Implement the Recommended Life Cycle

The following section provides a high-level, simplified overview of the procedure for implementing the recommended project life cycle in your company's MicroStrategy environment. This is a simplified version of the workflow you are likely to see at your organization. However, you should be able to apply the basic principles to your specific situation.

1. Create the development project.

   Creating the development project involves setting up the database connections and project schema, configuring user security, and building the initial schema and application objects. For information on creating a project, see the Project Design Help.

2. Create the test and production projects by duplicating the development project.

   MicroStrategy recommends that you duplicate the development project to create the test and production projects, rather than creating them separately. Duplicating ensures that all three projects have related schemas, enabling you to safely use Object Manager or Project Merge to copy objects between the projects.

   For instructions on how to duplicate a project, see Duplicate a Project.

3. Create objects in the development project.

   In the recommended scenario, all objects (attributes, metrics, reports) are created in the development project, and then migrated to the other projects. For more information about the development project, see Recommended Scenario: Development, Test, and Production.

   For instructions on creating schema objects, see the Project Design Help. For instructions on creating application objects, see the Basic Reporting Helpand Advanced Reporting Help.

4. Migrate objects from the development project to the test project.

   Once the objects have been created and are relatively stable, they can be migrated to the test project for testing. For instructions on how to migrate objects, see Update Projects with New Objects.

   Depending on the number of objects you have created or changed, you can use either Object Manager or Project Merge to copy the objects from the development project to the test project. For a comparison of the two tools, see Compare Project Merge to Object Manager. For a tool to determine what objects have changed, see Compare and Track Projects.

5. Test the new objects.

   Testing involves making sure that the new objects produce the expected results, do not cause data errors, and do not put undue strain on the data warehouse. If the objects are found to contain errors, these errors are reported to the development team so that they can be fixed and tested again. For more information about the test project, see Recommended Scenario: Development, Test, and Production.

   Integrity Manager is an invaluable tool in testing whether new objects cause reports to generate different results. For detailed information about Integrity Manager, see Verifying Reports and Documents with Integrity Manager.

6. Migrate objects from the test project to the production project.

   Once the objects have been thoroughly tested, they can be migrated to the production project and put into full use. For instructions on how to migrate objects, see Update Projects with New Objects.

7. Repeat steps 3 through 6 as necessary.

The project life cycle does not end with the first migration of new objects into the production project. A developer may come up with a new way to use an attribute in a metric, or a manager may request a specific new report. These objects pass through the project life cycle in the same way as the project's initial objects.