IT BI Technical Ideas: How to test BI and ETL Applications with manual and automation approach?: A comprehensive guide for Business Intelligence project evaluation

This is an enhanced version [as on 2nd Sep 2015] with Data migration practices also.
IT BI Technical Ideas: How to test BI and ETL Applications with manual and automation approach?
A comprehensive guide for Business Intelligence project evaluation

The BI Projects are heart of the any business organization. The IT departments need to struggle a lot to bring them into a good shape by spending thousands of man days efforts towards data validation, cleansing, transforming, consolidating and presenting to the users.

At the same tome the BI Project evaluation for its implementation is a challenge to any IT organization. The resources should be well understood on its activities by collecting latest information. They also need to work in collaboration with the technical teams by understanding the latest design and development requirements. At the same time they need to confirm with the users on their understanding of the latest requirements before stepping into the evaluation process. This activity denotes lot of resource educations is required for BI Projects evaluation.

One might get the following questions also into their mind:
What kind of techniques can be used for data transformation?
Why do you need to evaluate thoroughly the BI applications?
Why do you need a Big Bang kind of test coverage for BI Projects?
Why do you need different environments for BI Projects?
What kind of testing is involved?
Is there any test automation process involved for BI projects?
If you are nominated as a business representative to certify the ETL/BI Application; you might ask some of the following questions.
i) Is the appropriate data being extracted?

ii) If the source data element is split into multiple columns, is it done correctly during the transformation process?

iii) If some data elements are merged together did any integrity problems result from this transformation process?

iv) Is the data loaded correctly into the appropriate BI target databases and the appropriate BI tables?

v) Can the data in the BI target databases be reconciled with the source files and source databases? Where are the reconciliation totals stored?

vi) Are data values correctly transformed and cleansed? Is bad data slipping through without notice?

vii) Is the load performance adequate? And is the BI data available to the business people when they expect it?
For all the above test scenarios; this E-Book can denote the solutions to follow.

By considering the above clarifications or questions; with my past work experiences on these kind of projects I have made this detailed E-Book to understand the Data warehouse concepts in depth, the development activities and the feasible testing methodology need to be used for applying the evaluation procedure.

Following are some of the Contents in this E-book:
Introduction
Background of Data warehouse and Business Intelligence
What is ETL?
Data warehousing
Data Mart (DM)
What are the reasons for creating Data Mart?
What is BI?
Technologies and Tools
SDLC Activities
What are the ETL Development Activities?
How to build and unit test of ETL process?
What is integration testing on ETL process?
What is performance testing of ETL process?
What is acceptance testing on ETL process?
What are the data transformation activities?
What are the BI Application Development Activities?
How to determine the final project requirements?
How to design BI Application prgrams?
How to build and unit test BI application programs?
What is the need to provide data access and analysis training?
What is the environmental setup processes involved during development?
What could be the predicted issues in BI projects?
Testing methodology
and some more.
After going through this document with clear understanding on it, any BI professional can be ready to step into the BI project evaluation confidently.