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June 21, 1999

Cross-Functional Project Management

TD Technologies' Slate tracks multifaceted projects-but at a high price

By Andy Feibus

First Look

ooking for a way to manage project requirements for complex, multifaceted engineering projects involving software, hardware, or a combination of both? TD Technologies Inc.'s Slate 4.2 (Systems Level Automation Tool for Engineers) provides a way to manage project requirements that span cross-functional project teams.

If you're creating a product that combines software and hardware--for example, embedded control systems and general-purpose computers--you'll not only need to manage the requirements for how fast the software should operate, but also the hardware's cooling and physical space requirements and the budget required to satisfy each requirement. All these requirements are related views of the same overall project outcome.

Slate supports these related views using an object-oriented database to store the project requirements, organizing them into abstraction blocks, which are like the big blocks that engineers write on whiteboards to represent activity or a physical entity. Multiple abstraction blocks may be used within Slate to represent a single entity. For example, a refrigerator's compressor can be represented by a different abstraction block for its electrical and durability needs.

Projects usually start from an existing-requirements document. Slate can import a requirements document from Microsoft Word or Adobe FrameMaker. Once a document is imported, you can use the document to generate the requirement objects. Your next job is to create the relationships between these requirements, and define the abstraction hierarchies and the flows between the abstraction blocks. Finally, you can take each of these views and have Slate generate detailed requirements reports and documents from this database.

I tested Slate 4.2 on a Windows NT 4.0 system, though it can also run on a Sun Solaris 2.5.1 or 2.6 system, as well as Hewlett-Packard 10.20 and 11.0 workstations. To support cross-functional projects teams, Slate has a server component that supports network access from multiple workstations. A Windows 95/98 client will be available this month.

Four products are available to view and manage your requirements: Viewer, for viewing Slate databases; Reviewer, for viewing and annotating the databases; Require, to support importing, exporting, and requirements tracking; and Architect, which allows all the features, along with capturing and linking requirements.

My impression is that the product is highly complicated, with poor online-only documentation that presumes strong skills. Slate does a decent job describing which objects you can create, but it isn't as clear about why or when you should create them. An online tutorial is included, but it requires FrameMaker (not a common NT document editor). The point is either to encourage new users to attend a TD Technologies training class--or that the company believes only people with skills in the discipline will buy the product.

Overall, Slate has the features you'll want to manage "industrial-strength" projects: document import and export, requirements traceability features, support for cross-functional teams working on the same project, links (for an additional charge) to project-management and engineering tools, and hooks for adding your own features to the product.

If you can get past its documentation and other quirks, Slate can help you cover all your project's angles--if you can handle its price.

Andy Feibus is president of CustomBytes, an application development consulting firm in Atlanta. He can be reached at amf@mindspring.com.