National Tea Day – 21st April

Support a Charity While You Have a Cuppa.

There are a number of ways you can get involved with National Tea Day www.nationalteaday.co.uk least of all you can ensure you get a good brew on for elevenses. Maybe nip out at lunch time and get a packet of scones and share afternoon tea with your work colleagues. Ask for donations in a Tea Cup and pick a local charity!

There’s an awful lot of tea drunk by engineers at 3SL towers…….

Large amounts of tea drunk at 3SL
3SL – Tea

Now the tricky bit, how on earth do we make this blog entry have something to do with Cradle? Ah! Multivalue Picklist Categories is how. If you have a set of premises that you manage, these can be set as items within Cradle. Each café could have a number of supplies that the café offers, and these could be recorded in a multiple value category.

If there was a shortage of Oolong, it would be simple to run a query to list each of the premises that need to be contacted. For further reading on categories, you could read ‘Multiple Value Categories’

Showing that multivalue categories can be used for everything, including tea
Multi Value Categories Representing Product Supplies

Happy New Year 2021

We Wish All a Happy New Year 2021

The Close

2020 was not a year that many of us were expecting or would wish for. Our thoughts to all that have been affected by Covid 19.

Looking Forward

Our wishes for a healthier, happier and productive new year.

So raise a glass to  – You, Cradle, projects and success. Cheers.

based on Photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels
Happy New Year

From the staff at 3SL.

Happy Saint George’s Day 2017

Happy St George’s Day

Wishing all our customers, suppliers and followers a Happy Saint George’s Day 2017 from 3SL.

UML Activity Diagram

In a UML model, the static representation of the system is a set of Class Diagrams (CD). Each class may have an associated Activity Diagram (ACD) to show the internal behaviour and/or algorithm for the class.

ACDs can also be drawn at any level in the UML model, to represent time sequenced behaviour at any level. The activities in the ACDs are intrinsically shareable, such that any given activity can appear on more than one ACD.

Depicting the legend of St George in an ACD
St. George as a UML Activity Diagram (ACD)

OK, we accept there may be a bit of poetic licence going on in this diagram, but it still shows how activity within a class can be represented. If you ever want a reminder of the legend of St. George it may be handy. For more information see the Cradle help section for ACD

National Tea Day – 21st April 2017

Support a Charity While You Have a Cuppa.

There are a number of ways you can get involved with National Tea Day www.nationalteaday.co.uk/ least of all you can ensure you get a good brew on for elevenses. Maybe nip out at lunch time and get a packet of scones and share afternoon tea with your work colleagues. Ask for donations in a Tea Cup and pick a local charity!

There’s an awful lot of Tea drunk by engineers at 3SL towers…….

Large amounts of tea drunk at 3SL
3SL – Tea

Now the tricky bit, how on earth do we make this blog entry have something to do with Cradle? Ah! Multivalue Picklist Categories is how. If you have a set of premises that you manage, these can be set as items within Cradle. Each café could have a number of supplies that the café offers, and these could be recorded in a multiple value category.

If there was a shortage of Oolong, it would be simple to run a query to list each of the premises that need to be contacted. For further reading on categories, you could read ‘Multiple Value Categories’

Showing that multivalue categories can be used for everything, including tea
Multi Value Categories Representing Product Supplies

 

 

What can you get for 249* New Pound Coins?

Starting from £249* for Cradle‐RM Desktop

There are a number of versions of the Cradle single user licence. All the same great product suite, just with different parts enabled. If you have 249* new pound coins you could get your requirements into shape. The new pound coin  was introduced on 28th March 2017. Follow information about it, and other money facts, with the Royal Mint. (#NewPoundCoin) 3SL are quite happy to accept the old coins up until the 15th October 2017. With a little more, your requirements and end to end processing with the Pro version.  Add on further and get the system engineering version, which includes modelling.

New pound coins and vopy or Cradle-RM Desktop
Cradle-RM Desktop Version 7.2

Where Cradle really comes into its own is with the Enterprise version. Licences are tailored depending on the number of users and which functions they need to access. Contact us to discuss your requirements. * Price  March 2017 for up to date prices visit the shop.  

Update:

Sept 2017 – Only a month left

Countdown with a month to go – The legal tender status of the round £1 coin will be withdrawn at midnight on Sunday 15th October 2017.

World Water Day 2017

3SL Staff Support World Water Day

World Water Day (22 March 2017). We should celebrate that we are part of the 90% of people that have access to clean safe drinking water.

clean water
Water for All

We would like to encourage our readers to help the 10% of the world’s population that face dirty or diseased water by supporting charities like WaterAid by having a collection and possibly turning #Blue4Water!

Photo of staff with corporate blue faces
Corporate Blue

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.

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…..