Think Quality Assurance of your organization’s Data Warehouse is the same as any old QA process for an application? Think again. QA for DW tests more than just functionality; it includes testing for exception handling, validations, transformations, performance, integration, and user acceptance. To meet these unique challenges, Adastra offers DW QA, based on our proven QA.360TM methodology that utilizes industry standards and processes to ensure organizations are implementing a DW of the highest quality.
Challenge
Data Warehouse development is a series of complex activities, full of risks and potential for human error. Due to the complexity of DW design, programming errors, changing requirements, and other factors, it is impossible to deliver a defect-free system. Conversely, the cost of finding and fixing defects grows immensely with each stage of the DW development life-cycle. The goal for DW development, then, should be to do the best possible job testing in each stage to minimize costs and risks.
Organizations usually have their own internal QA team who follow a set of standard processes. However, these standard QA processes may not cover the entire DW system since they were not created specifically for DW. Developers do their own unit testing, while system testing is done separately, without any comprehensive QA solution. Some organizations rely on the same resources who built their DW to test what they have built. But can or should you trust your own internal IT group to QA their own work? Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II, and other compliance regulations have numerous requirements around reporting. Companies use both internal and external auditors to ensure they are meeting these requirements; likewise for DW, companies should engage a third party for their DW QA to ensure your DW meets standards, is compliant with regulations, and your risks and costs are minimized.
Solution
Leveraging our proven QA.360TMmethodology, Adastra’s DW QA solution provides a comprehensive QA solution for each phase of the DW development lifecycle. Our consultants have extensive experience in implementing DW QA processes that have reduced costs and yielded quality DW systems.
QA.360TM consists of developing a test strategy, test plan, and test cases that provide a thorough testing of the DW. For various phases of the DW development, we utilize leading edge testing tools, along with our own in-house developed ETL test tool ALaRMTM (Adastra Load and Reconciliation Monitor). Data that gets presented to your ETL process changes, so the output only tells you the QA of that data set, but not the QA of the newly transformed data. Building the right test cases that will give you a comprehensive QA of your DW solution efficiently is critical. Adastra has the expertise and experience on how to create data to span all possible test cases. We perform functional testing, error handling testing, regression testing, and performance testing against the DW in detail to pinpoint all issues and get them resolved before going into production.
The DW QA process begins at the start of the project and lasts throughout the entire DW project lifecycle. QA.360TM is tailored specifically for the DW utilizing industry standards, and, coupled with Adastra’s extensive experience in applying our proven QA processes, we ensure quality is managed in every aspect of your DW project.