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Validate your system during development

Note

This article applies to Visual Studio 2015. If you're looking for the latest Visual Studio documentation, see Visual Studio documentation. We recommend upgrading to the latest version of Visual Studio. Download it here

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

To see which versions of Visual Studio support each of these features, see Version support for architecture and modeling tools.

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 your UML model
- 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.
- Develop 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 your code
- Validate code with layer diagrams

External Resources

Category Links
Videos link to video Channel 9: Doug Seven: Code Understanding and System Design with Visual Studio 2010

link to video Channel 9: Architecting an Application using a Layer Diagram

link to video 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
Technical Articles and Journals MSDN Architecture Center

See Also

Testing the application Extend UML models and diagrams Model user requirements Analyzing and Modeling Architecture