Revision as of 11:23, 12 August 2009

OSEE Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

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Is OSEE an application framework or an application?

The simple answer is BOTH. OSEE Application Framework is created to allow applications to be built on top and share the common data model. This can be used independently of any OSEE applications. In addition, there are applications that are delivered with and use the OSEE Application Framework. This includes a full featured Requirements and Document Management System (OSEE Define), a powerful change tracking and configuration management application (OSEE ATS - Action Tracking System), a fully customizable peer-review module and other project, reporting and metrics tools. These application can be used out-of-the-box and new applications can be created or integrated on the framework to share and contribute to the same data.

What are Artifacts, Attributes and Relations?

Artifacts: Any data object stored within OSEE. This is a strongly typed object that can store any data throughout the lifecycle of systems engineering. From meeting minutes to architecture diagrams, processes to requirements, artifacts are the main object within OSEE's data store. There may be a "Software Requirement" artifact defined to hold the requirements at a software level or a "User" artifact defined to hold data associated to an OSEE user.

Attributes: Metadata attached to any Artifact. With the example of a "Software Requirement" artifact, the attributes may be "Qualification Method", "Safety Criticality" or "Subsystem". For a "User" artifact, the attributes would be "Email", "Name" and "Phone".

Relations: The link between artifacts. These too are strongly typed such that you can relate a "User" to a "Meeting" that they attended. Or relate the high level customer requirements to the lower level software requirements that satisfy them. These relations can also have "Rationale" stored which gives the user the ability to note why the relation exists.

What are Branches and how are they used in OSEE?

One of the problems OSEE intended to solve was to be able to manage Variants or Product Lines. After a set of requirements is developed, it may become the baseline for variant sets of requirements for similar products. In other words, you may develop the same product for another customer, but have slight changes to the requirements, code and test for features specific to that customer. Historically, this would mean maintaining completely separate "copies" of all the requirements and other artifacts. This is costly to maintain when changes from the baseline artifacts are required to be propogated to the other product line. Add 5 or 10 more customers with different needs and this becomes a major undertaking.

OSEE provides the capability to create these variant branches and maintain not only the record of where these branches came from, but also enables changes made to the baseline branches to be easily committed to the variants. In addition, OSEE manages these variants in an efficient manner such that only the changed requirements (or artifacts) are "copied".

How are artifacts stored?

The OSEE Application Framework provides a dynamic and strongly typed artifact (object) model that is stored using a relational database. All OSEE applications use this version controlled persistence layer to store their artifacts, provide branching, etc.

What is a Working Branch?

A working branch is simply a sandbox area for a users to make changes and perform reviews before committing to the baseline branch.

On complex systems engineering, requirements, and other artifacts, can be developed by hundreds of engineers. To have requirements "locked" while they are being modified by one user can cause significant delays in schedule. The need for parallel development (multiple users working on the same requirements) is a necessity to keeping a project moving forward. In addition, users making mistakes need the ability to revert or throw away their changes and start over without polluting the baseline branch and teams also need the ablity to review changes before committing them to main baseline. This is done using working branches.

Other products sound similar. Why OSEE?

1. Open Source Extensible Platform
2. Open Eclipse Project w/ Collaboration
3. Tight Integration Around A Common Data Model
4. Full Lifecycle Engineering Environment

Is OSEE only for Avionics Engineering?

No. OSEE's was created by The Boeing Company in support of the Apache AH-64 Attack Helicopter flight control software. Although it was created for the complexity of a large US Department of Defense program, it was architected to support any systems engineering project from a simple application built for a customer to a large complex application like the Apache flight controls. In addition, since OSEE is an application on it's own, the OSEE Team uses OSEE to develop, deploy and maintain OSEE.

What is the OSEE Define?

OSEE Define is OSEE's advanced Requirements and Document Management System. OSEE Define can be used to track a simple application's requirements, code and test or configured to support a large program doing concurrent development with multiple parallel builds and manage requirements for multiple product lines simultaneously. Although any application file (document) can be stored and managed, OSEE Define is tightly integrated with Microsoft Word(c) to store and manage individual requirement objects (stored in XML) and provide advanced features like index based searching and showing differences between historical changes. Integrated tightly with the Action Tracking System, OSEE Define can be configured to provide advanced configuration management for any set of requirements object.

What is the Action Tracking System (ATS)?

The Action Tracking System is the tightly integrated configuration management system built in OSEE and very tightly integrated with the OSEE Application Framework. It uses a powerful workflow engine to provides a fully customizeable workflow to track improvements, problems and support for any number of teams/tools/programs simultaneously. This gives the user a single point view into all the work that they are required to do.

Why build yet another bug tracking tool like the Action Tracking System (ATS)?

Although there are a number of open source and commercial bug tracking systems available, OSEE's goal to integrate workflow management and provide a tight integration with the Application Framework, and the applications built on top, required us to develop ATS. ATS is meant to be more than simple bug tracking since it can be used to manage mutliple teams working on multiple products or support simultaneously. This means that you can create a single "Action" to "Fix the XYZ capability" that will create the necessary workflows for all the teams that need to perform work. For example, a workflow may be created for not only the Software Development team, but also the test team, documentation team, integration team and even facilities like labs or conference rooms. Each team then moves intependently through its workflow to perform the work necessary for the common "Action". In addition, ATS enables complete customization of different workflows for each configured team. This means that the documentation team can follow their own "process" which may contain 5 different states while the application developers can follow their own more complex "process" which may contain 30 different states.

Can I import existing Microsoft Word(c) documents into OSEE?

Yes. OSEE will import existing Word 2003 XML documents and atomize them by their paragraph sections. The Word styles "Heading (1...9)" are used to determine the breakout into individual artifacts and their position in the document hierarchy.

Do I have to create a new database table for every type of Artifact that I want to use

Quick Answer: No

The OSEE Architecture Framework uses a common table structure to store all types of artifacts, attributes and relations. This allows the users to dynamically create and start using new objects without major database modification.

Do I have to use the Artifact types that are built into OSEE?

Quick Answer: No

All Artifact Types, Attribute Types and Relation Types (with a few exceptions) are fully customizable. Although OSEE was initially built for capturing all data throughout the lifecycle of a large avionics systems engineering project, it was architected to store any data by simply defining a different data model to use.

In addition, these data models can be dynamically modified. New Artifacts, Attributes and Relations can be specified at anytime (and even by end users if allowed). Modification and deletion of these can be performed with some administrative back-end tools with the understanding that you would need to determine what to do with the removed data.

Do I have to use Microsoft Word to enter my requirements?

Quick Answer: No

This question comes up when users find out that OSEE is integrated with Microsoft Word as one method to enter artifact data such as requirements.

OSEE uses Artifacts, Attributes and Relations to store information in it's data store. The Attributes associated with a certain Artifact can be boolean, text, date, float or any newly created attribute type. One such attribute type is a "Word Content" attribute. This allows word content to be added as an attribute to an Artifact. This attribute, however, is not required to be used. One could define a "Software Requirement" to be any set of Attribute types that must/can be entered. Although, Word 2003 XML is more tightly integrated into OSEE, the architecture provides for other editing applications to be plugged in. We are actively working on adding tight integration with Open Office to edit requirements.

In addition to this specific type of Attribute, OSEE does allows any operating system file to be dragged in and created as an Artifact. This artifact, when opened, will extract its data and present it to the operating system to allow viewing and editing. This allows things like requirements to be specified by other modeling, diagraming or even mathematical applications that OSEE doesn't know about. These artifacts can have their own metadata associated and also be related to other artifacts in the system.

How are MS Word styles and formatting handled?

Whole MS Word documents can be stored and edited as an artifact like any other native file type without any formmatting restrictions of any kind. However, to use the more tightly integrated support such as editing many artifacts in a single Word document or the document generation capabilities, then the file format needs to be MS Word 2003 XML. Since OSEE supports user defined Word XML templates for editing, previewing, comparing, and publishing, the user has complete control over the Word styles (and all other formmatting) through the rendering templates. The only formmatting requirements for Word content are that when importing the Word styles "Heading (1...9)" are used to determine the breakout into individual artifacts and their position in the document hierarchy.

What is Skynet?

Skynet is a legacy term for the persistence portion of the OSEE Application Framework.

What are Artifact Framework types?

OSEE provides <a href="#whatareartifacts">Artifacts, Attributes and Relations</a> that are strongly typed. This means that the user can create their own artifact type, for example a "Software Requirement" to represent the requirements at a software level and their own attribute types, for example a "Qualification" attribute or a "Safety Criticality" attribute and event their own relations, for example a "Software Requirement to Allocation" relation. These types are defined in the Artifact Framework and can be created dynamically in the system during database creation or while running. This allows the end user to expand the data that is being stored in OSEE without providing a new release.

How does OSEE handle traceability?

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requirements_Traceability">Traceability</a> is handled in OSEE through the use of <a href="#whatareartifacts">Relations</a>. These relations can be <a href="#frameworktypes">defined in OSEE</a> according to their need and the users can then add and remove these relations throughout the lifecycle of the requirements or other artifacts. Deliverable documents or any report generation would also use this traceability.

What is BLAM?

BLAM Lightweight Artifact Manipulation (BLAM) allows non-programmers to graphically construct workflows to automate repetitive tasks. A given workflow can be used for variety of similar tasks by using customizable controls to specify workflow parameters. It also provides programmers the ability to interact with the OSEE Artifact Framework API to build and execute tasks.

Can I import existing traceability into OSEE?

Quick Answer: Yes

Since traceability is usually defined in a way that is specific to it's use and the objects that are being traced, there is currently no "generic" traceability importing in OSEE, however OSEE provides <a href="whatisblam">BLAM</a> that would enable traceability to be imported from existing applications, documents, excel spreadsheets. This capability has already been used a number of times to successfully import traceability from legacy documents and systems on projects OSEE has been deployed to.

Can I import from Microsoft Excel(c)?

Quick Answer: Yes

Through OSEE's <a href="whatisblam">BLAM</a>, users can import from other applications, documents and spreadsheets.

How do I publish documents from OSEE?

The majority of the work in publishing out of OSEE has been in the format of Microsoft Word(c) documents. The user can create a Word template that "describes" the format, headers, footers and what data maps into the specified areas in the template. A <a href="whatisblam">BLAM</a> is then ran where the user can specify the <a href="whatarebranches">branch</a> and what artifacts are to be published. Upon execution, the documents are created. This method has successfully generated documents in excess of 10,000 pages that were delivered to the customer.

The OSEE architecture also supports other methods of publishing including web and open document formats. Depending on the level of complexity, some work would be done to provide further export capabilities.

Another form of publishing that OSEE was architected for is delivery of OSEE and the database. Although OSEE can publish documents and reports, it was decided early on that the vendors and customers would want and need the same navigation and exporation capabilities that OSEE provides. Instead of delivering generated documents, one of the projects that OSEE is deployed on delivers a copy of OSEE with a sanitized database (confidential data removed). This has been very successful from both the program and customer's point of view.

What databases can be used with OSEE?

OSEE was architected to be database independent and should run on any SQL-99 compliant DB that has a JDBC driver. It is currently runs on Oracle 10g and 11g and PostgreSQL 8.2. In the past, OSEE has also been run on Derby and MySQL. The current release of OSEE would need to be tested for compatibility with Derby, MySQL, or any other database. If desired, the OSEE Team could work with the user/developers to help perform this task.

Can OSEE be used offline and later sync'd up?

Although OSEE does not currently provide the capability to download database artifacts, work offline and then sync up when re-connected, it was certainly a consideration in the design. The most complex part would be resolving conflicts that may occur to artifacts edited in both disconnected OSEE's. Since OSEE already has the capability to run on multiple databases and the capability to export and import artifacts, it would just take some effort to provide the first versions of this feature. This would be a great area for collaboration.

What is VUE?

VUE is one of the last remaining external dependencies. For those that aren't familiar, VUE (http://vue.uit.tufts.edu/) is a diagramming tool that OSEE ATS uses to define it's workflows. Simply put, you can create a simple state diagram using the editor and embed the XML necessary to render the widgets for each state in the workflow. OSEE stores this file as XML and reads it to dynamically create and walk the users/teams through their process/workflow.

The plan has been to replace this with an integrated GEF editor as soon as possible. This would be a great are for collaboration for whomever might be interested.

Search FAQ

How do I search for all artifacts of a certain type

1. Select Search pulldown and select "Search"
2. Select the branch you wish to search on
3. Select the "Artifact Search" tab
4. Select "Artifact Type" in the first pulldown under "Create a Filter"
5. Select the name of the artifact type you wish to search for
6. Select "Add Filter" (make sure no other filters exist from your last search
7. Press "Search" button

Word FAQ

How to stop Word from prompting with "Convert File"?

If you are getting prompted with a "Convert File" window when you open documents from Define,Open any document in Word select Tools->Options… from the menu and then on the General tab uncheck Confirm conversion at Open then select OK.

How to stop Word from adding Smart Tags?

Tools -> AutoCorrect Options… -> Smart Tags -> Save Options... -> embed smart tags [uncheck]
Tools -> AutoCorrect Options… -> Smart Tags -> Label text with smart tags [uncheck]
If the button is not grayed out click "Remove Smart Tags"
Tools -> Options… -> General -> Confirm conversion at Open [uncheck]
To toggle viewing of xml tags press CTRL+SHIFT+X (enable these unless you have a good reason not to)

How do I make tracked changes in Word appear inline instead of balloons

1. Open the ‘Show’ dropdown menu within the Reviewing Toolbar and select ‘Options…’.
2. Within the ‘Track Changes’ window that just appeared change the ‘Insertions’ and ‘Deletions’ colors to Blue and Red, respectively.
3. Change the ‘Use Balloons’ dropdown menu from ‘Always’ to ‘Only for comments/formatting’.
4. Click OK.

How do I keep MS Word from prompting to save Normal.doc

On the Tools menu, click Options. Click the Save tab. Clear the Prompt to save Normal template check box.

How do I make artifact tags visible?

ctrl-shift-x