Project Administration – Cross Reference Integrity Checks

This blog follows on from our previous blog about project integrity checks. Here we discuss a second project integrity tool which concerns the validity of cross references. This can be found in the Project ribbon:

Project ribbon
Cross Reference Integrity Check option

As with the Item Integrity Checker, the user MUST have ACCESS_BYPASS privilege to instigate any changes to the data. It is highly recommended that there are no other active users in the database.

In fact, we would recommend locking a project using Project Manager prior to using these utilities if you cannot be certain that other users would not try to log on during the process of running the utilities.

Also, it is highly recommended to back up your database and/or create a snapshot prior to instigating any changes using these utilities.

For details about snapshots, refer to the following help page.

Cross Reference Integrity Checker

The Cross Reference Integrity Checker consists of several checks that compare the links found in the database with the rules specified in Project Setup. Some of the issues found can be repaired with a single click.

There are some checks that would not be required in normal Cradle usage but could appear as a result of an import. An example of this could be due to the fact that Cradle has the ability to import cross references independently of any item types and specify the from item and the to item. These items referred to in the cross references by their identity attribute, might not exist in the database so this is an example of a dangling cross reference.

Cross Reference Integrity Checks

Other checks are:

  • Duplicate cross references
  • Reversed hierarchical cross references – where the from item has an identity that suggests it to be the child of the to item. For example, a cross reference that is from item 1.2.3 to item 1.2. The usual action is to fix the cross references which will reverse them.
  • Cross references to be reversed – where the link rules specified in Project Setup state that the link between the checked items should be in the opposite direction in order to be valid.
  • Cross references needing a new link type – where it detects cross references that are invalid according to the current link rules but which become valid if their link type is changed
  • Invalid cross references
  • Cross reference cardinality – detects cross references whose cardinality does not match the current link rules
  • Cross reference attributes – checks the cross reference attributes, e.g., if there was information in a cross reference attribute (e.g. Reason) and was removed in a way other than through the UI, this check will flag the cross reference.
Cross Reference Integrity dialog
Cross Reference Integrity dialog

These checks will provide both a report and a summary in the dialog.

Example Cross Reference Integrity Report
Example Cross Reference Integrity Report
Example Cross Reference Integrity dialog
Example Cross Reference Integrity dialog

In this example, 154 of the cross references that exist in the database would be valid if they were reversed. So clicking the Fix button would repair those links with a single click.

Summary

We have addressed some of the checks that can be run on items to confirm the validity of cross references.

Please remember that the user MUST have ACCESS_BYPASS privilege to instigate any changes to the data. It is highly recommended that there are no other active users in the database.

Cradle Modules – PDM

The Cradle PDM module provides the infrastructure for all other Cradle modules. Its scalability and flexibility create an industrial strength, proven, shared data environment for even the largest projects:

Cradle PDM Module
Cradle PDM Module

Databases

Cradle supports any number of databases, each with its own schema, CM system and users. Each database supports many projects. Use the Project Manager tool to organise this environment by user-defined criteria, for example as hierarchies.

Each database stores any number of items, of any number of types (requirements, risks, classes, user stories, functions) defined by a UI. Items have any number of attributes, each of a user-defined type, that manage up to 1 TByte of any type of data, held in Cradle, or referenced in external files, URLs or another tool or environment.

Calculations

User-defined calculations are supported in all parts of Cradle and can be displayed as graphs, in views and user-defined reports. User-defined rules can be applied to automatically set attribute values or perform calculations, to maintain the integrity within and between items.

Cross References

Items can be cross referenced, with optional user-defined link types and groups. Links have user-defined attributes to justify, parametrise, explain or characterise them. You control which links are used to navigate or report traceability, based on link type or group, direction and link attribute values. Links are both direct and indirect, for full lifecycle traceability, impact and coverage analyses.

Process Tailored Environment

You use start pages and a phase hierarchy to build an environment tailored to your process. End users only need to be trained in your interface, reducing training time and costs:

  • Start pages are text and graphics controls that perform your choice of operations simply and easily
  • The phase hierarchy shows the process as a hierarchy in which an agile or phase activity, task, sprint, report or document is run by a mouse click. Different parts of the phase hierarchy can be shown to each user or stakeholder group.

Traceability and coverage views are available as trees, nested and pivot tables, matrices and Hierarchy Diagrams. Unique transitive links give traceability across the full system lifecycle.

Configuration Management

Items evolve through versions that are managed in baselines and controlled by a built-in CM system, with mechanisms for review, baseline and version control, full change control, and audit trails.

Cradle can track all changes. Edits can be reversed selectively or by group. Items can be compared across edits and in baselines. Edits can raise alerts to users, and mark related items as suspect. All edits are permanently available, for change logs.

Adaptations

Cradle provides adaptations to allow variants of items. This mechanism is ideal for databases that contain a library of standard items and projects that use the library, and contribute to it.

Access Controls

Access controls apply to all items based on user roles, privileges, security clearances and skills. Users can be grouped in a hierarchy of teams, to create any access control scheme, such as for customers, subcontractors and IV&V. The creation and manipulation of links can be controlled, by item or user.

Cradle is multi-user. It locks information at item level, with automatic database commit after an edit. This maximises users’ interaction with the database and guarantees all data s up-to-date.

Alerts

Cradle’s alert mechanism sends messages by email (SMTP or IMAP), Cradle or both. Alerts can be selectively enabled and disabled. Alerts track events on items, including edit, review and formal change.

Discussions

The Cradle discussion mechanism allows even read-only users to add comments to items. Four other commenting mechanisms are provided.

Project Planning

Cradle can manage project plans and WBS. User task lists are maintained. WBS structures and progress data can be exchanged bidirectionally with external PM tools. Cradle can generate burn-down and earned-value graphs on any user-defined criterion to monitor progress.

API

Cradle is open and extensible. It provides multiple import/export formats, an API, a user-definable event-driven command interface, interfaces with other tools and bidirectional interfaces to Microsoft Office.

Query and Report Data

Cradle provides uniquely powerful data query and visualisation facilities. Each user’s environment can be tailored by defining custom queries, views, forms, navigations, matrices, reports and other facilities. All customisations have a scope, to be specific to the end user, or shared with other users of the same type (such as all customers or all managers), the user’s team, the entire project, or all projects.

Any desired compliance, coverage or traceability report can be created quickly/easily using Cradle’s queries, multi-row views/nested table view, and saved for later use.

Licensing

Cradle has floating, dynamic licensing and low cost read-only users. Open and named user licences are available. Everything described here is free of charge.

Licences, databases and schemas are interchangeable across Linux and Windows 8.1, 10, 11, Server 2012 R2, 2016 and 2019.

Optional support for Oracle and MySQL.

Feature Summary

Feature Summary - PDM
Feature Summary – PDM

Please contact 3SL for further information about Cradle PDM licences.

Product Range – Cradle Enterprise

Cradle Enterprise Overview

Collaborative Model Based Systems Engineering across the Systems Lifecycle

Complete Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and documentation solution for the entire project lifecycle, fully user-definable and applicable to all agile and phase based processes.

  • Supports the full systems development lifecycle at system, subsystem and lower levels
  • Integrates in one product features normally spread across separate tools from different vendors
  • Completely user-definable and user-extensible with point-and-click UIs
  • Manage any information, including requirements, risks, interfaces, tests and verifications
  • Scalable to millions of items of information
  • Full traceability of data from external sources and version management of source documents
  • Full traceability and coverage analyses
  • User-definable views of data including tables, trees, documents, matrices, diagrams and graphs
  • User-defined metrics and management dashboards

Cradle Enterprise is a complete multi-user solution to manage, trace and document all the data for your agile and phase-based projects.

Capture and Track Information

Capture information from external documents and tools, and track changes in these sources. You can build new sets of requirements, analysis, architecture and design models, tests or verifications, and link them to the source data and to each other. Check the consistency and quality of this information, and prove the integrity of the models and other data with bi-directional coverage and traceability analyses.

Customers’ confidence can be raised with proof that your work satisfies its sources and constraints, and will meet their needs.

Easily track progress with metrics and KPIs and link to your WBS and actual progress to your project planning tools.

Create Databases and Information

Create any number of databases, each with a schema and multiple projects that contain any number of items of any number of user-defined item types. Each item has any number of attributes with up to 1TByte of data, held in Cradle, or referenced in files, URLs or other tools.

All items can be linked with user-defined types of cross reference. The links have attributes to justify, explain or parametise them. Links are direct and indirect, for full lifecycle traceability, impact and coverage analyses.

External documents can be loaded into hierarchies of items. Every item in Cradle is linked to its source in a document. Changes in new document versions are automatically found and the database updated. You can prove the integrity of all source data to your customers with a range of detailed coverage analyses of their documents.

Items can be linear, hierarchical and in many-to-many relationships. Items can be split, merged and reordered. All information can be shared and reused. Cradle can support product ranges, models, variants and builds, and generate comparative analyses between them as tables, pivot tables and matrices.

Create any number of analysis, logical, process, architecture or design models in SysML, UML, SASD, IDEF, ADARTS and other notations. Optionally group models in hierarchies and link elements of all models to requirements, SBS, issues, test cases and all other information.

Track and View Information

Cradle tracks all edits to every requirement, test case, verification and all other information that you want it to hold. Edits can be reversed selectively or by group. Full or partial change logs are readily available.

Control the work with team hierarchies, roles and access controls. Review items with discussions, user-defined workflows and built-in CM with baselines, full version control and formal change management.

You define how information is viewed and reported in any number of views, shown as nested tables, trees, matrices, pivot tables and as diagrams.

Generate versions of documents such as a URD, SRD, IRS, SDS and SSDS to match your or your client’s formats with user-defined templates and detailed traceability of which items were published in each document issue.

Manage Projects

Manage your projects with:

  • Metrics, user-defined calculations of items’ values
  • Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), results of metric calculations with colour-coded display bands
  • Bi-directional links to Project, including user task lists and actual progress reporting

Cradle is open. It supports many import/export formats, has several interface mechanisms to link to other tools, and connects to Microsoft Office components Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Project.

Cradle is simple to customise and use through point-and-click UIs.

Major Features

The major features are:

Cradle Enterprise Features
Cradle Enterprise Features

Supported Platforms

The supported platforms are:

Supported Platforms

Characteristics

The characteristics are:

Cradle Enterprise Characteristics
Cradle Enterprise Characteristics

Cradle Enterprise is part of the Cradle product range that includes low cost, single-user tools.

Product Range Highlights

  • Applies to agile and phase projects
  • Application lifecycle management
  • Requirements management
  • Modelling / MBSE
  • Test execution / risk management
  • Full lifecycle integration
  • V&V and compliance management
  • Reporting / document publishing
  • Metrics
  • Dashboards
  • Project plans
  • User-defined UIs
  • Custom web UIs
  • Configuration management
  • Multi user

Product Range – Cradle-SE Pro

Cradle-SE Pro Overview

Model Based Systems Engineering across the Systems Lifecycle

Complete Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and documentation solution for the entire project lifecycle, fully user-definable and applicable to all agile and phase based processes.

  • Supports the full systems development lifecycle at system, subsystem and lower levels
  • Integrates in one product features normally spread across separate tools from different vendors
  • Completely user-definable and user-extensible with point-and-click UIs
  • Manage any information, including requirements, models, risks, interfaces, tests and verifications
  • Scalable to millions of items of information
  • Full traceability of data to source and generated documents with complete version management
  • Full traceability and coverage analyses
  • User-definable views of data including tables, trees, documents, matrices, diagrams and graphs
  • User-defined metrics and management dashboards

Cradle-SE Pro is a complete solution to manage, trace and document all the data for your agile and phase-based projects.

Capture and Track Information

Capture information from external documents and tools, and track changes in these sources. You can build new sets of requirements, analysis, architecture and design models, tests or verifications, and link them to the source data and to each other. Check the consistency and quality of this information, and prove the integrity of the models and other data with bi-directional coverage and traceability analyses.

Customers’ confidence can be raised with proof that your work satisfies its sources and constraints, and will meet their needs.

Easily track progress with metrics and KPIs and link to your WBS and actual progress to your project planning tools.

Create Databases and Information

Create any number of databases, each with a schema and multiple projects that contain any number of items of any number of user-defined item types. Each item has any number of attributes with up to 1TByte of data, held in Cradle, or referenced in files, URLs or other tools.

All items can be linked with user-defined types of cross reference. The links have attributes to justify, explain or parametise them. Links are direct and indirect, for full lifecycle traceability, impact and coverage analyses.

External documents can be loaded into hierarchies of items. Every item in Cradle is linked to its source in a document. Changes in new document versions are automatically found and the database updated. You can prove the integrity of all source data to your customers with a range of detailed coverage analyses of their documents.

Items can be linear, hierarchical and in many-to-many relationships. Items can be split, merged and reordered. All information can be shared and reused. Cradle can support product ranges, models, variants and builds, and generate comparative analyses between them as tables, pivot tables and matrices.

Create any number of analysis, architecture, logical, process or design models using UML, SASD, IDEF, ADARTS, SysML and other notations. Group models in hierarchies and link all elements of all models to requirements, SBS, issues, test cases and all other information.

Track and View Information

Cradle tracks all edits to every requirement, test case, verification and all other information that you want it to hold. Edits can be reversed selectively or by group. Full or partial change logs are readily available.

You define how information is viewed and reported in any number of views, shown as nested tables, trees, matrices, pivot tables and as diagrams.

Generate versions of documents such as URD, SRD, IRS, SDS and SSDS to match your or your client’s formats with user-defined templates and detailed traceability of which items were published in each document issue.

Manage Projects

Manage your projects with:

  • Metrics, user-defined calculations of items’ values
  • Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), results of metric calculations with colour-coded display bands
  • Bi-directional links to Project, including user task lists and actual progress reporting

Cradle is open. It supports many import/export formats, has several interface mechanisms to link to other tools, and connects to Microsoft Office components Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Project.

Cradle is simple to customise and use. You do not need to learn a scripting language or become a programmer to tailor it to your process. After every change to your schema, Cradle will automatically update collections of queries, views and other definitions that make you productive immediately.

Major Features

The major features are:

Cradle-SE Pro Features
Cradle-SE Pro Features

Supported Platforms

The supported platforms are:

Supported Platforms

Characteristics

The characteristics are:

Cradle-SE Pro Characteristics
Cradle-SE Pro Characteristics

Cradle-SE Pro is part of the Cradle product range. The full, multi-user, product is Cradle Enterprise.

Product Range Highlights

  • Applies to agile and phase projects
  • Application lifecycle management
  • Requirements management
  • Modelling / MBSE
  • Full lifecycle integration
  • V&V
  • Reporting
  • Document publishing
  • Metrics
  • Dashboards
  • Project plans
  • Compliance management
  • Single user

Product Range – Cradle-SE Desktop

Cradle-SE Desktop Overview

Model Based Systems Engineering across the Systems Lifecycle

Complete Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) solution for the entire project lifecycle, fully user-definable and applicable to all agile and phase based processes.

  • Supports the full systems development lifecycle at system, subsystem and lower levels
  • Integrates in one product features normally spread across separate tools from different vendors
  • Completely user-definable and user-extensible with point-and-click UIs
  • Manage any information, including requirements, models, risks, interfaces, tests and verifications
  • Scalable to millions of items of information
  • Full traceability of data from external sources and version management of source documents
  • Full traceability and coverage analyses
  • User-definable views of data including tables, trees, documents, matrices, diagrams and graphs
  • User-defined metrics and management dashboards

Cradle-SE Desktop is a complete solution to manage and trace all the data for your agile and phase-based projects.

Capture and Track Information

Capture information from external documents and tools, and track changes in these sources. You can build new sets of requirements, analysis, architecture and design models, tests or verifications, and link them to the source data and to each other. Check the consistency and quality of this information, and prove the integrity of the models and other data with bi-directional coverage and traceability analyses.

Customers’ confidence can be raised with proof that your work satisfies its sources and constraints, and will meet their needs.

Easily track progress with metrics and KPIs and link to your WBS and actual progress to your project planning tools.

Create Databases and Information

Create any number of databases, each with a schema and multiple projects that contain any number of items of any number of user-defined item types. Each item has any number of attributes with up to 1TByte of data, held in Cradle, or referenced in files, URLs or other tools.

All items can be linked with user-defined types of cross reference. The links have attributes to justify, explain or parametise them. Links are direct and indirect, for full lifecycle traceability, impact and coverage analyses.

External documents can be loaded into hierarchies of items. Every item in Cradle is linked to its source in a document. Changes in new document versions are automatically found and the database updated. You can prove the integrity of all source data to your customers with a range of detailed coverage analyses of their documents.

Items can be linear, hierarchical and in many-to-many relationships. Items can be split, merged and reordered. All information can be shared and reused. Cradle can support product ranges, models, variants and builds, and generate comparative analyses between them as tables, pivot tables and matrices.

Create any number of analysis, process, architecture and design models using UML, SASD, IDEF, ADARTS, SysML and other notations. Group models in hierarchies and link all elements of all models to requirements, SBS, issues, test cases and all other information.

Track and View Information

Cradle tracks all edits to every requirement, test case, verification and all other information that you want it to hold. Edits can be reversed selectively or by group. Full or partial change logs are readily available.

You define how information is viewed and reported in any number of views, shown as nested tables, trees, matrices, pivot tables and as diagrams.

Manage Projects

Manage your projects with:

  • Metrics, user-defined calculations of items’ values
  • Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), results of metric calculations with colour-coded display bands
  • Bi-directional links to Project, including user task lists and actual progress reporting

Cradle is open. It supports many import/export formats, has several interface mechanisms to link to other tools, and connects to Microsoft Office components Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Project.

Cradle is simple to customise and use. You do not need to learn a scripting language or become a programmer to tailor it to your process. After every change to your schema, Cradle will automatically update collections of queries, views and other definitions that make you productive immediately.

Major Features

The major features are:

Cradle-SE Desktop Features
Cradle-SE Desktop Features

Supported Platforms

The supported platforms are:

Supported Platforms

Characteristics

The characteristics are:

Cradle-SE Desktop Characteristics
Cradle-SE Desktop Characteristics

Cradle-SE Desktop is part of the Cradle product range. The full, multi-user, product is Cradle Enterprise.

Product Range Highlights

  • Applies to agile and phase projects
  • Application lifecycle management
  • Requirements management
  • Modelling / MBSE
  • Full lifecycle integration
  • V&V
  • Reporting
  • Metrics
  • Dashboards
  • Project plans
  • Compliance management
  • Single user

Product Range – Cradle-RM Pro

Cradle-RM Pro Overview

Requirements Management across the Systems Lifecycle

Complete Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Requirements Management (RM) and documentation solution for the entire project lifecycle, fully user-definable and applicable to all agile and phase based processes.

  • Supports the full systems development lifecycle at system, subsystem and lower levels
  • Integrates in one product features normally spread across separate tools from different vendors
  • Completely user-definable and user-extensible with point-and-click UIs
  • Manage any information, including requirements, risks, interfaces, tests and verifications
  • Scalable to millions of items of information
  • Full traceability of data to source and generated documents with complete version management
  • Full traceability and coverage analyses
  • User-definable views of data including tables, trees, documents, matrices, diagrams and graphs
  • User-defined metrics and management dashboards

Cradle-RM Pro is a complete solution to manage, trace and document all the data for your agile and phase-based projects.

Capture and Track Information

Capture information from external documents and tools, and track changes in these sources. You can build new sets of requirements, functions, components, interfaces, tests or verifications, and link them to the source data and to each other. Check the quality and structure of this information, and prove the integrity of information with bi-directional coverage and traceability analyses.

Customers’ confidence can be raised with proof that your work satisfies its sources and constraints, and will meet their needs.

Easily track progress with metrics and KPIs and link to your WBS and actual progress to your project planning tools.

Create Databases and Information

Create any number of databases, each with a schema and multiple projects that contain any number of items of any number of user-defined item types. Each item has any number of attributes with up to 1TByte of data, held in Cradle, or referenced in files, URLs or other tools.

All items can be linked with user-defined types of cross reference. The links have attributes to justify, explain or parametise them. Links are direct and indirect, for full lifecycle traceability, impact and coverage analyses.

External documents can be loaded into hierarchies of items. Every item in Cradle is linked to its source in a document. Changes in new document versions are automatically found and the database updated. You can prove the integrity of all source data to your customers with a range of detailed coverage analyses of their documents.

Items can be linear, hierarchical and in many-to-many relationships. Items can be split, merged and reordered. All information can be shared and reused. Cradle can support product ranges, models, variants and builds, and generate comparative analyses between them as tables, pivot tables and matrices.

Track and View Information

Cradle tracks all edits to every requirement, test case, verification and all other information that you want it to hold. Edits can be reversed selectively or by group. Full or partial change logs are readily available.

You define how information is viewed and reported in any number of views, shown as nested tables, trees, matrices, pivot tables and as diagrams.

Generate versions of documents such as a URD, SRD, IRS, SDS and SSDS to match your or your client’s formats with user-defined templates and detailed traceability of which items were published in each document issue.

Manage Projects

Manage your projects with:

  • Metrics, user-defined calculations of items’ values
  • Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), results of metric calculations with colour-coded display bands
  • Bi-directional links to Project, including user task lists and actual progress reporting

Cradle is open. It supports many import/export formats, has several interface mechanisms to link to other tools, and connects to Microsoft Office components Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Project.

Cradle is simple to customise and use. You do not need to learn a scripting language or become a programmer to tailor it to your process. After every change to your schema, Cradle will automatically update collections of queries, views and other definitions that make you productive immediately.

Major Features

The major features are:

Cradle-RM Pro Features
Cradle-RM Pro Features

Supported Platforms

The supported platforms are:

Supported Platforms

Characteristics

The characteristics are:

Cradle-RM Pro Characteristics
Cradle-RM Pro Characteristics

Cradle-RM Pro is part of the Cradle product range. The full, multi-user, product is Cradle Enterprise.

Product Range Highlights

  • Applies to agile and phase projects
  • Application lifecycle management
  • Requirements management
  • Full lifecycle integration
  • V&V
  • Reporting
  • Document publishing
  • Metrics
  • Dashboards
  • Project plans
  • Compliance management
  • Single user

Product Range – Cradle-RM Desktop

Cradle-RM Desktop Overview

Requirements Management across the Systems Lifecycle

Complete Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Requirements Management (RM) solution for the entire project lifecycle, fully user-definable and applicable to all agile and phase based processes.

  • Supports the full systems development lifecycle at system, subsystem and lower levels
  • Integrates in one product features normally spread across separate tools from different vendors
  • Completely user-definable and user-extensible with point-and-click UIs
  • Manage any information, including requirements, risks, interfaces, tests and verifications
  • Scalable to millions of items of information
  • Full traceability of data from external sources and version management of source documents
  • Full traceability and coverage analyses
  • User-definable views of data including tables, trees, documents, matrices, diagrams and graphs
  • User-defined metrics and management dashboards

Cradle-RM Desktop is a complete solution to manage and trace all the data for your agile and phase-based projects.

Capture and Track Information

Capture information from external documents and tools, and track changes in these sources. You can build new sets of requirements, functions, components, interfaces, tests or verifications, and link them to the source data and to each other. Check the quality and structure of this information, and prove the integrity of information with bi-directional coverage and traceability analyses.

Customers’ confidence can be raised with proof that your work satisfies its sources and constraints, and will meet their needs.

Easily track progress with metrics and KPIs and link to your WBS and actual progress to your project planning tools.

Create Databases and Information

Create any number of databases, each with a schema and multiple projects that contain any number of items of any number of user-defined item types. Each item has any number of attributes with up to 1TByte of data, held in Cradle, or referenced in files, URLs or other tools.

All items can be linked with user-defined types of cross reference. The links have attributes to justify, explain or parametise them. Links are direct and indirect, for full lifecycle traceability, impact and coverage analyses.

External documents can be loaded into hierarchies of items. Every item in Cradle is linked to its source in a document. Changes in new document versions are automatically found and the database updated. You can prove the integrity of all source data to your customers with a range of detailed coverage analyses of their documents.

Items can be linear, hierarchical and in many-to-many relationships. Items can be split, merged and reordered. All information can be shared and reused. Cradle can support product ranges, models, variants and builds, and generate comparative analyses between them as tables, pivot tables and matrices.

Track and View Information

Cradle tracks all edits to every requirement, test case, verification and all other information that you want it to hold. Edits can be reversed selectively or by group. Full or partial change logs are readily available.

You define how information is viewed and reported in any number of views, shown as nested tables, trees, matrices, pivot tables and as diagrams.

Manage Projects

Manage your projects with:

  • Metrics, user-defined calculations of items’ values
  • Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), results of metric calculations with colour-coded display bands
  • Bi-directional links to Project, including user task lists and actual progress reporting

Cradle is open. It supports many import/export formats, has several interface mechanisms to link to other tools, and connects to Microsoft Office components Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Project.

Cradle is simple to customise and use. You do not need to learn a scripting language or become a programmer to tailor it to your process. After every change to your schema, Cradle will automatically update collections of queries, views and other definitions that make you productive immediately.

Major Features

The major features are:
Cradle RM Desktop Features

Supported Platforms

The supported platforms are:

Supported Platforms

Characteristics

The characteristics are:

Cradle RM Desktop Characteristics
Cradle RM Desktop Characteristics

Cradle-RM Desktop is part of the Cradle product range. The full, multi-user, product is Cradle Enterprise.

Product Range Highlights

  • Applies to agile and phase projects
  • Application lifecycle management
  • Requirements management
  • Full lifecycle integration
  • V&V
  • Reporting
  • Metrics
  • Dashboards
  • Project plans
  • Compliance management
  • Single user

Hiding Unused Item Types

Each Cradle project contains item types that can be linked together by cross references:

  • You define the types of items, their characteristics and their attributes
  • You define the types of cross references and their attributes, and the rules by which they link items

There are several item types that are included by default in Cradle, such as:

  • Source documents – captured using Document Loader
  • Formal documents– formal saved Document Publisher output
  • Requirements – standard requirement type that you might wish to replace with a system note type instead
  • Events – used in the analysis stage of a project to model the environment of a system and to describe how the system interacts with this environment
  • Essential Domain – analysis models
  • Implementation Domain – design models
  • Project plans – integration with Microsoft Project
    Items shown in interface
    Before hiding unused item types

    Some of the item types might not be necessary in your schema so you can remove unused item types/information in the Miscellaneous section of Project Setup:

    Hide option in Project Setup
    Setting item types to be hidden

Once applied and WorkBench restarted, you will no longer see the item types/information you have chosen to hide. This includes:

  • Project sidebar nodes
  • Sidebars
  • Menus
  • Item type chooser
  • Query, View and Form Details dialogs

    Items hidden from user interface
    After hiding unused item types

This also applies to the Web Access default and basic user interfaces.

Checking Database Integrity

Data integrity refers to the accuracy, completeness and reliability of data stored within your Cradle database. Checking database integrity is important as it guarantees both the traceability and searchability of your data. It also increases the performance and stability of your data. Maintaining the integrity of your data is essential. As you collect more and more data within  your Cradle project, it is a priority to maintain the integrity of this data, otherwise the data is worthless.

Error checking ensures that your Cradle data hasn’t been compromised, e.g. during upgrades/imports etc. We recommend that integrity checks are done on a regular basis.

In Cradle, there are a couple of ways to check the integrity of your database:

Please note that these checks must only be run when there are NO other users active in the database. If you are in doubt as to whether you are the only user active in the database, then DO NOT run these checks. If you do, damage can occur.

Item Integrity

The Item Integrity option allows you to perform integrity checks on your Cradle database. This option is available from the Project tab in WorkBench:

Screenshot of the Item Integrity dialog
Item Integrity dialog

The Frame Version Checks detect missing versions of any frames or missing records in any version of any frame for the item type specified. Errors  can be fixed using the Fix button.

There are many Item Checks which are explained here.

Many of these checks can be made subject to one of the following scopes:

  • Superseded or retired – Selects items with a status of S (Superseded) or T (Retired)
  • Latest baseline – Selects items with a status of B (Open Baseline)
  • Deleted – Selects items with a status of D (Deleted)
  • Current –  All current items

If you want to produce a report of the item integrity check, ensure to select the Generate a report checkbox.

Cross Reference Integrity

The Cross Reference Integrity Check option checks the cross references in your Cradle database.

Screenshot of the Cross Reference Integrity dialog
Cross Reference Integrity dialog

The current set of cross references is scanned to find any cross references that are invalid. Any cross reference is only counted once in these checks. So if a cross reference is dangling and also invalid, it will only appear once in the counts.

The Cross Reference Checks are explained here.

When the integrity check has been ran you have the following options:

  • Fix – Fix the cross references
  • Export – Export the group to a CSV file
  • List – List the group individually
  • Delete – Delete the cross references from the group

The Fix and Delete options for privileged users must only be run when there are no other active users in the database. If you are in any doubt, do NOT run these operations.

If you want to produce a report of the cross reference integrity check, ensure to select the Generate error report checkbox.

October 2022 – Newsletter

Welcome to the October 2022 newsletter from 3SL that provides a mixture of news and technical information about us, and our requirements management and systems engineering tool “Cradle”. We would especially like to welcome everyone who has purchased Cradle in the past month and those who are currently evaluating Cradle for their projects and processes.

We hope that we, and Cradle, can deliver real and measurable benefits to all of the exciting development projects that we see every day through your regular contacts with our support team. If you have any problems, please do not hesitate to contact 3SL support here.

32-Bit vs 64-Bit

For our next major release – Cradle-8.0 we are considering stopping support for:

  • 32-bit Windows
  • 32-bit Microsoft Office
  • 32-bit Linux

We would like to understand if this affects any of our current customer’s and potential prospects.  If you can find the time, please provide your views/opinions to our Support Team at support@threesl.com.

Please note that Cradle-8.0 will not be released until mid 2023 at the earliest.

Upcoming Training Courses

We still have places left on our two remaining Cradle training courses this year.

The next scheduled course is the Cradle Document Publisher course. The dates are 17th to 20th October. Document Publisher is a Windows® based publishing tool that allows professional documentation to be produced directly from the data within your project’s database. Fully understanding how to configure templates and data manipulation will offer the best output for you to provide to your stakeholders, customers, regulators and other interested parties.

The last scheduled course of 2022 is the Cradle Requirements Management course. The dates of this course are 21st to 24th November. This is a great opportunity for small teams, or a couple of new team members to get started with RM and Cradle.

Both courses are conducted over four ½ days.

Don’t miss out! To book a place on one of our online courses please click here!

Training Course Calendar 2023

We are currently preparing our training course calendar for 2023. This will be available soon.

The courses available in 2023 are:

  • Project Administration:
    Public Online Training Course
    Cradle Training Courses
    • January and July
  • User:
    • January and July
  • Requirements Management:
    • February and August
  • Document Publisher:
    • March and September
  • Risk Management:
    • April and October
  • Test Management:
    • May and November
  • Configuration Management:
    • June and December

Dates to be confirmed.

Making SWIFT Payments

Recently we have noticed some minor issues with receiving swift payments. If payments are to be made by SWIFT using a MT103 instruction, please ensure Field 71A is set to OUR instead of SHA.

Social Media

Last month we discussed:

We also paid our respects to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

Thank You

3SL would also like to thank all of our customers/evaluators/prospects who have found the time to send feedback on our services, e.g. training courses, Cradle support etc. We understand how busy you are, but these responses help us to both monitor and look to improve the services we provide to you. Thank you.

Thank You
Thank you from 3SL

That’s all for our October 2022 newsletter.