BI/Data Warehouse Testing

Prescreening identifies when field and table structures have changed (e.g., new or removed tables or fields, modified precision or length). If a change is detected, tests can be automatically updated. When working with file sources, you can test to ensure that the data loaded into the staging tables is correctly structured and formatted, as well as verify that the field level data meets your requirements (e.g., allowed values or patterns).

Vital Checks expose data acquisition (ETL) errors to help ensure the validity of the data on the target system. Using metadata and constraint information extracted from the source database, Tricentis Tosca verifies that the range of tables (and records within) have been copied successfully. The following test types can be created out-of-the-box:

• Completeness tests: Enable count comparisons between source and target
• Uniqueness tests: Check for the uniqueness constraint defined in the database
• Referential integrity tests: Check that complete records have been copied and that technical and logical integrity is maintained

Reconciliation tests can perform algorithmic or complete row-by-row comparisons of two data sets from two disparate systems. For example, you can compare remote files to a database query, local files to data within a Hadoop cluster, or any combination of these options. These tests can be associated with your transformation requirements—providing instant insight into which transformation requirements have been tested and whether those tests succeeded or failed.

Profiling tests validates data for logical consistency and correctness from a business perspective. For example, you can automatically check that insurance contracts can only be canceled if all outstanding invoices have been paid. Or, you could validate whether a certain business process completes within a specified time period. Profiling functionality can also be used to monitor how many data values of a certain type exist at any given point, alert you to “out of range” values and use results to create a trend profile over time.

Report testing verifies report creation and content from the end-user perspective. Tests can also check access restrictions and report generation performance. Report tests might involve a combination of UI and API tests, depending on how the reports are accessed. For example, a test might open a Cognos report in a web browser, retrieve a value from a table in the report, and then compare it with a result retrieved from a database query.