Decision Center provides tools for validating that decisions are implemented as expected, in the form of testing and simulation of rulesets.
Business users must verify that changes to their rules do not have unexpected side effects on other rules in the ruleset. Decision Center is designed for this purpose: by testing their rules in the Decision Center Enterprise console, business users make sure that the rules behave as expected.
In the Decision Center Enterprise console, business users validate business rules against test scenarios. See Testing and simulation.
The following figure shows how Decision Validation Services work in Decision Center by connecting to a server that has Rule Execution Server and a Scenario Service Provider (SSP) installed:
The Scenario Service Provider (SSP) is a web application that resides on an application server and provides services to execute testing scenarios and report whether the scenario passed or failed.
By default, policy managers use an Excel spreadsheet to define and populate test scenarios that contain the test data and the expected results of execution. They can generate a template for this spreadsheet from Decision Center. A template defines the specific BOM members to be populated with the input test values, expected output, and result values. Each row in the spreadsheet represents a test case, or fictitious use case, against which the behavior of the rules is validated.
For testing the individual rules and tasks, policy managers create test suites to provide parameters for the rules in different usage scenarios and check the results of running the rules. For testing the project as a whole, policy managers create simulations that show how the project performs in real-life situations.