Your project database already has thousands of entities. You and your team are working around the clock. You’re trying to meet deadlines and work quickly and you’ve possibly let your database look like your grandma’s attic.

We understand; database maintenance is hard. But it’s worth it. Most of the lifecycle costs are in operations and support. As engineers we try to implement ease of use, maintainability, and good quality design to make the operations and support as inexpensive as possible. Innoslate’s Intelligence View can help. Often overlooked, this powerful feature using artificial intelligence and natural language processing can quickly reduce a project’s risk and cost.

Intelligence View checks grammar basics all the way to finding missing traceability. Let’s see how Intelligence View provides a way like no other to avoid the garbage-in garbage-out issues of managing a project.

What Is Intelligence View?

With some help from Naval Postgraduate School and Stevens Institute of Technology, we developed 60+ heuristics that make up Intelligence View. As explained in our Online Help Center, the genius minds from these organizations developed formal representations of a well-defined system architecture. We call these representations: heuristics. These heuristics were then developed into our tool to create Intelligence View; to be used as a way of checking your project against these heuristics. Intelligence View will then list out your problem entities from the database and provide the ability to fix it right from this view.

What Can You Check in Intelligence View?

The heuristics in Intelligence View are divided into six categories:

1. Global
2. Action
3. Asset
4. Conduit
5. Input/Output
6. Requirements

The Global category takes an overall look at your project and looks for items such as “Entity Names and Descriptions do not contain ambiguous words.” The Action, Asset, Conduit, Input/Output, and Requirements categories look at each of these classes of information in the database to ensure:

1. all the objects have a name, number, and description
2. words are being used sufficiently to describe that class (Actions have verbs in them)
3. proper relationships are made to other objects appropriately for the class
4. correct traceability relationships between classes and requirements

You can read a full detailed list of these heuristics at our Online Help Center.

Getting Familiar with Intelligence View

In Intelligence View, you’ll see the view does a check on your project and you’ll see a list of the “problem entities” listed under each heuristic by category.

If you look at the top mid-right of this view at the top of the page, you’ll see there is a blue “Run” button and a gray “Settings” button. The “Run” button allows you to rerun the heuristics check. The “Settings” button will be a pop-up that allows you to pick and choose which heuristic you are most interested in and lets you set each individual heuristic to a particular warning type setting.

Applying Customized Settings

You’ll see there is an auto default setting already applied to each heuristic, however, you get to customize these settings and set each heuristic to go off as an Error, a Warning, or Ignore All. When you set the heuristic to an Error, the banner will be red for that heuristic and will pull up all applicable entities that are not meeting up to that particular heuristic’s standard. The Warning setting will show up with a yellow banner and pull up all those applicable entities, and lastly the Ignore All setting will simply not show up when you run it. Remember to click the “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the list to apply your customized settings.

Resolving Project Issues

Now that you have customized Intelligence View to your project and can view issues, it’s time to fix them.

You can choose to fix the issue or ignore the issue by clicking on the “Fix” or “Ignore” buttons. When you fix the entity, you will see a popup and it will explain why there is a problem and a suggestion to fix it. It will also provide the proper fields/ways to fix the problem within Innoslate.  Once you make the fix, the problem entity becomes grayed out. This is nice if you’re simply going down the list and fixing each problem one by one, so you can see which ones are fixed vs. the ones that are not.

Lastly, you’ll also find the analysis of the run right underneath each category below the list of problem entities. The analysis provides how many entities it analyzed then the ratio and percentage of heuristics applicable to the entities in the run. Once you have completed resolving issues, press the blue “Run” button to run the check again. Hopefully, you’ll see the “All Passed!” green banners under each category.

Intelligence View is an excellent way to do a quick health check-up on your project. The next time you look into Database View and start feeling overwhelmed with the classes and relationships and the data, and you feel like you could use a quick tune-up, remember to do a quick analysis of your project with Intelligence View. You will see better stakeholder communication, reduction in costly mistakes, and proper traceability throughout the lifecycle. Ensure that your project or mission is successful by using Intelligence View for proper database maintenance.

If you have questions about Intelligence View watch the tutorial or contact us at support@innoslate.com.