How to View and Revert Software Design Changes with Visual History?
Knowing the past is the key for making right decisions in the future, and this is particularly true in software design. Knowing a software's previous designs can help you understand how the software behaved before and why was certain design idea being changed or abandoned. All these provide you with insightful ideas in producing new design that can not only work, but work in the best possible way.
Visual History was designed to help you trace and see the changes of your software design. By sliding along its timeline, you are presented with your design in old revisions. You can glance over the evolution of design to determine the best solution for your software. Visual History also allows you to revert changes from old design, which saves your precious time on reworking the same old things.
What is this Tutorial About?
The purpose of this tutorial is to show you how to use Visual History to see the history and evolution of a use case diagram. At the beginning of this tutorial, you will be asked to create a simple use case diagram for an ATM, make some changes, and perform several rounds of commits. After that, you will run Visual History to see the changes you have made and to revert some of them.
Preparation
In order to perform the steps in this tutorial, make sure you have Visual Paradigm downloaded and installed. You may click here to download Visual Paradigm if you do not have it installed.
To avoid disrupting your production environment during the tutorial, please import a new project into Teamwork Server/Visual Paradigm Online to walk through the steps in this tutorial.
Part I – Building a Sample Project with a Use Case Diagram
In this section, you will draw a simple use case diagram for an ATM. Several rounds of commits will be performed as well.
- Open the new project you just imported into Teamwork Server/Visual Paradigm Online.
- Create a use case diagram named ATM. Draw a simple use case diagram with an actor, User, and several use cases: Withdraw Cash, Check Balance, Edit Account, and Donate to Charity.
If you are not familiar with use case diagrams or use case modeling, please read the user's guide page about use case diagrams. For advanced users, you may want to read about the 10 tips to create a professional use case diagram in our Know-How article. - Commit the changes to the server (by selecting Team > Commit... from the toolbar).
- Contain the use cases within a system shape. Name the system ATM.
- Commit the changes to the server.
- Let's say the Donate to Charity use case was found to be redundant in the ATM system. Delete it.
- Commit the changes to the server.
- The Edit Account use case was found to be a bit unclear. Let's rename it to Edit PIN.
- Commit the changes to the server.
Part II – Using Visual History
In this part, you will use the Visual History feature to review previous designs. You will also revert some of the changes.
- Open Visual History by selecting Team > Visual History... from the toolbar.
- Visual History is mainly divided into two sides. The left-hand side shows the diagram image of the currently open revision, while the right-hand side shows the diagram image of the revision selected in the timeline below it.
Now, press on the revision pointer in the timeline and drag it to the right by one revision.
- When you arrive at a revision, a preview of the diagram in that revision will appear. Release the mouse button.
- Once you have released the mouse button, you can see the use case diagram from the previous revision appears on the right-hand side. Besides, a yellow pointer appears above the Edit PIN use case on the left-hand side. It indicates where a modification took place.
- Click on the yellow pointer. This pop-up shows a summary of modifications made to the Edit PIN use case between the revision selected on the right and the current revision. In this case, the summary tells you that the use case was renamed from Edit Account to Edit PIN.
- Let's say we want to re-apply the old use case name. Click Revert in the Modification Summary pop-up.
- The use case (in the current revision) is instantly renamed to Edit Account, following the previous revision.
- Now, move one more revision backward by adjusting the revision pointer in the timeline.
- This time, you should see two red pointers, with a minus sign in them, appear on the right-hand side. This means that the Donate to Charity use case and its connector were present in the chosen old revision but are no longer present in the current revision.
- Let's restore the Donate to Charity use case. Click on the red pointer above the Donate to Charity use case. In the pop-up, click Restore.
- You should see the Donate to Charity use case reappear in the current revision. Let's also restore the association that connects the User actor and the Donate to Charity use case.
- You're done. Click Done at the bottom of Visual History to go back to the diagram.
- Finally, don't forget to commit the changes to the server.