3. AgileBI Things - 2017-03-26

Shane writes an AgileBI series called “3 AgileBI Things” published on LinkedIN Pulse. This article below is a copy of “3. AgileBI Things – 2017-03-26“.  Shane also writes on AgileBI concepts at AgileBI Guru.

1. Automated Testing Goals

So I have finally been lucky enough to get some time to focus on automated testing and templates for business rules (they go hand in hand ya know).

Nice article from Steven Thomas on the four things he expects to get out of automated testing.

4 Objectives for an Automated Test Strategy

2. Data Warehouse Test Checklist

In a truly agile approach, we are not trying to boil the ocean and build all the automated tests we need, we are funnily enough starting with 3.

  1. Prove the dev wrote the business rule code correctly.
  2. Prove no new reference values “magically” turn up in our source systems once our code is in production
  3. Alert us if the data on our production loads goes wonky

So one test for the dev process and 2 production health tests to make any BAU effort bleed disappear.

Lots of other test types left to do, an intersting list of some tests we may need to build here:

Data Warehouse Testing: Part 2

3. Busines Rule Game

When creating our AgileBI courses we spend a lot of time trying to incorporate interactive sessions to reinforce the messages (and also to get people off their butts, nothing worse than sitting watching powerpoint for 8 hours!)

Here is an interesting interactive game for groups to reinforce defining business rules.

Rules vs Examples

About Shane 

When the team have time I am nagging them to add new cool features to ODE, our open source data vault automation engine at ode.ninja.

Most of my time is actually spent teaching and coaching customers how to deliver using AgileBI as part of the Optimal Orange team.

We run regular Agile courses with a business intelligence slant in both Wellington and Auckland, you can learn more about these here.