I use DVS in rule designer, but now I am unable to use DVS with the decision engine. I've been reading claims that DVS is, in fact, still supported. I figured I would try to create an Excel file for a Decision Engine rule project, but I am getting this error:

Rule projects for use with the decision engine are not compatible with Decision Validation Services (DVS)

How can I unit test rules with decision engine at rule designer?

Hi Travis - DVS is deprecated in version 8.8.0. The feature won't be included in future releases of the product. 

Mary I have a couple follow up questions that you might be able to help with. What's the best way for me to unit test business rules in rules designer? Do you know if IBM will eliminate rule designer for rules authoring process? If so, will business or enterprise console be a decent replacement for rule designer? 

Thanks!

In my opinion there will come a day that rule designer will no longer be supported.  This makes sense as RD does not really fit into the whole cloud thing.  That said, I think it will be years before we see that happen based on the length of time it has taken IBM to get the business console to the level of functionality that we have today.

As far as unit testing goes you do have the ability to do DVS testing in the business console, of course they call it something different now (Decision Runner) but from a functionality point of view it is the same thing.  

Now if you are talking about debugging that is a different story.  We use the process as described in ODM 8.8.1->Decision Server Rules->Tutorials->Rule Designer tutorials->Tutorial:Debugging a ruleset.  The one thing we do differently is we use jaxb to unmarshall an xml payload to populate our xom objects.  That way we can take a real request that is not doing what we expected, throw it in a file, read the file and use jaxb to build our xom object and we are off and running.  NOTE:  Debugger when running in DE has a bug that does not show variable values, except for the params.