This allows users with existing proprietary execution environments, which are too complicated or special to be adopted to the execution environment of Silk Central, or users with automated test results from various sources, for example continuous integration (CI) systems, to still collect all results of their whole testing process in one central place and to associate these results with their requirements, versions, and builds for holistic reporting and decision making.
The whole process around test creation, which means the representation of the actual test in Silk Central, and around execution planning does not change. You create tests in Silk Central and assign these tests to execution plans to execute them.
The difference is in the deployment settings of the execution plan. Instead of specifying an execution server, you enable the so called External execution of assigned tests.
Running such an execution plan then results in an execution plan run that is visible like normal execution plan runs in the Silk Central UI, with the difference that this execution plan is waiting to receive results from the external execution environment.
For external execution plan runs, you can create setup and cleanup tests in the same way as for runs that are executed on the Silk Central execution servers. For example, you can use a setup test to trigger the execution plan run in the external execution environment. This will block the Silk Central execution server for the duration of the external execution plan run, and then a cleanup test can be executed on the same execution server. Such setup and cleanup tests have the same ID as the external execution plan run. You can get the ID through the predefined parameter #sctm_regular_execdef_run_id. For additional information, see Predefined Parameters.
If Silk Central is installed on your system, you can update such execution plan runs through the interactive REST API documentation, accessible from host:port[/inst]/Services1.0/swagger-ui.html, where host is your Silk Central host. For example http://localhost:19120/Services1.0/swagger-ui.html.