Regardless of whether your data warehousing (DW)/business intelligence (BI) team is dedicated to Scrum, a fan of Kanban, or focused on XP, “Agile” in any form calls for small increments of potentially deployable results – which means that QA is essential on a regular, frequent basis. As we develop these small increments, we need to not only test the new development, but also regression test what we’ve already built. Our test suite grows larger with each iteration, and manual testing quickly becomes infeasible. Agile requires that we automate our tests so that regression testing doesn’t become a development bottleneck.

Test automation is one of several key technical enablement practices that allows teams to be more successful in their agile journeys. While there are lots of test practices and automation tools out there for software development teams to leverage, very few are targeted to data-related development and testing. Agile analytics practitioner Lynn Winterboer and DW/BI architect and developer Cher Fox will share essential agile test foundations and data-focused test automation technologies to help data warehousing and business intelligence teams get a leg up on this important agile practice, including a demo of how this works!

Agenda:
Why is test automation important for agile DW/BI teams?
Why aren’t all DW/BI teams automating their tests today?
What is the path to data-focused test automation?
Where to start? What tests to automate first?
Demo of a simple test automation tool any DW/BI team could build and use
Learning Outcomes:
The intent of this presentation is to:
1) Educate DW/BI folks on why test automation is important to an agile journey;
2) Clarify that a solid foundation is needed in testing practices and principles before automation is useful;
3) Show that automation is easy to do, using simple DW/BI tools and coding languages.