BI and Data Warehouse Testing
As an advanced Business Intelligence Testing Company in Bangalore, At Crossroad Elf, we undertake Business Intelligence testing initiatives to help companies gain deeper and better insights so they can manage or make decisions based on hard facts or data.
Our team of Power BI Consultants and testers can help you validate your data in your BI systems through robust testing processes.
BI Testing Strategy
A BI testing project is a testing project too. That means the typical stages of testing are applicable here too, whether it is the performance you are testing or functional end to end testing:
Some of the important testing services we offer are
Analytical/BI Report Testing & Validation
The reports are never going to be correct, consistent and fast if your preceding layers were malfunctioning. It is important to look for the following:
- The reports generated and their applicability to the business
- The ability to customize and personalize the parameters to be included in the reports. Sorting, Categorizing, grouping, etc.
- The appearance of the report itself. In other words, the readability.
- If the BI elements are BI integrated, then the corresponding functionality of the application is to be included in an end-to-end test.
ETL/DW Testing & Validation
The ETL process is where the raw data gets processed into business targeted information. We need to look for the following during this testing:
- The source and destination data types should match. E.g.: You can’t store the date as text.
- Primary key, foreign key, null, default value constraints, etc. should be intact.
- The ACID properties of source and destination should be validated, etc.
- Performance: As systems become more intricate, there are relationships formed between multiple entities to make several co-relations. This is great news for data analytics; however, this kind of complexity often results in queries taking too long to retrieve results. Therefore, performance testing plays an important role here.
- Scalability: Data is only going to increase not decrease. Therefore, tests have to be done to make sure that the size of the growing business and data volumes can be handled by the current implementation or not. This also includes testing the archival strategy too. Basically, you are trying to test the decision- “What happens to older data and what if I need it?”
Reliability/Recovery Testing
Reliability Testing or Recovery Testing – is to verify as to whether the application is able to return back to its normal state or not after a failure or abnormal behavior and also how long does it take for it to do so (in other words, time estimation).
An online trading site if experience a failure where the users are not able to buy/sell shares at a certain point of the day (peak hours) but are able to do so after an hour or two. In this case, we can say the application is reliable or recovered from the abnormal behavior.
In addition to the above sub-forms of performance testing, there are some more fundamental ones that are prominent
Smoke Test
- How is the new version of the application performing when compared to previous ones?
- Is any performance degradation observed in any area in the new version?
- What should be the next area where developers should focus to address performance issues in the new version of the application?
