Categories: DW & ETL

ETL Testing – Part 2

Test Estimation:

Effective software project estimation is one of the most challenging and important activities in the testing activities. However, it is the most essential part of a proper project planning and control. Under-estimating a project leads to under-staffing it, running the risk of low quality deliverables and resulting in loss of credibility as deadlines are missed. So it is imperative to do a proper estimation during the planning stage.

The basic steps in estimation include:

Estimating the size of the system to be tested.
Estimating the effort in person-hours (1 person hours – number of working hour in a day i.e. 8 hours)

After receiving the requirements the tester analyses the mappings that are created/modified and study about the changes made. Based on the impact analysis, the tester comes to know about how much time is needed for the whole testing process, which consists of mapping analysis, test case preparation, test execution, defect reporting, regression testing and final documentation. This calculated time is entered in the Estimation time sheet.

Integration Testing:

Integration testing is to verify the required functionality of a mapping (Single ETL / single session) in the environment specific to testing team (Test environment). This testing should ensure that correct numbers of rows (validated records) are transferred to the target from the source.

Integration testing is also used to verify initialization and incremental mappings (sessions) functionality along with the pre-session and post-session scripts for dependencies and the usage/consumption of relative indicator files to control dependencies across multiple work streams (modules). During integration testing error-handling processes, proper functionality of mapping variables and the appropriate business requirements can be validated.