March 2014

Marlab’s

I N S I D E T H I S

I S S U E :

Business Intelli-

gence : Quality

Perspective

2

Quality News &

Views 5

Cartoon Space 6

Volume VII

From the Editor …

Of late, we have been seeing greater interest and enquiries on Test digest. This is from both, within and outside the company. Thank you for your continued support. Coming to Market trends, a recent IDC study projects a 2013-2017 forecast for the worldwide cloud testing and automated software quality (ASQ) software-as-a-service (SaaS) market, which experienced 37.7% growth, from 2011. IDC expects a huge annual growth rate of 31.1% for 2013-2017, resulting in projected 2017 revenue of $1 billion from this service alone. Another trend which has been steadily increasing is the phenomenon of “Crowd-sourced” test-ing. This consists of delegating software testing to a community or hiring testers through an online forum. Among the advantages it provides is that testing is carried out by a number of different testers from different places rather than by hired consultants or professionals. Through this forum, we will continue to share news and information on some of these trends apart from the core test-ing areas.

Happy Reading !!

T E S T D I G E S T © 2 0 1 4 M A R L A B S S O F T W A R E P V T L T D P A G E 2

What is BI: For any analysis and or decision making there will be fair amount of study to

be done on incidents, and this can only happen if the incidents directly or indirectly available recorded,

without which making any decision would be quite risky and neither carry any surety on the success that

would neither yield any autopsy nor lesson learnt, hence in order to make decisions we should have the

incidents recorded and for business the incident registry is the " Business Data" and the way the data is

been interpreted is called "Intelligence" and the whole story leads to business intelligence.

Hence given the above need of niche technology made every

growing organization to look at their data intelligently and hence

the scope for the ‘Business intelligence’ as the technology.

In order to build any ‘Business Intelligence’ solution the business data should be collected to the common

pool technically known as ‘Data Warehouse’ and the sources of the same could be from intra or inter or-

ganization(s).

How it is built: The technically architecture of the Business intelligence would typically be as below.

(Images : Copied from the internet, as available already then why should create one)

Data Sources: since the data could be sourced intra or inter organization as mentioned above, since the

data may or may not be in same format unless the data collected is of same format there cannot be a col-

Mahesh Rayappa G

BUSINESS DATA INTELLIGENT DATA

Current year the sales increased by 12% Current year sales is higher by 12% with 100 employees, but last year it was 100% with 10 employees

This year hired 20 candidates Current year 50 people resigned VS 2 last year

Bangalore division sales are up by 50 % Overall sales is down by 6% in India

BI is about

providing the

right data at the

right time to the

right people so

that they can

take the right

decisions” –

Nic Smith

lection, hence one of the main design step of BI solution is makes the data of similar format to make the

decisions and would be done by process called ETL (extract, transform and load).

ETL : This is 3 step process which extracts data from the various sources, formats to be in similar for-

mat along with the business operations done uniformly and then loads data to the common pool i.e.

Data warehouse.

Data Ware House: is a common repository holding the data prepared by the ETL (gate keeper) with

all the necessary curing of data done.

Data Marts: The ETL process stores data according to the subject matter necessary for Ex: HR data is

stored only with employee, Sales Data mart only stored with sales and invoices etc.

BI Analytics: Reporting layer which actually reads data from the marts and portrays according the

business needs for ex. current year VS previous year.

Snippet of sample of BI Report:

Why we need QA in DWBI projects: In any other technology its ‘garbage in and garbage out’.. but

in BI it is going to be ‘garbage in and exponential garbage out’

Given the typical design architecture as illustrated

above there are many integration points with immense

possibility of defects referred as ‘software bugs’ and

those could be due to

Business requirement complexity

Data changing over period

Data Quality

Improper handling the process

No traces of data being lost

Unaware of the actual of business need

Technically infeasibility

Inexperience

Inter technology integrations

Tool incapability (hence there will be lot of workarounds)

P A G E 3 T E S T D I G E S T © 2 0 1 4 M A R L A B S S O F T W A R E P V T L T D

continuation of ‘Business Intelligence ...

“If you don’t

have a competi-

tive advantage,

don’t compete!”

– Jack Welsh

P A G E 4 T E S T D I G E S T © 2 0 1 4 M A R L A B S S O F T W A R E P V T L T D

Hence software testing is very essential in BI projects to make sure all integration points are functioning as

designed. Example of different referencing subject

areas but read from single point.

How to do BI Testing: No different to any other

testing life cycle as mentioned below

Business and requirement understanding

&Validation

Test Estimation

Test planning

Designing test scenarios and test cases from

all the available inputs

Test data preparation

Test execution

Regression Testing (upon issues fixed / change request implemented)

Test Report

Release post mortem

Production support

What to test in BI: Some of the noticeable metrics which needs to be checked for are listed below

Make sure complete source data is loaded to the reporting tables

No data loss

Making sure that the data is not redundantly stored

Data accuracy according to the business needs

Data integrity (Data if spilt and stored in multiple tables should be referenced as received)

Reporting valid Data

Providing intuitive data display

Usability and intuitive representation of the data

Latest analysis capability

Supporting all the historical data with the current latest data

User security w.r.t Data, Display, Privilege

Performance checks on the presentation layer

To be made to be compatible to migrate to the next version of the tool or inter technology

Challenges in BI QA: Typically the BI testing not less than the developer level, more over it is time con-

suming process as here we should justify the issue along with the finding out the route cause

Data quality : inconsistent data (structure of future or historic data cannot be imagined )

Lack of SQL knowledge

Real time data unavailability

QA having less privileges in the Data bases

Huge Volume and complexity of data

Fault in business process and procedures

Lack of documentation

continuation of ‘Business Intelligence ...

P A G E 5

Information 2020: Big Data and Beyond

This talks about the ‘Big Data’ technology and more

http://my.gartner.com/portal/server.pt?open=512&objID=202&mode=2&PageID=5553&resId=2512815&ref=Webinar-Calendar

Is ETL Still Relevant in the Era of Hadoop? This presentation outlines architecture and methods developed to migrate high cost ETL processing to a low cost processing platform Hadoop.

https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/9059/91121

Webinars >>

Top 10 Business Intelligence Trends for 2014 This throws some light on how data and analytics continues to accelerate, transform the staid old business intelligence

http://tdwi.org/whitepapers/2014/02/top-10-business-intelligence-trends-for-2014.aspx?tc=page0

A Strategic Approach to Complex ETL Testing This paper describes effective data warehouse testing strategy

http://www.querysurge.com/resource-center/white-papers/strategic-approach-to-complex-etl-testing

BI - Today and Tomorrow This paper gives a perspective on the advancements in the BI technology platform expected in future.

http://www.tcs.com/SiteCollectionDocuments/White%20Papers/BIPM_White_Paper_Business-Intelligence-Today-Tomorrow_120111.pdf

How Five Hot Trends Are Shaping the Future of Business Analytics How cloud-based services, predictive analytics, social media analytics, big data, and mobile computing are combining to take business intelligence

beyond traditional boundaries http://tdwi.org/whitepapers/2013/03/anatomy-of-the-new-decision-how-five-hot-trends-are-shaping-the-future-of-business-

analytics.aspx?tc=page0

Strategies for Testing Data Warehouse Applications This article talks about strategic decision-making through Data Warehousing

www.information-management.com/issues/20070601/1086005-1.html

eBooks , Whitepapers & Columns >>

T E S T D I G E S T © 2 0 1 4 M A R L A B S S O F T W A R E P V T L T D

Big Data Essentials: Removing the Skills Barrier In this you will learn about A flexible and comprehensive Big Data integration platform architecture

www.brighttalk.com/webcast/10477/97301

Business Intelligence Series (Session 2): Data Integration Platform vs. ETL This presentation will discuss how this need has led to the scope of ETL to evolve into that of an Enterprise Data Integration Platform

http://www.techgig.com/expert-speak/Business-Intelligence-Series-Session-2-Data-Integration-Platform-vs-ETL-39

7 habits of highly *ineffective* Big Data security This talks about few security habits that expose Big Data to a breach or cause major delays/rework

www.brighttalk.com/webcast/10573/104617

P A G E 6 T E S T D I G E S T © 2 0 1 4 M A R L A B S S O F T W A R E P V T L T D

Raj

esh

Sun

dara

raja

n .

Mur

ali D

ubut

aval

u

.

Vara

pras

adar

ao Y

arra

.