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Tips and best practices for the long-term management of DesignWise models.
When teams start exploring DesignWise, they are often unsure what will happen to the plans after the initial release – will they have long-term value, where is traceability with execution, how to conduct maintenance, etc. ? In this article, we have consolidated the “cheat sheet” from the information available in our feature-focused documents and provided additional insights gained from client projects.
Part 1. Collaboration and review
As you design DesignWise models, it is always a good idea to work together with other SMEs, bounce ideas off business analysts and developers, and eventually review the draft plans with the key stakeholders. To assist in that process, DesignWise provides several features:
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4. Revisions (accessed from the dropdown near the plan name) provide version control capabilities where you can see your colleagues’ actions and, if necessary, return the plan to the previous state.
Part 2. Release preparation and ongoing maintenance
Once you have created the optimal model and confirmed it with the stakeholders, it is time to move the test suite to execution. Many of the downstream actions are typically performed in test management tools (e.g. Micro Focus ALM / QC, JIRA Xray, etc.) or in automation frameworks (e.g. Cucumber). We will focus on the steps that have direct impact on the DesignWise models.
Freezing
When your scenario suite is finalized, it can be a good idea to ensure test data consistency with the help of “freezing”.
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To clarify, freezing makes the italicized values (red rectangle highlight above) constant by saving all scenarios as Forced Interactions. Italic type means that DesignWise has already covered all n-way interactions for that parameter and now randomly selects a value from the available list. Therefore, without freezing, there is a chance the value will change on suite re-generation. This could pose a challenge with test data preparation if, for example, distinct accounts need to be set up to represent each of the scenarios.
Ongoing maintenance
While we recommend unfreezing the test suite before incorporating new information into the model, in some cases the updates can be made on top of the preserved scenarios. You have to keep in mind that frozen test cases will often prevent DesignWIse from finding the most efficient way of including changes, which leads to the avoidable growth of the test suite.
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