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February 2017 Newsletter

Happy Chinese New Year

新年快乐！
3SL 祝愿我们的所有客户，合作伙伴和供应商2017吉祥如意！

Regulation, Compliance and Traceability from Cradle

Discovery, Implementation, Demonstration, is this really what making a product is all about?

From a product development point of view, Elicitation, Analysis, Specification and Validation may be terms an engineer is more familiar with. However, we work in a world where regulation and compliance are hugely important factors in a product’s lifecycle.

As developers and producers we must discover the sets of codes, regulations and standards that form the non functional requirements of our product. We must the implement the changes to our product design to ensure the end product is compliant. Before delivery we must be able to trace our designs and decisions to demonstrate how we comply.

For further discussion on the parallel paths that a product lifecyle must comply, please read one of the 3SL’s whitepapers here.

Twitter Tips

Thanks to those extra follows from January, don’t forget to retweet whenever you find a tip helpful and keep using those #3SL and #Cradle tags.

Baseline Past and Present

Whenever a project reaches a defining moment it is advisable for the project to be baselined. A line in the sand to say ‘we are at this point’, a point from which further development and changes can stem.

However, sometimes we want to return to and extract a particular baseline, say to use as the starting point for a new project variant. See how to export this information in our linked in article

Cradle is Citrix Ready

Large or complex deployment, centrally managed? A number of our customers use Cradle deployed in a Citrix environment.

Cradle 7.1 has been certified for Citrix XenApp 7.6 and can be accessed through the Citrix Ready Marketplace

False Positives

Any software developers out there? We’re gathering experiences, encountered while developing and distributing software, of the eternal battle between virus protection, legitimate development and malware hackers. Please join the discussion here on LinkedIn or see it in the ‘Cradle – RM/SE Tool from 3SL’ group.

Many Roles

Do you sit as a person with many hats? Today you are Engineer, tomorrow you are QA Manager? In smaller organisations many people find they wear a number of hats, but like to keep their operations separate. Whether this is from an administration and traceability point of view, or just to prevent a change being made to data accidentally by a role with an elevated privilege (think sudo in Linux). It may also be the case that you want all these roles to exist in the future, but while the embryonic project is being set up and developed there is only a small team working on it. These roles are later handed over to new colleagues.

Cradle allows you to set up all the users individually and then provide a common alias or in Cradle terms a ‘Switch Identity’. The user can then switch between the various roles without the more time consuming logout – remember different password – login loop.

This is further illustrated in our LinkedIn discussion.

MBSE Buzz!

Model Based System Engineering is all the rage at the likes of the NASA / JPL symposium 25th – 27th Jan. Why not have a look at Cradle’s New MBSE Reference in our improved 3SL website.

Hints of the Month

Here are some links to helpful topics since our last newsletter, they should improve your Cradle experience:

Need to estimate your hardware requirements over the life of a project see the Database Size Calculator.

Want to show every user a special message before they start? Use the Login Messages and User Acknowledgement facility.

Happy about installing, IT want to know everything is OK, drop in at VirusTotal – see Check Cradle Files are Free From Viruses.

New to managing documents and statements you can Avoid Problems Opening Source Documents and Statements here.

Seeing an odd Word error ? Read all about it Word Error – Ambiguous name detected: TmpDDE.

Don’t worry if you computer raises a False Positive from Symantec and Trend Micro Office Scan.  AV Products will explain why.

The world still revolves round documents (paper or electronic) it’s an easy way for humans to deal with data, from Cradle you can Publish a Formal Document.

Installation issues? A few of articles that may help Installation Issues With .NET Framework, Installation Issue With Windows C Runtime, Installation Issue With Office 2016 / 365 / ClickToRun

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False Positives from Symantec

False positives were recently reported by the Symantec and Trend Micro Office Scan Anti-Virus (AV) products. In both cases, they falsely reported a problem with the c_image.exe executable (which simply displays images, such as the Cradle splash screen).

We have arrangements with these and other AV vendors to pre-qualify Cradle executables before release. We do not know why these products have started to produce false positives for c_image.exe, since this executable has not changed and has previously been included in these products’ whitelists.

We have reported this problem to both vendors and can confirm that c_image.exe is in the whitelists of these products as of 11.1.17.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Cradle Splashscreen
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From Now to Goal – Requirements Management

Goal

If you don’t know where you are currently, or how you arrived or what your ultimate goal is, how do you know in which direction to head? Requirements Management is a skill made easier by the full traceability of tools such as Cradle.

non directional ruler
From – Now – Goal

Build Me a Home

Starting a project without having a base understanding of the situation is a like building a house on unstable foundations. When the walls start to wander you’ll have no idea whether it was because the foundations were not level or were inappropriate or whether the direction of the wall is simply wrong.

Not knowing the ultimate goal could lead to a double height wall being built for a bungalow.

If you have no measure of how high the wall currently stands, you’ll have no chance of estimating how long it will take to finish.

Baseline, Elicit  and Measure

It may sound obvious when applied to the ‘simple’ task of  building a home. It appears ridiculous to start building without knowing whether our goal is a bungalow, house or flat. Yet many projects start with a very loose understanding  between stakeholders and producers and can head off in the wrong direction.

Baseline

Do we know the current situation? Do the foundations exist, is this a single storey  build that needs extending with an upper floor or are we to start from scratch. Are there any assumptions we need to record, this project assumes that there bedrock will be found within a metre.

Elicit Requirements

Have we investigated what the customer / stakeholder actually wants? We could achieve the same m2 with two storeys or one larger floor. No point building a house and then finding mobility restrictions mean a bungalow was needed. Do they actually need a house. The baseline may show they actually have somewhere to live and all they need is some more storage. We could provide them with a shed and achieve their goal. This honesty in not selling them a new house may mean we have a smaller turnover, but a far better reputation. This should lead to repeat and new business as knowledgeable supplier.

Measure

This needs to be done at each stage. Internally we need to know that we are meeting the design. When do we stop building the walls? Externally we need to know that the customer is going to be happy. Milestones and intermediate reviews will prevent big surprises at the end. Whilst we want to avoid requirements creep, we have no intention to build a mansion for the price of a flat, customer requirements change and to remain agile, we need to build in steps to accommodate change.

Summary

If you can see the sense in this simplistic example you have every justification you need to correctly control and manage your project. If you can’t see the point, you’re likely to return to your back of envelope calculations and assumptions of what your customer needs. Good luck to you, but we’d prefer you to take steps to de-risk your plans. Put yourself on the receiving end, a 20 storey building each with a floor of 1m*1m and a ladder pinned to the outside. It fulfils the requirements, but you try sleeping in your new bedsit.

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Making Space – Maximized Data Display Area

I Need More Space

There is a lot of information in the WorkBench UI (User Interface). Sometimes you want a concentrate on one aspect, and it many not be possible to see everything you want in one go. You may be using Cradle on a laptop or tablet with a small screen and a limited display resolution. If so, you may want a maximised data display area, by reducing the screen area occupied by the Cradle UI controls. Make space in Cradle’s WorkBench interface by closing sidebars and the ribbon, status bar and Quick Access Bar (QAB).

Maximised Data Display Area

You can do several things to maximise what you can see in the WorkBench UI. In general, these are all to minimise or hide parts of the WorkBench UI. You can make many of these changes permanent by setting your preferences. To set yourpreferences, select Preferences in the Home tab, make the changes (typically in the UI Control group) and finally, click OK.

set UI preferences in 3SL Cradle RM SE Tool
Setting UI Preferences

Hide the Sidebar

You can hide the sidebar on the left of the UI by clicking whichever sidebar’s button is currently selected. This will make the sidebar disappear.

You can prevent a sidebar being shown when WorkBench starts by setting the Default sidebar user preference to None:

maximised data display area in 3SL Cradle RM SE Tool
Set No Sidebar

Hide the Quick Access Bar

The Quick Access Bar is a horizontal menu of buttons that provides easy access to sets of queries that Cradle creates automatically when you define item types in your database schema.

You can hide the quick access bar from the Window group in the ribbon:

maximised data display area in 3SL Cradle RM SE Tool
Hide the Quick Access Bar

You can prevent the quick access bar being shown when WorkBench starts by de-selecting the preference Show quick access bar when WorkBench starts:

maximised data display area in 3SL Cradle RM SE Tool
Set No Quick Access Bar

Hide the Status Bar

The Status Bar is a horizontal collection of status indicators shown across the bottom of the UI. You can hide the status bar from the Window group in the ribbon:

maximised data display area in 3SL Cradle RM SE Tool
Hide the Status Bar

Minimise the Ribbon

You can minimise the ribbon across the top of the UI by double-clicking to the right of the tabs, typically to the right of the Help tab.

Maximise Diagram Area

When you edit or view a diagram in any model, Cradle will display it in a form. This form includes the diagram’s symbols in a drawing area. It also includes other diagram attributes. You can set the preference so that you only see the diagram’s symbols when a diagram is first drawn:

maximised data display area in 3SL Cradle RM SE Tool
Hide Diagram Attributes

Press A to toggle the display of the other diagram attributes.

Normal Display Area

For illustration, a typical WorkBench UI showing a query with a simple view in Table style would appear like this:

maximised data display area in 3SL Cradle RM SE Tool
Normal Data Display Area

Maximium Display Area

If you use all of the tips described here, the UI will have a maximised data display area and will appear like this:

maximised data display area in 3SL Cradle RM SE Tool
Maximised Data Display Area

This is a useful increase in the screen area used to display information.

 

Article Updated: More details 26/07/2018
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Manual ‘ V’ Cradle

Compare

When it comes to managing your requirements  and designs there really is no contest between a manual based system and a tool based system.  A cross referenced and baselined design in Cradle is your ultimate goal.

Manual

A manual based system at worst is a set of paper requirements, managed in folders with paper-clips and sticky notes. An electronic system may include a number of word processor documents, drawings and spreadsheets. These have very limited, or manually updated meta data to describe how they interlink.

RM tool

A Requirements Management and Systems Engineering software tool brings these elements together in one place and provides the meta data and traceability that binds them together into a successful project.

 

Paper and pencil versus Cradle
Manual versus Cradle
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Move from ‘bdd’ to ‘ibd’

It is easy to traverse a SysML bdd (block definition diagram) to an ibd (internal block diagram). This is achieved via the cross references between the specification, holding the details, and its use on each diagram. A common piece of data represented in different ways on different diagrams. A case of record once, use many.

How to move from 'bdd' to 'ibd'
Follow cross reference from ‘bdd’ to ‘ibd’
Article updated 22/10/2018 – Added links to Cradle online help
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Switching Between Cradle Login Accounts

It is often the case that the accounts within a project have more than one role. For example an “engineer” role and a “team leader” role. Different privileges are needed for these roles, so it is possible that people will have more than one user account.  This could create a problem if the user repeatedly needs to logout and re-enter credentials for each of their accounts. If a user needs to repeatedly change user profiles, these steps can become very time consuming.

Instead, a user can use the ‘Switch’ option in the ‘User’ group in the ‘Home’ tab. A similar mechanism is available in Cradle custom web UIs.

Cradle presents a list of other user profiles that the user can ‘switch’ to. When the user chooses one of these user profiles, he/she is logged-out from the current login account and logged-in to the chosen login account, without any use of the Login dialog, with no need to enter the new user’s username, and with no need to enter the password for the new login account.

This mechanism can be used to allow any number of users can to switch between any number of users in the SAME database.

Switching Between Cradle Accounts
Switching Between Cradle Accounts
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Publish a Table

From Query to Print

The Publish Table function in Cradle gives a simple way to produce html (Hypertext mark-up Language) , rtf (Rich Text Format) or csv (Comma Separated Values) output.

Publish a table from within WorkBench
Publishing a table

Tip: Saving as html will maintain the formatting to directly open in Excel.

Article updated 22/10/2018 – Added tip
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Managing Projects

Managing Projects in Cradle

When you have a large number of projects and users it can get difficult to track them all. Project Manager, part of the Cradle suite, provides a method to hierarchically organise, categorise and sort your projects.

Project Manager showing projects in folder organisation.
Organise projects in Project Manager

Classification / Categorisation

A Project may belong to more than one sub category, “Mechanical Department” and “Current Project”, you can place a link to the project in each of these folders. In the future the link may be in the “Mechanical Department” and “Completed” folders, its up to you. Project manager can also add a host of user defined categorisations and references. This will help identify a project and its associated contracts or references,  now and in years to come.

Attributes

You can set attributes for each project. These can provide extra details about the project’s purpose, status, dates and so on. Project Manager ships with nine default attributes, however, you can add your own or change those supplied.

  • Alias  ‘Alias ID for the project, such as an alternative project ID number’
  • Division ‘General Description such as the company division doing the project’
  • Branch ‘General description such as the company branch doing the project’
  • Customer ‘General description such as the name of the customer for the project’
  • Reference ‘General Description such as the RFP or ITT reference number’
  • ‘Inception Date’ ‘General description such as the start date of the project’
  • Purpose ‘General project description, used in any manner found to be useful’
  • Summary ‘General project description, used in any manner found to be useful’
  • Description ‘General project description, used in any manner found to be useful’
Showing the range of Project Attributes that can be set for a project

    Setting Project Attributes

Continue reading “Managing Projects”