Organizations are now aiming to incorporate best practices of DevOps and software development techniques into their analytics efforts.
This explains the reason why BI testing is an obvious choice. It is significantly more efficient to catch an issue before it enters production, both for internal users and external consumers than to deal with the implications later. Any company that employs analytics platforms should do frequent BI testing to uncover problems before they are seen by users, ensuring credibility and avoiding risk.
Why Do You Need BI Testing?
Before we get started with BI testing, it’s important to understand why business integration testing is necessary. When analytics impact the work of apps, business integration is by far the most important procedure.
For example, suppose you relocate and need to use your credit card to make a payment. But due to the shift in location, the BI application flags it as a strange transaction. To prevent fraud, such modifications may be made using BI.
Additionally, numerous additional scenarios in business integration might severely impact the behavior of your application. As a result, business intelligence testing enters the picture. By attaining BI analytics and reports, it assists you in locating and resolving system flaws after making adjustments to the application procedure.
BI Testing Process
Let us now take a look at the business intelligence testing method:-
1. Verify the Data at the Source
A data source is among the most important aspects of business intelligence since it is the initial location where data is saved and supplied to all important operations. A single comma or full stop error may wreak havoc on a piece of work.
Furthermore, for a business intelligence operation, there may be several sources of data, all of which are saturated with data in various forms. As a result, data validation at the source is vital, as is data type matching on both the sender and receiver ends.
You may do this by incorporating a series of data validation requirements to verify that data types are matched on both ends and that erroneous fields are not filled in. To avoid discarding data, you must confirm that data arriving from sources is valid at this stage.
You can also correct data without forwarding it for further analysis. It’s commonly referred to as the “Extract” step of ETL.
2. Double-check Your Data Transformation
You must first understand data transformation before moving on to the underlying notion. It is, in fact, a step in the business transformation process when raw data is processed and business-targeted information is obtained.
You can assure data symmetry across the process by matching both the source as well as destination data types.
Keep an eye on the primary key, foreign key, default value constraint, null value constraints, and other aspects of the database. As per the database, everything should be correct and complete.
3. Check for Data Loading
Within corporate business intelligence procedures, slow data loading may be a severe problem. And the test and the data loading scripts would be key components for your ETL testing. You have to verify the following in conjunction with the data storage system.
Performance Testing: As systems get more complex, relationships between things begin to establish co-relations. But apart from providing respite, it also adds to the complexity of data, lengthening the time it takes to get data via queries. As a result, performance testing is required to verify that data is accessed quickly and efficiently.
Scalability Testing: Data will continue to increase over time. As a result, scalability testing becomes a requirement to assure continuous data processing during installation as the company grows in size.
Furthermore, testing areas like failure recovery, computing capability, and exception handling, are more beneficial than others. BI testing solutions may assist you in improving the scalability of your software for smooth operation.
4. BI Report Validation
Reporting is the final stage of the business intelligence process, and testing is the final attribute. BI reports, like any other report, are prone to errors. It’s also unrealistic to assume them to be constant and quick.
In such circumstances, it is vital to test the following features:-
- Examine the reports that have been prepared to see if they apply to the business.
- Check that you can modify and alter report settings including classification, grouping, sorting, etc.
- Examine the report’s readability.
- In the end-to-end testing, the application’s functionality corresponds to the BI parts.
Conclusion
BI testing can benefit your software business if it is implemented properly. And to get the best results, you must consider taking the help of a professional software testing company like QASource.
Visit QASource now to implement premium BI testing services for your software business.
