Recommended Scenario: Development, Test, and Production

This commonly used scenario is the project life cycle that MicroStrategy recommends you use as you develop your projects. In this scenario, you typically use three environments: development, test, and production. Each environment contains a MicroStrategy project.

MicroStrategy recommends that if you want to copy objects between two projects, such as from the development project to the test project, those projects should be related. Two projects are considered to be related if one was originally a duplicate of the other. To establish different development, test, and production projects, for example, you can create the test project by copying the development project, and you can create the production project by copying the test project. All three of these projects are related to each other. For more information about duplicating a project, see Duplicate a Project.

This scenario is shown in the diagram below in which objects iterate between the development and test projects until they are ready for general users. Once ready, they are promoted to the production project.

The Development Project

In the development environment project, you create objects. This may be a project in which developers work. They think about the design of the whole system as they create the project's schema and application objects. For detailed instructions on how to design a project schema and create application objects, see the Project Design Help.

The Test Project

Once the objects' definitions have stabilized, you move them to a test project that a wider set of people can use for testing. You may have people run through scripts or typical usage scenarios that users at your organization commonly perform. The testers look for accuracy (are the numbers in the reports correct?), stability (did the objects work? do their dependent objects work?), and performance (did the objects work efficiently, not producing overload on the data warehouse?).

In this test environment, you want the project to initially connect to a development data warehouse for initial testing. Later, for more stringent testing, connect the test project to the production data warehouse. If objects need further work, they are changed in the development project and recopied to the test project, but not changed in the test project.

The Production Project

After the objects have been tested and shown to be ready for use in a system accessible to all users, you copy them into the production project. This is the project used by most of the people in your company. It provides up-to-date reports and tracks various business objectives.

Implementing the Recommended Scenario

When migrating changes into a testing or development environment, be as thorough as possible. Carefully consider how your business users will access and use their application, reports, and dashboards on a daily basis. Anticipate the needs of your business users, and test every type of scenario before officially migrating to a production environment.

To set up the development, test, and production projects so that they all have related schemas, you need to first create the development project. For instructions on how to create a project, see the Project Design Help. Once the development project has been created, you can duplicate it to create the test and production projects using the Project Duplication Wizard. For detailed information about the Project Duplication Wizard, see Duplicate a Project.

Once the projects have been created, you can migrate specific objects between them via Object Manager. For example, after a new metric has been created in the development project, you can copy it to the test project. For detailed information about Object Manager, see Copy Objects Between Projects: Object Manager.

You can also merge two related projects with the Project Merge Wizard. This is useful when you have a large number of objects to copy. The Project Merge Wizard copies all the objects in a given project to another project. For an example of a situation in which you would want to use the Project Merge Wizard, see Real-Life Scenario: New Version From a Project Developer. For detailed information about Project Merge, see Merge Projects to Synchronize Objects.

To help you decide whether you should use Object Manager or Project merge, see Compare Project Merge to Object Manager.

The Project Comparison Wizard can help you determine what objects in a project have changed since your last update. You can also save the results of search objects and use those searches to track the changes in your projects. For detailed information about the Project Comparison Wizard, see Compare and Track Projects. For instructions on how to use search objects to track changes in a project, see Track Your Projects with the Search Export Feature.

Integrity Manager helps you ensure that your changes have not caused any problems with your reports. Integrity Manager executes some or all of the reports in a project, and can compare them against another project or a previously established baseline. For detailed information about Integrity Manager, see Verifying Reports and Documents with Integrity Manager.