Your business never stops changing, which means your planning model doesn’t, either. Whether you’re managing changing territories for sales teams, introducing new product lines into your supply chain operations, or building a new entity into your budgeting process, it’s crucial that the entire business has confidence in the changes being made in Pigment.
This confidence is precisely what Test & Deploy is designed to offer.
When you manage Applications with Test & Deploy, you create a Development workspace where you can experiment with changes to your model without affecting day to day activities in Production (your main workspace) - giving you confidence that you’re making the most effective adjustments. When you’re happy with your changes, you can deploy them to your Production environment at a time that suits you - ensuring your business stays running smoothly.
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How does Test & Deploy work?
When you have Test & Deploy enabled, additional workspaces are created alongside your existing Production workspace. These are typically referred to as DEV and TEST. Using two additional workspaces means you can work more efficiently with a subset of your data in the Development workspace, and by distinguishing between production and non-production activities enables separation of duties and access to production data only where it is necessary.
Completed structural changes may then be deployed to the Test workspace, where you can test the effects of these changes in a workspace containing sanitised test data for complete confidence that your calculations are still operating as expected.
When you have completed testing, you can view a summary of the changes that will be made and deploy these changes directly to your Production workspace for them to take effect for your users at a time that’s convenient for you, ensuring no interruptions to day to day operations.
With partial deployment, if you are using Test & Deploy across multiple Applications, you can choose which of these Applications to deploy, giving you full flexibility to manage changes across multiple teams and planning processes independently.
You can also see a record of deployments and the number of changes made within affected Applications in Pigment for your records.
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What’s included in Test & Deploy?
Changes in scope for Test & Deploy include anything that impacts your model structure; for example Application settings, Block structures or formulas. You can choose whether to include data in Dimension lists for greater flexibility.
Boards and Views will also be included when performing deployments to ensure seamless management of updates across both modeling and reporting. With Boards and Views managed by Test & Deploy, reporting can be accurately prepared for new financial periods, planned changes to reporting requirements, or additions to executive report packs without affecting existing standards and practices.
Note that user access permissions and data integrations are not replicated in DEV or TEST workspaces; these remain independent so you can customise your workspaces inline with the requirements of your business.
When would I use Test & Deploy?
Once Test & Deploy is enabled for an Application and this Application is ‘managed’ by the Test & Deploy process, any structural changes to the Application need to be made in Development and deployed through the Test & Deploy process before they can take effect in the Production workspace.
Examples of changes that benefit from being managed through Test & Deploy include:
- Adding new financial periods to your model in preparation for a new financial year
- Amending a formula to calculate more efficiently, or to improve readability
- Changes to reporting for example to incorporate new products, or to include new visualizations or Board layouts
Where can I find more information?
Full documentation for how to use Test & Deploy can be found in the Knowledge Base here.
Test & Deploy is available for customers on the Enterprise plan: please contact your Customer Success Manager for more information.
