Testing of Business Intelligence (BI) Applications

Business Intelligence & Analytics BI

 Business intelligence (BI) Is a process of gathering, analyzing, and transforming raw data into accurate, efficient, and meaningful information which can be used to make wise business decisions and refine business strategy. As part of the BI process, organizations collect data from internal IT systems and external sources, prepare it for analysis, run queries against the data and create data visualizations, BI dashboards and reports to make the analytics results available to business users for operational decision-making and strategic planning. 

Business Intelligence Testing (BI Testing) initiatives help companies gain deeper and better insights so they can manage or make decisions based on hard facts or data.

What is Business Intelligence Testing:

Business Intelligence testing helps the business users to validate and verify the accuracy of these BI Reports and Dashboards and ensures data credibility and accuracy of insights derived from the BI process. Reports and dashboards are extensively used to make business decisions. These decisions later form the basis for the company’s growth and success. If BI reports are wrong, then decisions taken based on these reports will also be wrong. Inaccurate reports affect the organization’s credibility and also expose them to compliance and legal issues. 

 The principle for Business Intelligence testing is very simple. What you do vs what you expect.

BI projects can implement one of the following approaches, or a combination of them.

 1. Manual testing: Compile a list of test cases that need to be verified after every change. These can be maintained in a simple spreadsheet and updated with new test cases as dashboard development progresses. As this kind of testing does not require any additional software products it is the simplest one to implement. However, it is the slowest and most expensive one to maintain. 

 2. Automated testing: We can automate manual test executions, but it does take a considerable investment to build out the initial automation framework. Adding and maintaining tests requires software development skills depending on how much abstraction our framework does. Common tools used are Selenium, Kinesis UI, BI Validator, iCEDQ, QuerySurge,etc.

Comments

  1. Simi FrankJuly 5, 2021 at 5:46 PM

    👏🏻👏🏻

    ReplyDelete
  2. Alex JhonApril 28, 2025 at 5:24 PM

    To help teams understand the process easily, an Explainer Video can be a highly effective tool. An explainer video can visually walk users through the steps of BI testing, highlight best practices, and illustrate common pitfalls to avoid.

    ReplyDelete

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