Cradle is a multi-user, multi-project, systems engineering environment that spans the entire systems and software development lifecycle. Building on an infinitely scalable, arbitrarily extensible, distributed and web-enabled repository, Cradle provides a suite of tools that integrate all project phases, activities and deliverables within a single, configuration managed, access controlled framework. You can tailor this framework to your projects, combining desktop tools such as Word and Excel, with your specialist engineering and project management tools and corporate PDM / EDM solution into a seamlessly managed whole that can be distributed site-wide, company-wide or project-wide using web and non-web technologies.
Cradle can be used as a web portal to all project information, as an integrated systems engineering environment or you can use just one of its component point tools. Cradle is modular, with tools built around a central Project Data Management module that provides powerful infrastructure capabilities.
Cradle provides a requirements capture facility that scans customer statements and extracts requirements, assumptions and/or domain knowledge, creating cross references back to the original document. When new versions of such documents are registered, Cradle finds the differences and provides an impact assessment. Cradle is fully integrated with Word, Excel and PDF, as well as other text formats.
Business, operating, user, system and derived requirements can be captured and evolved. Support tools identify duplication, omission and ambiguity, and conduct coverage analyses. Interactive Non Functional Requirement Graphs (NFRGs) and Hierarchy Diagrams graphically illustrate the linkage within and to/from requirements sets.
Requirements can be linked to a wide variety of UML, use case, functional, behavioural, dynamic and architectural models, grouped within multiple model domains. Requirements can be allocated to use cases, functions, business processes, operational sequences, which in turn can be allocated to functions, classes etc within components of equipments in multiple candidate architectures. Performance assessment and budget aggregation and apportionment within and across these architectures are fully supported, together with the means to develop these models to hardware and software, including the generation and reverse engineering of source code.
All project activities are defined within a project schema that identifies project phases, data types and rules, and links and rules. The Cradle multi-user, infinite-capacity, repository can manage any volume of any data, allowing requirements (and other item types) to contain text, figures, tables, graphics, audio and data of any type. Database items can link to data in external objects, URLs and data held in external databases, including corporate PDM / EDM solutions.
Cradle provides a user-definable metrics capability, to monitor and manage the evolving requirements sets, and data of all other types.
Cradle is fully web-based, providing RO and RW web access from customisable web front-ends. All tools support hierarchy and editable tables with user definable queries, views and forms. Web publishing to HTML, XML and SVG is provided.