 specifying in increasing component granularity dd/mm/yyyy is nothing like π. In reverse as UTC 2017-03-14T12:46:14Z again does not have any π significance. However, living elsewhere in the world, as long as it still used the Julian calendar, dates are written differently, if you swap the components to mm/dd/yyyy 3/14/2017 does have a meaning, although we have to skip back in time to 1592 to really tell the joke!

Writing unambiguous requirements is about being clear in your language, precise in your detail and knowing your audience. Otherwise you may end up with Pi on your face…..

photo of a pie
A Tasty Meat and Vegetable Pie

According to piday.org Pi Day is celebrated on March 14th (3/14) around the world. Pi (Greek letter “π”) is the symbol used in mathematics to represent a constant — the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter — which is approximately 3.14159.

3SL Partner Hosts MBSE Open-day for the Automotive Sector

OpenCADD

3SL’s Brazilian Partner OpenCADD Advanced Technology hosted a MBSE event for the automotive sector on 15th and 16th February 2017 at UTFPR Ponta Grossa, Paraná in Brazil:

UTFPR Ponta Grossa, Paraná, Brazil
UTFPR Ponta Grossa, Paraná – Brazil

The focus for the event was embedded software development in the automotive sector, and included discussion of the software tools provided by OpenCADD in Brazil, which includes 3SL’s Cradle tool. OpenCADD sent a strong team to UTFPR to promote and describe the application and use of MBSE:

OpenCADD Team at UTFPR
OpenCADD Team at UTFPR

The event was attended by several automotive companies including DAF, Chiptronic and Marcopolo, and by many students from UTFPR.

MBSE Presentation at UTFPR
MBSE Presentation at UTFPR

 

March 2017 Newsletter is Available!

We are pleased to announce that our March 2017 newsletter is available here:

https://www.threesl.com/pages/news/webletter-March17/index.php

This month’s newsletter contains the announcement of the Cradle-7.2 release, notes about 3SL’s scoial media accounts, the link from Cradle to Microsoft Project, and some thoughts on managing complex or unusual data types in Cradle.

We send thousands of e-mails through our newsletter distribution list. If you would like to receive our newsletter automatically, please send your e-mail address to me at: mark.walker@threesl.com and I will add you to the list.

We hope that you will find the newsletter to be interesting and helpful!

Cradle User Interface Languages

What ever your language…..

Cradle is currently available in available in eight  English/ English US, Chinese(zh), Dutch(nl),  German(de), French(fr), Korean(ko), Russian(ru) and Welsh(cy), languages.

WorkBench yn Gymraeg
Welsh UI for Cradle WorkBench

If there is a UI (User Interface) language you would like, please speak to us and we will quote for other translations.  Alternatively you can add your own Language, Country or Regional variant. Use the supplied Message Catalogue Manager software tool in Cradle.

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

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…..

 

Cradle-7.1 has been certified for Citrix XenApp 7.6

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.

Product Details

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:

  • Load information from external sources
  • Manage needs, user stories, requirements and a product backlog
  • Analyse the user needs, optionally with models (MBSE)
  • Define the design constraints
  • Define the architecture, optionally with models
  • Create the design, optionally with models
  • Define and track tests, issues and defects at all levels
  • Manage user acceptance and system validation
  • Conduct traceability and coverage analyses across all information in the entire lifecycle or any part of it
  • Publish documentation with user-defined layouts and templates
  • Manage work breakdown structures and user task lists, record actual progress, and link bi-directionally to project planning tools
  • Reuse and share information between projects

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.

Features

  • Full lifecycle systems engineering environment
  • Completely userdefined database with unlimited item types, items, attributes, data, link types, and cross reference links
  • Manages information source documents, through needs and requirements into architecture and functionality/behaviour to testing, V&V and acceptance
  • Massively scalable for small to large, distributed teams
  • Full traceability from source documents, through any engineering process into all published documentation
  • Usable across all industry sectors and government agencies
  • Can manage contractual relationships in entire supply chain

For more information, click here.