RAT - AUTHORING Tools

 

A SMARTer Way to Author Engineering Items

 

RAT – Authoring Tools

Documents, models, and requirements authoring

While traversing the System Life Cycle, engineers produce thousands of engineering items; most of them are abstract work products (requirements, models, architectures, test cases, manuals, risks, etc.), defined to achieve a system and its composed elements.

RAT – AUTHORING Tool 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 – AUTHORING Tool 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 use of correct syntax. RAT also provides real-time quality checking of the items that are being created. Therefore, RAT frees engineers from format concerns (e.g., structure of requirements) allowing them to focus on the engineering decisions: that is, engineers and RAT tool team up to improve the overall quality of your projects.

RAT - AUTHORING Tool

Benefits

Quality

RAT – AUTHORING Tool provides real-time quality guidelines when creating new engineering items. Best practices, checklists, or rules, such as the INCOSE Guide to Writing Requirements or the EARS patterns, are now closer to system engineers.

Time

The concept “Get it right the first time” can now be applied to requirements, test cases, and other document writings… RAT allows a significant reduction of verification loops at different levels (Stakeholder, System, subsystem, component).

Money

Focusing on requirements quality from the very beginning helps reduce rework and subsequent costs.

Features

Real-time quality checking

Based on the catalog of rules and metrics established using the RQA – QUALITY Studio (INCOSE, NASA, ECSS…)

Pattern-based writing

Choose a particular pattern from a preset library of patterns (EARS patterns, Sophist, ECSS…) and easily follow the different slots comprising to a well-formed requirement of the selected type (Functional, Non-Functional, Safety…).

Connection to controlled vocabulary

Either managed in KM – KNOWLEDGE Manager or using the concepts that you have established in your models.

Consistency check

To ensure, in real-time, that your requirement is consistent with other requirements in the same document, in other documents, or even with your models.

Detection of overlapped requirements

With the help of our semantic engine, identify similar requirements to avoid contradictory or redundant statements in your specification.

Correctness, Completeness and Consistency

For a textual artifact, once a pattern has been selected, RAT – AUTHORING Tool 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 any other artifact, has followed the right syntax and it provides the proper information.

RAT – AUTHORING Tool implements a smart 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 methodology to requirements engineering provides several benefits:

  • Both humans and computers will read and understand textual artifacts more easily without ambiguity (Correctness).
  • The chances of writing redundant and/or contradictory content are decreased (Consistency).
  • Homogeneous vocabulary and grammar across multiple documents improve the consistency of the whole project (Requirement patterns).
  • A Semantic Engine “understands” the information stated in a single way.

The information reported by RAT – AUTHORING Tool includes out-of-the-box quality metrics for the detection of inconsistency, ambiguity, duplicated items. The real-time quality assessment, as well as the IntelliSense ® writing assistant, are both included as plug-ins on top of the major tools for requirements management, risk or testcase management, modelling tools, simulation tools…

RAT Authoring Tools

Measure the quality of requirements, models and artifacts in real-time

RAT – AUTHORING Tool provides quality feedback (based on the rules and metrics assigned in the RQA – QUALITY Studio) in real time and highlights defects in the requirement. This reduces the time needed for manual quality inspection, peer review, and double-checking while boosting the quality of engineering items.

All the patterns offered by RAT – AUTHORING Tool and all the quality metrics checked must 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 – AUTHORING Tool can also notify users, in real-time, about the lack of consistency between the currently edited engineering item and others in the same document/project, and even between different types of engineering items.

Patterns customization

RAT – AUTHORING Tool uses a customizable set of textual patterns, which can be easily tailored and managed using the KM – KNOWLEDGE Manager.

RAT – AUTHORING Tool users can benefit from an easy-to-use feature to suggest new patterns or suggest changes to existing ones. The tool notifies the knowledge architects, who may accept or reject suggested changes to the Knowledge Base, all of this using the KM – KNOWLEDGE Management tool.

Requirements authoring within models

When RAT – AUTHORING Tool is used inside a modeling tool (Capella for example) its advantages increase: You can write requirements following the name conventions of the different model elements, generate links automatically between model elements and requirements, and you can synchronize the requirements with your preferred Requirements Management tool.

Automatic import/export between different supported environments

RAT – AUTHORING Tool provides a round-trip mechanism that allows a seamless transfer of engineering items to various tools. To interoperate between different sources of information, e.g. requirements and models, it implements new OSLC specifications enabling the exchange of information regardless of its format or the tools used to create it.

RAT - AUTHORING Tool's Connectivity and Integration

SES ENGINEERING Studio’s RAT – AUTHORING Tool capability can be connected to a broad range of Systems Engineering tools, such as Requirements Management tools, ALMs, PLMs, MBSE and many more are yet to come! You can also develop your own connectors to RAT – AUTHORING Tool using our API.

50+ Connectors

The available connectors for the RAT – AUTHORING Tool Capability are also detailed in SES ENGINEERING Studio. More information

Add-in version

Besides, RAT – AUTHORING Tool is available as a fully integrated add-in to some of the major Systems Engineering tools: IBM Rational DOORS, PTC Windchill, Capella MBSE, IBM Rhapsody, or MS Office.

Web-based version

RAT – AUTHORING Tool is also available as a web browser extension, compatible with MS Edge, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

This extends the integration to web-based ALM and PLM platforms, such as SIEMENS Polarion & Teamcenter, Codebeamer, JIRA, Atlassian Confluence, etc.