Enterprises today are investing a lot of time and money in gathering and analyzing the heaps of data that they have accumulated all these years. Integration and analysis of this data has a huge demand today and this forms the foundation for BI and Big Data solutions. Big Data and Business Intelligence have gained momentum over the years and continue to do so. Enterprises are delving deeper into adapting Big Data analytics and also optimize the 3 V’s of Big Data which are Volume, Velocity and Variety. In order to gain more business insight and take better business decisions, it is imperative to balance between gaining volume as well as velocity under a single technical solution.

 

Behind all these techniques, the main ingredient is the data – the backbone of any type of analytical or graphical report/dashboard. And one of the primary processes involved with data management is ETL – Extraction, Transformation and Loading. ETL collects varied source data from heterogeneous databases and transforms them into disparate data warehouses. Depending upon different business rules and ETL tools, the process is manually mapped to the tables.

 

In order to achieve optimum quality and output of data, it is highly essential to have a thorough testing done for these chunks of data and that, needless to say, lies as a responsibility of the automated testing. Testers need to possess the skills and adapt to a diversity of testing techniques in order to achieve best of quality. ETL testing is one huge requirement which is needed for a well planned and well defined testing procedure. Once these ETL processes are verified and validated by testers, the stability of the application is sure to rise.

Process Involved in ETL Software Testing

 

On the whole, ETL software testing includes the same procedure as in a traditional process. Let us glance through certain preliminary steps involved:

 

• Understanding of business needs and requirements
• Requirement analysis
• Requirement validation and test estimation
• Test planning based on inputs and development of test scenarios
• Test data preparation and execution
• Generation of summary reports on test completion

 

Points to Ponder while ETL Software Testing

 

• Data that is being transferred either from source to destination or from one system to another, needs to be checked consistently
• The speed of the entire process and its efficiency need to be tracked
• While testing, queries need to be executed for different scenarios
• Various types of tests like Primary key, Foreign key, data type constraints etc. need to be carried out
• In case of data extraction from an open system, we need to check the consistency of the to be processed data with that of the destination system

 

Challenges Faced during ETL and BI Software Testing

 

• There are chances of missing business flow and unstructured information
• Lack of understanding in the business flow may lead to confusion to the tester while building test cases and test plan
• Owing to the volume and complexity of the data, the tester may get mystified
• There are chances of data anomalies from disparate data sources
• The tester may not get the entire privilege to execute entire ETL job procedure
• Chances of incomplete and duplicate dare are likely
• Chances of loss of data during ETL / handshaking process are high

 

Robust and consistent data is a very important aspect of any software solution and plays a major role in decision making and generation of reports / dashboards. This is where ETL testing plays an important role in data validation and to ensure that the business information is reliable and up to data, thereby minimizing the hazards created by data loss.

 

Software Testing Solution, your testing partner, offers a range of QA and Manual / automated software testing services encompassing the entire software release lifecycle. With a stringent focus on quality and processes, we have been implementing several testing projects in a multitude of technologies.

 

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