Hey everyone,
I’m looking for some suggestions and best practices regarding quality controlling diagrams and models within Visual Paradigm. Specifically, I’d like to hear about your experiences with ensuring the accuracy and completeness of diagrams that involve requirements, components, use cases, packages, and dependencies between requirements.
Here’s the background: I’ve been heavily involved in building these diagrams, which are crucial for dependency modeling and prioritizing task backlogs across different teams. Getting the dependency connectors right, along with the appropriate stereotypes, is essential for downstream reporting and ensuring that interdependent tasks are executed smoothly.
Now, I want to delegate the modeling responsibilities to other members of my team. While I plan to train them thoroughly on the correct approach, I’m worried that certain aspects of the model might be overlooked. Even with my experience, I know that oversights can happen, and I expect the same from my team. So, I’m looking for ways to implement guardrails that can identify potential modeling errors within our subject domain.
In a perfect world, I’d love to have a tool that offers the following features:
- The ability to run data tests against a set of elements (withing a diagram, selection set, model, or package).
- A resulting list of pass/fail results, where each “fail” result provides the failure reason, suggestions for a fix, and an option to open the model element spec or view it directly.
One idea I had was to develop a testing harness using the OpenAPI. Instead of testing for code, it would test for data/model smells. I envision something similar to the testing frameworks and user interfaces that most IDEs provide for running unit tests. It would display green checkmarks for passed tests, red X’s for failed tests, and provide details about what went wrong.
Before I embark on building such a tool, I wanted to reach out to you all and see if anyone has tackled this problem before. Are there any other best practices or approaches within Visual Paradigm that you’ve found helpful in solving this issue?
Your insights and suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance for your contributions!
Alfred
