Why You Need It

Comprehensive testing of a data warehouse at every point throughout the ETL (extract, transform, and load) process is becoming increasingly important as more data is being collected and used for strategic decision-making. Data integration projects are initiated as a result of mergers and acquisitions, compliance and regulations, data consolidation, and the increased reliance on data-driven decision making (using Business Intelligence tools, etc.). Any way you slice it, the data warehouse/business intelligence (BI) platform is complex and presents many problems to overcome.

What's involved?

We have developed a successful solution to the issue of providing software quality and testing to the data warehouse/BI platform. The solution has 3 components:

• A successful Process
• People with experience and expertise
• Best-of-breed Tools for managing, executing, and tracking the process

RTTS utilizes a best practices process that follows the phases below: 

• Assess: Evaluation of your current testing practices and recommendations how to improve your process.
• Plan: Develop an actionable, strategic plan that provides a road map for successful implementation of the testing effort.
• Design: Create test artifacts for manual and automated execution of the test strategy, as it was laid out in the Test Plan.
• Automate, Execute, Track: The scripting of functional and performance test cases using automated tools, the execution of test cases, and the tracking of defects and issues.
• Evaluate and Improve: Refine and update test assets, recommend process improvements, evaluate production metrics re-evaluate resource needs.

The People

RTTS is the premier software and services firm in the software quality and testing area. Our team boasts software quality industry experts who have successfully implemented hundreds of projects at over 400 companies. All RTTS Engineers have many years of experience with automation tools implementing functional, performance, scalability, and security testing. All Engineers are employees of the firm (no contractors), all have Computer Science undergraduate or master's degrees and all have gone through a rigorous and intensive 300-hour training program. Our team can assist you in any of the following ways:

• Full outsourcing of your testing needs, including end-to-end planning and execution
• Supplement your team with RTTS experts to provide more depth and breadth
• Mentor and train your team in both process and tool knowledge

The following strategic areas of Data Warehouse Testing are targeted by RTTS:

• Data Completeness
• Data Transformation
• Data Quality
• End-to-End Integration testing
• Regression testing
• Performance testing
• Business Intelligence Reports

The Tools

We implement and supports tools from IBM, HP, Microsoft, Oracle, Teradata, Rally, Selenium, Citrix, and others. We support 95% of the test tools in the industry. Our experts can implement tools you already have or assist you with determining the appropriate tool for your project, providing information on the correct amount of software you need. 

The tools we support cover the following functionality: 

• Test management
• Requirements management
• Automated regression testing
• Performance/Load/Stress testing
• Security testing
• Data Warehouse regression testing (QuerySurge - www.querysurge.com)
• Defect tracking