RAT - AUTHORING Tools
A SMARTer Way to Author Engineering Items
Requirements Authoring. Improves the Text Quality of Documents and Models
Authors of engineering items (requirements or models) must know what structure to follow, which terms to use, the expected quality policies or checklist to follow, the level of consistency with other requirements or models… This is why writing new requirements or models can sometimes lead to writer’s block.
RAT is the ideal way to help engineers create different types of artifacts. It helps authors during the demanding process of composing requirement statements or other documentation, hence improving the overall quality of the projects.
RAT is available for multiple engineering tools, like PTC Integrity, IBM DOORS, DNG and Rhapsody, Capella, Microsoft Excel and Word.
Benefits
Quality
RAT offers the same quality analysis provided by RQA – Quality Studio, but now in real-time. Best practices, checklists or rules are now closer to engineers in systems engineering projects.
Time
Money
Focusing on requirements quality from the very beginning reduces rework and subsequently costs.
Formalization Stages
Consistency
Systems assets will be consistent with the organization’s patterns and grammars.
Controlled Vocabulary
Placeholders in the patterns allow RAT to suggest concepts from a controlled vocabulary, thus enhancing the system’s consistency.
Formal Representation of Requirements
Once a textual artifact or model is properly formalized, several possibilities become feasible: consistency analysis between requirements and models, automatic generation of models or test cases.
Systems Assets Reuse
RAT identifies similar or overlapping system elements in real-time.
Descriptions
Requirements Authoring, System Documentation or Creation of Models with RAT
RAT is the perfect assistant for system analysts/engineers when writing the system documentation or creating models. RAT leads engineers with a set of agreed-upon patterns, suggests the most suitable content for each piece of written information and always ensures the right grammar. RAT also provides a real-time quality checking of the elements that are being created. Therefore, RAT exonerates engineers from format concerns (e.g. structure of requirements) allowing them to concentrate on the engineering decisions: that is, engineers and RAT teaming up to improve the overall quality of the projects.
For a textual artifact, once a pattern has been selected, RAT shows its structure, its description and examples of how it should be used. Authors just need to select the right terms and semantics from a controlled vocabulary which is suggested while typing, thus ensuring that the developed requirement, or other artifact, has followed the right grammar and it provides the proper information.
RAT implements an IntelliSense way of writing – a technique that guides authors while writing – thus providing an accurate way of creating consistent requirements and speeding up system documentation writing.
Applying this SMARTer way to develop the system documentation, RAT entitles several benefits:
- Both humans and computers will read and understand textual artifacts more easily without ambiguity (Correctness).
- The system asset includes all the required information (Completeness).
- A Semantic Engine “understands” the information stated in a single way (Reuse and Formalization).
- The chances of finding coupled or inconsistent content are increased (Consistency).
- Homogeneous vocabulary and grammar across multiple documents improve the consistency of the whole project (System Consistency).
The information reported by RAT includes out-of-the-box quality metrics for the detection of inconsistencies, ambiguity, duplicated requirements or models.
The real-time quality assessment, as well as the IntelliSense writing assistant, are both included as plug-ins on top of some of the most widely used tools for requirements management, risk or testcase management, modelling tools or simulation tools.
Features
Measure the Quality of Requirements, Models and Artifacts in real-time
RAT provides a quality report (based on the rules and metrics assigned in RQA – QUALITY Studio) in real-time and highlights defects in the requirement. This reduces the time needed for quality inspection, peer-review, double checking, V&V or other tasks to assess the quality of assets manually, while boosting the quality of engineering items.
All the patterns offered by RAT and all the quality metrics checked have to be previously defined in RQA – QUALITY Studio, ensuring that all the authors, who are collaborating on the same document or model, follow the same rules.
RAT can also warn users, in real-time, about the lack of consistency between the current engineering item and others in the same document/project, and even between different types of engineering items such as requirements, models, tests, simulations…
Patterns Customization
RAT uses a customizable set of textual patterns, which can be easily tailored and managed using the KM – Knowledge Manager; these patterns are immediately available in RAT.
RAT users can benefit from an easy-to-use feature to suggest new patterns or suggest changes to the existing ones. The tool notifies the knowledge architects, who may apply or deny the suggested changes in the Knowledge Base using KM.
Correctness, Consistency and Completeness
RAT includes quality metrics for the detection of inconsistencies, ambiguity, duplicated requirements or models out-of-the-box.
Real-time quality assessment and the IntelliSense writing assistant are both available as plug-ins to some of the most widely used tools in a system engineering project: IBM DOORS, IBM DOORS NG, PTC Integrity, IBM Rhapsody, 3DEXPERIENCE or MS Office.
Requirements Discovery
RAT allows the automatic identification of requirements in unstructured sources of information, such as MS WORD or PDF documents. Textual patterns identify candidate statements based on semantic matching and Artificial Intelligence.
Automatic Import/ Export Between Different Supported Environments
RAT provides a round-trip mechanism that allows to seamless transfer engineering items among different tools. In order to interoperate between different sources of information, e.g. requirements and models, the Systems Engineering Suite implements new OSLC specifications making it possible to exchange and share information regardless of its format or the tools used to create and manage it.
Semantic Search for Consistency Checking and Reuse
RAT includes a semantic search engine that identifies the elements that are similar to the one being created/edited. This allows the reuse of elements, the identification of overlapped or inconsistent content…
RAT - AUTHORING Tools Built in Your Assets Development Environments
RAT is able to connect to more than 25 of the most common tools used to develop system documents, specifications, models and many more are yet to come! RAT users can even develop their own new connectors to connect different tools with our APIs.
