Overview

Use cases

Help Quality Assurance Engineers to assess key quality metrics of a SysML model, in terms of standards compliance and adherence to custom rules.

Assist Project Managers in understanding and tracking quality-related metrics of MBSE artefacts as a project progresses.

Highlights

Build scalable CI/CD pipelines to support automated validation of SysML projects as part of your next-generation MBSE workflow.

Share and review analysis reports using popular collaboration platforms like Jupyter and Confluence.

Integrated with Teamwork Cloud and Enterprise Architect.

Main features

Automatically generate rich quality reports including a high-level Quality Score, as well as detailed rule violation breakdowns, allowing you to navigate to the problematic model element with a single click.

Run either as a stand-alone desktop application or as a server-side automated workflow (e.g. on Jenkins), directly accessing projects on Teamwork Cloud.

Supports standard (UML/SysML), and custom (SAIC Digital Engineering Validation Tool) rule libraries, which are extensible.

Illustration presenting the IncQuery Validator reporting

Challenges of MBSE Quality Assurance

Model-based Systems Engineering promotes the concept of a primary artefact being the “single source of truth”. This means that systems design artefacts captured in SysML tools such as Cameo Systems Modeler or Enterprise Architect need to be validated for internal consistency as part of the authoring process, to make sure that they are free of basic errors (such as missing or invalid property values) as well as more complex design mistakes (such as incorrectly applied patterns, circular dependencies, etc).

While authoring tools do provide some quality assurance features (e.g. validation rules), their configuration and execution is hard to standardize across a large team of collaborators, especially as tool capabilities may be significantly different. As a result, quality assurance practice in MBSE projects becomes fragmented and heavily reliant on error-prone and time-consuming manual review processes – which is hardly the best, yet still the most popular way of being ISO26262 compliant.

Consequently, a lot of SysML projects, especially complex ones managed by large organizations along long supply chains, tend to accumulate a lot of undetected or ignored errors. This is a significant risk, as these may manifest in later engineering phases as handover problems that require a lot of back-and-forth communication to resolve. The most severe of such flaws may even remain in the system under design until testing and integration, causing a lot of extra cost and missed deadlines.

Our solution

IncQuery Validator

IncQuery Validator is a powerful tool that provides Automated Quality Gates as an integral part of your next-generation MBSE workflow. Running either as a stand-alone desktop application, or as a server-side automated pipeline, it can generate rich validation reports including a high-level Quality Score, as well as detailed rule violation breakdowns, that give information on the general context, severity, and impact of each quality issue.

Reports, especially when regularly generated as part of an automated CI/CD pipeline, can be used by:

Systems Engineers as part of their authoring workflow, to maintain internal consistency and ensure error-free handover towards detailed design.

Quality Assurance Engineers to assess key quality metrics of a SysML model, in terms of standards compliance and adherence to custom rules;

Project Managers to understand and track quality-related metrics of MBSE artefacts as a project progresses.

Key Features

Automatically Generated Rich Validation Reports

IncQuery Validator reports are stand-alone artefacts that can be configuration-managed in their own right. The HTML/PDF reports feature the Quality Score, which takes the number and severity of each rule into account, giving you a mark on the well-known A-E scale, where A is given to warning-free SysML projects, and E corresponds to projects with critical issues. Detailed rule breakdowns are also provided, allowing you to navigate to the problematic model element with a single click, right inside Cameo or Enterprise Architect. Furthermore, it can easily be shared and reviewed in popular documentation management platforms such as Atlassian Confluence. Finally, the package also contains CSV/JSON files suitable for further processing in Excel, Jupyter, Tableau, and similar tools.

IncQuery Validator report with the SAIC Digital Engineering ruleset

QA Dashboard on Jenkins powered by IncQuery Validator

Build Scalable CI/CD Pipelines for MBSE

IncQuery Validator supports CI/CD deployment out of the box. This way, you can easily orchestrate reliable and scalable validation workflows for many complex projects, by taking advantage of elastic capabilities of Jenkins or similar platforms. IncQuery Validator can run on SysML project files stored in file-oriented version control systems such as Git, as well as interface directly with Teamwork Cloud. CI/CD platforms also allow to capture historic quality metadata to power QA dashboards, as well as integrate with messaging and notification platforms so you can disseminate quality-related information quickly and efficiently to key stakeholders.

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Integrated with Teamwork Cloud and Enterprise Architect

For Enterprise Architect users, IncQuery Validator offers UML/SysML standards-compliance, as well as Diagram conformance checking, to ensure high-quality interoperability across the entire engineering toolchain.

For Cameo/Teamwork Cloud users, IncQuery Validator offers an adaptation of the SAIC Digital Engineering Validation Tool ruleset, that checks for basic problems and advanced design anti-patterns.

The rule sets can be customized and extended, and support for additional UML/SysML tools is possible via SDKs.