Validating Your System During Development

Visual Studio Ultimate can help keep your software consistent with the users' requirements and with the architecture of your system.

Key Tasks

Use the following tasks to validate your software.

Tasks	Associated Topics
Make sure your model is consistent: Depending on the way your project uses and interprets models, it might be useful to disallow some combinations of elements. For example, you could restrict UML classes so that they always have .NET-compliant names. You can define constraints like these in Visual Studio extensions.	Validate a UML Model How to: Define Validation Constraints for UML Models
Make sure your software meets the users' requirements: You can use requirements and architectural models to help you organize the tests of your system and its components. This practice helps ensure that you test the requirements that are important to the users and other stakeholders, and it helps you update the tests quickly when the requirements change.	Developing Tests from a Model
Make sure that your software remains consistent with the intended design of your system: Layer diagrams describe the intended dependencies between the components of your application. During development, you can verify that the actual dependencies in the code conform to the intended design.	Create layer diagrams from code Validate Code with Layer Diagrams Understanding Layer Validation Errors

External Resources

Category	Links
Videos	Channel 9: Doug Seven: Code Understanding and System Design with Visual Studio 2010 Channel 9: Architecting an Application using a Layer Diagram MSDN How Do I Series: How to Validate Code using Layer Diagrams
Forums	Visual Studio Visualization & Modeling Tools Visual Studio Visualization & Modeling SDK (DSL Tools)
Blogs	Visual Studio ALM + Team Foundation Server Blog Layer Validation
Technical Articles and Journals	The Architecture Journal - Issue 23: Architecture Modeling and Processes
Other Sites	MSDN Architecture Center

See Also

Concepts

Testing the application

Extending UML Models and Diagrams

Modeling User Requirements

Modeling the Application