ETL Test Automation Planning for DW/BI Projects

As businesses create (and need) more data than ever before, the sheer number of BI failures threatens to grow exponentially. This could have a far-reaching impact on the underlying digital transformation initiatives that these projects are designed to enable.

Given that companies are releasing new applications faster than ever — some releasing updates on demand and multiple times a day -—too many organizations are using manual ETL test processes and the wrong tools to manage critical parts of releases for highly visible, often customer-facing, applications.

That translates into risk to customer loyalty, the brand, confidential data ——nd worse. For more details ETL Testing Training

This article explores how applying DevOps-style test automation to DW/BI and other data integration projects can guarantee a high level of data quality -- instilling the trust that is essential for the success of BI projects and the digital transformation initiatives that are ultimately driving them.

Taking a DevOps Approach to DW/BI Testing

DevOps, with its focus on tool automation across the entire development life cycle, addresses an enormous challenge for big data and DW/BI developers. Many of today's big data and DW/BI projects are already leveraging (or actively planning to adopt) agile and DevOps processes — but not for testing.

DW/BI projects in general are not currently using automated testing tools to the extent that is needed for project successes. Perhaps this is because they believe the required testing functions are not commercially available or are too complex and expensive to develop in-house. Learn from ETL Testing Course

When thinking about what you need to test to ensure data integrity, consider that BI is more than just data warehouses (DW) and extract, transform, and load (ETL).

Services between the ETL processes, as well as the middleware and dashboard visualizations, also come under the purview of BI.

Messages and negotiating pacts between these layers are complex and require considerable coordination and testing.

DevOps helps facilitate this with constant deployments and testing. Implementing a DevOps testing approach to DW/BI means automating the testing of different source and target data sets to keep data current.

This can be tremendously beneficial when handling many (possibly hundreds of) diverse data sources and volumes. Your team will be able to detect errors before they threaten BI applications in production.

Moreover, you will have more time to fix issues before applications reach production. For more ETL Testing Certification

Why Test Automation?

Continuous quality is a systematic approach to process improvement in order to achieve the quality goals of development and the business it supports.