What is BI Testing and Importance of BI Report Testing

What is BI Report Testing?

And The Importance of BI Testing

What is BI Report Testing ?

• Business Intelligence Testing helps business users to Test, Validate & Verify the accuracy of the BI Reports , the Dashboards ,the Data Layer and its Metadata.

• The principle for BI testing is very simple. What you do vs what you expect. The Delta defines the magnitude of the failure.

• Business Users needs to ensure that the BI Reports are delivered correctly. But BI reports are just a final output of a very long data pipeline.

• If the report is wrong, it is not necessary that the defect is in the report; the root cause of the defect might be somewhere along the breadth of the data pipeline.

Importance of BI Testing • BI Testing not only helps to achieve trustworthy decision support system (DSS) but also certifies your BI Reports and hence improves the credibility of your business.

• Inaccurate BI Reports affects organization’s credibility and exposes them to compliance and legal issues. It can also lead to hefty fines.

• Organizations therefore cannot afford to ignore BI testing.

The Data Pipeline The data pipeline can be divided two distinct stages:

• Data Processing & Storage. • BI Testing.

Part A : Data Processing & Storage Here are examples to know why Part A needs to be tested • Source Data: Sales number could be populated as 1000 instead of 100 and the defect in data can propagate downstream to reports.

• ETL: A file might be accidentally loaded twice or say customer data is integrated incorrectly because the names are not an exact match

• Database/Data Warehouse: It is possible that some orders were missed in the data warehouse thus giving shipment data without the orders.

Part B : BI Testing Here are examples to know why Part B needs to be tested • Data Layer: Business users needs to verify different sales revenue dimensions against its source data.

• BI Report: BI Reports accuracy should be tested against the data warehouse.

• Dashboards: Regression testing for a collection of multiple reports to achieve 100% decision accuracy.

How to Automate BI Testing?

• The report can be tested if access is available to the data set in a report or prompts are available in programmatic fashion.

• Assuming that is true, let’s look at some of the techniques. The actual results are in reports, here we assume that the specific result is available to us programmatically.

• Now the question arises on expected data. if the expected data is not known or is only in the business users mind, we cannot automate results.

• But if he/she (developers) writes down the expected result or points to a location where we can find it then we can automate the testing with iCEDQ.

Core Component of BI testing The three-core component of BI testing are: • Data Layer/ Metadata • BI Reports • BI Dashboards

Data Layer Testing Technique • With this technique, the business user can easily compare the data from the data layer with the equivalent database.

• Here sales revenue column is a measure as it has numerical data, whereas year or quarter are dimensions.

• Data Layer Testing focuses on reconciliation of all these dimensions and measures with the source data.

BI Report Testing Technique • Say you have a BI report present in two different environments and the business user needs to be sure that both the reports must have exactly the same metrics.

• For example, sales revenue for the first two quarters in the year 2014 & 2015 should be the same at both locations.

• This type of BI report testing can be done by BI Testing Automation. The latest release of iCEDQ for BI Testing provides excellent features for the same.

BI Dashboard Testing Technique • A BI dashboard is essentially a collection of multiple reports that provides at-a-glance views of KPIs (key performance indicators) and progress report or reports relevant to a business process. • All such business rules can be validated with regression pack testing.

Conclusion • There are many BI reporting tools in the market.

Business relies on them to make critical decisions.

• iCEDQ helps business to automate BI testing for ensuring the quality of the BI Reports and in turn quality of the decisions.

• All in all, BI testing will not only empower your business intelligence system but also your business.

Read here to know more about BI Report Testing and Importance of BI Testing.

Visit www.iCEDQ.com for more information.