Join us for our upcoming webinar, featuring Adrian Pitonak and Jan Jancar from Softacus, as they delve into the topic of "IBM DNG Export/Import.

Event Details:

Date: 25th of March 2024

Time: 3:30 pm CET

Location: Zoom

Link for registration: https://zoom.us/j/93121909731?pwd=dXRWb3gxUXhMUFFJdnpLYlNHSTFLdz09

Agenda Highlights:

The primary objective of the presentation is to highlight the diverse array of methods and techniques utilized with our clientele concerning Excel export and import processes.

• How to create an excel export - different ways and options
• Excel RoundTrip - how to do it
• Excel exchange with suppliers and customers
• Export of data from Publishing Engine to Excel
• Export to Excel via JRS
• Tips and tricks for Excel exporting

This event is tailored for professionals and users of Doors Classic and DOORS Next Generation (DNG), whether you hold the title of or have a keen interest in Excel export and import processes.

In today's fast-paced technological landscape, traditional engineering approaches are being outpaced by rapid advancements. This shift has led to increased demand for intelligent software-driven products across diverse industries, presenting challenges such as budgetary constraints, time limitations, resource scarcity, and stringent safety and quality standards.

Addressing these challenges requires integrated solutions that bridge functional, software, mechanical, and electrical engineering domains, providing a unified source of truth. IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM) is designed to mitigate integration failures and delivery delays, accommodate product line variability, and ensure comprehensive lifecycle visibility. 

 Join us at IBM TechXchange: Empower your Engineering with IBM ELM in Rome, Italy, on 21st March, 2024 to:

• Explore the latest iteration of IBM ELM, version 7.0.3, which builds upon years of industry leadership to deliver enhanced capabilities and efficiencies.
• Discover how these advancements empower engineering professionals to effectively manage complex systems and software development projects, meeting deadlines and exceeding expectations.

Our Solution Director, Jan Jancar, will present use cases of implementations of ELM, including challenges which often happens during the implementation.

Register here

 

Join us for our upcoming webinar series on Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) with IBM Rhapsody Systems Design and IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM)!

1st webinar of the series is on the topic: Best Practices in applying MBSE to a multi-variant product development environment with IBM ELM

Date: 26.02.2024

Time: 3:30 pm CET

In this inaugural webinar, we'll provide an insightful overview of applying MBSE to a multi-variant product development environment. Our experts will share best practices and real-life examples, focusing on system architecture and modeling workflows.

Benefits of joining the webinar:

• Gain valuable insights into implementing MBSE in a multi-variant product development environment
• Learn best practices from real-life examples and industry experts
• Discover how MBSE integrates seamlessly into the product development process, enhancing efficiency and productivity

This session will lay the groundwork for future deep dive sessions in our webinar series.

Don't miss out on this opportunity to enhance your understanding of MBSE and its application with IBM Rhapsody Systems Design and IBM ELM. Register now to secure your spot!

Sign up now: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwkdOqppzsiHNfZHaSN-dTVYIR19Q4ns1hM

Die MedConf 2024 findet vom 16. April bis 18. April 2024 in München Unterhaching als Präsenzveranstaltung statt. Die Konferenz mit begleitender Ausstellung ist die etablierteste und wichtigste Networking Plattform der Medizintechnik.

Die MedConf adressiert Mitarbeiter und Führungskräfte von Medizintechnik Unternehmen, die insbesondere aus den Bereichen Research & Development, Qualitätsmanagement, Produktentwicklung, Regulatory Affairs usw. kommen. Jährlich besuchen rund 250 Teilnehmer die Konferenz. Mehr Information zu der Veranstaltung finden Sie auf https://www.medconf.de/

Unser Solution Director, Jan Jancar, wird am drittem Tag der Konferenz, 18. April, um 13:30 Uhr CET eine Präsentation zum Thema „Traceability zwischen Requirements und Normen in Configuration Management-Umgebung“ halten.

Wir freuen uns auf unsere Teilnahme an der MedConf 2024 und auf die Gelegenheit, spannende Kontakte aus der Medizintechnik-Industrie zu knüpfen.

We are excited to invite you to our upcoming webinar on the topic of "Commenting Options in IBM DOORS NG."

Date: January 29, 2024

Time: 3:30 - 4:30 pm CEST

Sing up now under this link

During the webinar, we will explore essential aspects of commenting in IBM DOORS NG, including:

• Effectively using comments
• Reviewing comments
• Collaborating with internal and external stakeholders
• Techniques for exchanging comments with end customers who do not have direct access

Our Solution Director, Jan Jancar, will introduce valuable techniques, such as:

• Reviewing comments efficiently
• Commenting on base and module artifacts
• Finding comments using both out-of-the-box and attribute-based techniques

This webinar is designed to enhance your understanding of the commenting functionalities within IBM DOORS NG, providing valuable insights that can optimize your workflow.

Save your spot by registering here. After registration, you will receive a confirmation email with the webinar access details.

Feel free to invite your colleagues who might find this topic relevant. 

We are looking forward to seeing you at the event!

We're thrilled to announce our upcoming webinar Requirements Reuse in DOORS Next Generation / ELM.

We are pleased to announce that our company has been awarded at the IBM Ecosystem Kick-off DACH 2023 in the category Sustainability Software for exceptional growth in Engineering Lifecycle Management.

With tools and add-ons developed in-house for IBM products, Softacus has managed to demonstrate added value for customers and thus increase their competitiveness.

We look forward to continue working together with IBM to create innovative solutions that will have a positive impact on our society and the world!

 

 

Auch dieses Jahr wird Softacus bei der REConf, die vom 24 bis 28. April 2023 stattfindet, sein.

Die REConf (Requirements Engineering Conference) ist Europas führende Konferenz mit Schwerpunkt Requirements Engineering. Auf der Veranstaltung werden neue Methoden, Trends und Tools in Vorträgen, Diskussionsrunden und Workshops diskutiert.

Am zweiten Tag der Konferenz (25 April) um 16:00 Uhr wird unser Solution Director, Jan Jancar, zusammen mit Peter Schedl von IBM, einen Vortrag zum Thema "Traceability - das Salz in der Suppe" halten. 

Anforderungen sind der Ausgangspunkt der Entwicklung und somit auch der Traceability für alle Entwicklungsdaten. Projekte stellen heute bereits sicher, dass alle Kundenanforderungen in Systemanforderungen überführt wurden und Testfälle spezifiziert sind. Nicht selbstverständlich ist die Traceability in Verbindung mit KPI’s oder der toolgestützten Impactanalyse bei sich ändernden Anforderungen. 

Softacus zeigt gemeinsam mit IBM Best Practices wie sich solche Szenarien mit DOORS und der Engineering Lifecycle Management Lösung einfach abbilden lassen.

Melden Sie sich für RECconf 2023 hier an: https://www.hood-group.com/reconf/anmeldung

 

Softacus has been selected as one of the Top 10 IBM Solution providers for 2022 by the CIOApplications Europe - a popular European magazine on innovations and technology.

In this article, featured in the magazine in December 2022, our Solution Director, Jan Jancar, talks about the challenges engineering teams are facing nowadays and how Softacus and the IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management solution help organizations improve collaboration among software and system developers, increasing efficiency and product quality.

 

Introduction 

Deleting information from any document is something to think about twice may be thrice. But deleting a requirement from a specification is not as simple as deleting a sentence. A requirement is an object which holds not only the specification sentence but other information like name-value pair attributes, history, link information etc. 

In this document we will try to explain possible ways to approach how to delete requirements 

Challenges

Sometimes it is required to discard some information from the project for various reasons. But even in such cases, when specification information is discarded, there are still some risks as follows: 

• It may break the integrity of the overall information map. 
• The information piece to be discarded may not be needed in one configuration but may still be critical in others. 
• The information piece to be discarded now, may still be an important component of an audit trail 
• The information itself may have no value anymore, but the links it bears, my still constitute some value 

So when we decide to delete any information from the requirements base, we should be considering several cases. Or somebody has to pre-consider for us.      

How to delete requirements from DOORS Next Generation 

How can we delete any requirement from DNG? Or what is the best approach to delete requirements from the requirements database? 

For the reasons mentioned above, deleting requirements from GUI doesn’t exactly remove the data from the database. It just gets unaccessible. But to keep the integrity intact, any deleted requirement, still occupies a placeholder in the database. 

Soft Delete of Artifacts

Since any “delete” operation via the GUI doesn’t cause the physical deletion of the data from the database, and in spite of this result, the data is still permanently unreachable when deleted, may be we can consider a “soft” delete operation. 

It is a widely accepted approach to organize requirements in modules within DNG. Like we create/edit requirements within module, we also tend to execute the delete command in modules. This command is called as “Remove Artifact”: 

 

What we are doing with this command is not actually deleting the requirement, but removing it from the module. So it will remain accessible in the base artifacts and folders. 

 

 

Also, by design, there is a concept of requirement reusability. This means this requirement may coexist in other modules. 

This is why, when removing a requirement from a module it is not “deleted” by default. However if the artifact is present only in one module, then there is an option to delete it via “remove” comment as follows: 

If the artifact to be removed doesn’t exist in any other module, this option permanently deletes it. 

The permanent deletion of the artifact will still leave the artifact on the database for the integrity of the data. But it will not be possible to retrieve this artifact any more. 

So we can recommend not to permanently delete any artifact but remove. However there might still be some issues with removing the artifact from the module:

When an artifact is removed from the module, the specification text, its key-value pair attributes, history, all information will remain. Only its link to the module it belongs to will be broken. But there is one important piece of information else which gets broken. The link to other artifacts! In this example we see that the requirement is linked to another requirement in another module. When the artifact is removed from the module, we use that link as well. So when we retrieve it back to the module, it won’t have the link information anymore:

Sometimes our clients may prefer this behavior, sometimes not. For those, of which this is not preferable, we generally consult a “softer” delete operation. We advise to define a boolean attribute called “Deleted” with default value “false”. This attribute is assigned to all artifact types and instead of deleting the artifact, simply change the boolean value from “false” to “true”. 

Of course it is not enough to do this. Also we need to define a filter for every view which filters out the “Delete” attribute “true” valued requirements. 

Hard Delete of Artifacts

Hard delete of artifacts can be considered as deleting the artifacts with the option “If the artifact is not in other modules, permanently delete it.” selected. 

But this will still not be sufficient if the artifact is being used in more than one module. To make sure a hard delete, first remove it from the modules it is being used in. 

You can used the information “in modules” 

Then, just simply locate the base artifact in the folder structure and select “Delete Artifact” from the context menu. 

 

Upon confirming the deletion it will be permanently deleted: 

 

This operation will still not delete the artifact from other configurations if there are more than one stream and the artifact appears in those streams.   

How to clean up requirements 

As mentioned above, the requirements even deleted from GUI are not deleted from the database for various reasons. Most of which is to maintain the data integrity and database indices. Theoretically, after every physical deletion of the artifacts a reindexing and database maintenance scripts should be run. This would not make sense for a daily operation done by an end user.  

For those artifacts which are permanently deleted from the GUI, there is a repotools command which helps to remove from database as well. This is deleteJFSResources command. However, use it with extra precaution and please review the information in the link below: 

https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/deleting-data-permanently-doors-next-generation-project 

Summary: 

Making use of configurations, streams and modules complicates the deletion concept. We may loose information where we don’t expect. Also we may get results even after properly deleting artifacts. Since they will still be available in other configurations. That is why we generally advise to use the “Deleted” attribute approach and implement the filtering of non-deleted artifacts.