3SL Blog (Structured Software Systems Ltd)

23rd February 20174th February 2019

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’.

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

23rd February 201711th May 2017

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.

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!

23rd February 201711th May 2017

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.

22nd February 201714th November 2022

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.

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

22nd February 20179th May 2017

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

A Picture…

A proverb, a newspaper editor’s comment on journalism, a printer’s marketing spiel, the origin as discussed in Wikipedia and throughout the web is a little muddied. However, we think you’ll agree that a picture can convey very quickly what you would need many paragraphs to say.

There are many uses of images and pictures in capture, design and development. From the customer’s point of view this may be the easiest way to communicate what they want, even if they don’t know the language of the supplier. The designer drawing a picture of how the system operates is creating a model that communicates more than the specifications of each part. Images of anything from an oscilloscope trace to a microscope slide may be used as evidence of meeting a requirement. Photos of the final implementation can be a fabulous selling point.

Pictures in Cradle

Each of these elements can be captured in Cradle throughout the lifecycle of a product.
Here a requirement, capturing a photo of the location for the installation, provides the user with the textual description (Latitude and Longitude) and a clear visualisation of the site.

The model itself, and pictorial annotations within, can illustrate the design. The design model itself is supported through numerous notations including (to name but a few):

Holistically viewed with SysML (Systems Modelling Language) notations.
SysML Disgrams
Behaviourally described along a timeline with eFFBD (Extended Functional Flow Block Diagram)
Described in OO (Object-Oriented) methods with Use Case Diagrams describing how the system sits in its environment with CPDs (Component Diagrams) describing the parts
Functionally modelled through Yourdon DFDs (Data Flow Diagrams) and STDs (State Transition Diagrams) etc.
Pictures inserted in a Data Flow Diagram

A copy of a test certificate can be stored in a compliance item type, linked back through the design to the requirement. These could then be printed as an HTML report or more formally as figures within a Document Publisher output.

Images included in View, Form and Printed output

From concept to creation, you, Cradle and 3SL!

21st February 201711th May 2017

Database Size Calculator

We have produced a simple Excel spreadsheet that automates the database sizing formulae from the ‘Database Sizing’ section of Chapter 5 – ‘Hardware Sizing’ in the Cradle System Administration Guide.

You enter estimates for:

– The number and size of the items in your database
– The number of cross references
– The number of baselines you expect to create over the lifetime of the project, and
– The amount of new and changed information in each baseline

and you will see an estimate of the size of your Cradle database at the end of the project.

You can experiment with these values to explore upper and lower bounds for the eventual database size.

If you would like a copy of this spreadsheet, leave a comment below, or send an e-mail to me at: mark.walker@threesl.com

We will include this spreadsheet in future Cradle releases.

21st February 201722nd October 2018

Add an Image Attribute to Items

It is often helpful to be able to store image(s) inside items in a Cradle database.

This is easy to set up. You simply add one or more new image ‘frame’ attribute(s) to the type of item in which you want to store images, such as your test cases, or your System Breakdown Structure (SBS). To do this:

1. Start WorkBench and login to your database as a user with PROJECT privilege so you can change the schema
2. Select ‘Project Setup’ from the ‘Project’ tab to open the schema
3. With ‘Options’ set to ‘Item Definitions’, select the ‘Item’ type (this is the default)
4. Select the item type and select ‘Frames…’
5. Select ‘New…’ and enter the name of the new image attribute, such as: figure
6. Set the new attribute’s frame type to be an image (with no frame type, the frame stores plain text), such as GIF or JPEG (provided with all Cradle systems)
7. Select ‘OK’ to close the schema

Now any/all items of your chosen item type can have a figure frame that can contain an image. When you view the attribute, the image will appear. You can capture images from external documents into the attribute using Document Loader. You can include the images in reports and in documents published by Document Publisher. If you edit the image, then the change history will store the images from before and after each edit.

We hope that this is helpful!

Article updated 22/10/2018 – Made image bigger

21st February 20174th February 2019

User information

Who?

User information can be used to show such things as who has created an item, edited an item and when the item was created.

Chances are in a big project not every user will know all the other users on a project. If you need to know a bit more about who edited an item, you can hover over the changer for a tool-tip in a Cradle Form in WorkBench. This will show the additional information held for each of the users in the User Setup dialog.

To set User Profile details, this is done via “User Setup” as you can see in the screenshot below showing the Description of the User and the Location of the user.

Screenshot showing User Setup dialog — User Setup

These details are then shown when hovering over the user in areas such as Forms to show when the user last modified this item.

user tooltip showing details — Show user information

When / What ?

There are many more fields that will give you additional information information, dates and times will show the full underlying UTC, categories will show their description, go on have a hover and discover.

Article Updated 04/02/2019 – Added extra information

20th February 20174th February 2019

Add a Document Attribute to Items

It is often helpful to be able to store document(s) inside items in a Cradle database.

This is easy to set up. You simply add one or more new document ‘frame’ attribute(s) to the type of item in which you want to store documents, such as your test cases, or your System Breakdown Structure (SBS). To do this:

1. Start WorkBench and login to your database as a user with PROJECT privilege so you can change the schema
2. Select ‘Project Setup’ from the ‘Project’ tab to open the schema
3. With ‘Options’ set to ‘Item Definitions’, select the ‘Item’ type (this is the default)
4. Select the item type and select ‘Frames…’
5. Select ‘New…’ and enter the name of the new image attribute, such as: document
6. Set the new attribute’s frame type to be WORD (DOCX) or OO WRITER that are provided with all Cradle systems. With no frame type, the frame stores plain text.
7. Select ‘OK’ to close the schema

Now any/all items of your chosen item type can have a document frame that can contain a Word document (for WORD (DOCX) frames) or a LibreOffice/Open Office document (for OO WRITER frames). The entire document is embedded inside the item’s attribute.

When you view the attribute, it will appear as <DATA>. If you select View or Edit for this attribute, then it will open in Word or Writer. If you chose Edit, then any changes that you made to the document will be saved back into the database.

You can capture tables or images or ranges of text from external Word documents into the attribute using Document Loader. You can include these Word documents in reports and in documents published by Document Publisher. If you edit the document, then the change history will store the documents from before and after each edit.

Article Updated 04/02/2019 – Increased image size to make it readable

20th February 201730th January 2019

Opening an External URL reference from a Form

Referenced Information

Sometimes you need to reference an external resource from an item. These external references can be easily achieved by adding a URL frame to a Cradle item type. Each instance of that item type can then hold a reference to an external resource. The URL can then be opened to view it from the link element in the form.

Creating a URL Frame

While the ability to reference external resources via URL in a form is useful, you must first assign the HTML frame type to your Item Type(s).

It is very easy to do this, simply open Project Setup > Go to Item Types > Select your desired Item Type and click “Frames”. From here, create a new frame and then from the Type drop down select “HTML”.

Screenshot showing how to assign a frame — Assigning a Frame

We hope you find this useful! For information on other useful frame types see this cradle help article.