Working with Life Cycles

A SAS Model Manager life cycle defines the milestones and tasks that your organization uses to monitor the progress of a modeling project. The life cycle template controls the milestone tasks and the sequence of activities that are required to implement and deploy scoring models. SAS Model Manager provides example life cycle templates that you can use to create your own life cycle templates that are based on your business requirements.

The milestones in life cycle template track the progress of developing, implementing, and retiring your scoring models. Authorized users indicate when milestone tasks are started, completed, or approved.  The properties of a life cycle template determine who is authorized to update the status of a milestone task. Precedence rules for successive milestones ensure that life cycle tasks are completed in the correct order. SAS Model Manager automatically records the dates, times, and users who are associated with individual life cycle milestones.

The Life Cycle node contains the milestone phases and tasks for a modeling project. SAS Model Manager applies life cycle milestones to each version. Typical life cycle milestones for a modeling process might include the following:

The life cycle for a version always starts with the first milestone. A milestone is completed after all of its component tasks are completed. Milestones are normally completed sequentially, but the ordering sequence is defined at the task level. A task might be configured to depend on one or more other tasks. If a task has dependent tasks, then you cannot change the status for a task to Completed until all dependent tasks are also completed. Task dependencies control the milestone sequences.

Life cycle templates define the milestones that you use to track the modeling and deployment processes for a project version. Each milestone consists of one or more life cycle tasks. Milestones for the simple life cycle template might include Development, Test, Production, and Retire. The milestone tasks for this template describe the sequential steps to develop, assess, deploy, and retire scoring models that are based on time requirements and model performance. As a practical minimum, the life cycle template that you use should include at least two milestones: Development and Production.

You select the life cycle template when you create a version. Authorized users update the life cycle to indicate whether milestone tasks have been started, completed, or approved. The configuration of a life cycle template determines who can update the status of a life cycle milestone. Precedence rules among successive milestones ensure that milestone tasks are not completed out of sequence. SAS Model Manager documents the dates, times, and individuals who are associated with individual life cycle tasks and milestone status changes.

These are some tasks that you might perform to monitor the life cycle of a model:

For information about users and groups who can update the Status property of a task, see Participant Roles.

To view the life cycle templates that are available in SAS Model Manager, follow these steps:

To modify the status for a life cycle milestone, follow these steps:

Life cycle properties are metadata that describe the life cycle milestones and user roles. Life cycle metadata includes information such as the name of the milestone phase or task, the owner, unique identifiers, the name and path of the SAS Model Manager repository, and the status of milestones.

Milestone and task properties are organized into several types:

You cannot modify the General Properties or System Properties except to specify a description for the folder. The milestone Specific Properties contain information about start and end dates. The task Specific Properties contains information about status, dates, and process participants. You use User-Defined Properties to add your own life cycle properties. The background color of a property signifies whether you can modify a property value. You modify only the fields that are white. When you click in a field, you either enter a value or select a value from the list box.

Here is a list of the milestone properties.

Here is a list of task properties: