The Partial Proposal of Data Warehouse Testing Task
Pavol Tanuška, Pavel Važan, Peter Paul Schreiber · 2011
Abstract. The aim of this article is to suggest the partial proposal of datawarehouse testing methodology. The analysis of relevant standards and guidelines proved the lack of information on actions and activities concerning data warehouse testing. The absence of the complex data warehouse testing methodology seems to be crucial particularly in the phase of the data warehouse implementation. Keywords: Data warehouse, testing, methodology, UML. 1. Introduction In the phase of testing methodology designing for the process of the data warehouse validation, it is necessary to consider the results and knowledge acquired in the analysis of the existing standards and guidelines. The analysis of valid European standards and guidelines related to software products evaluation has been done by authors as an opening part of proposed testing methodology. There has been analyzed many standards that deal with software life cycle processes (e.g. ISO/IEC 12207, ISO/IEC 15288, ISO/IEC TR 12182, ISO/IEC TR 15271, ISO/IEC TR 16326), software products operating reliability evaluation (e.g. DIN/IEC 56/363 (458,478, 575)), with general evaluation of software products and tools (e.g. ISO/IEC 14598, ISO/IEC 14102) and with systems of software quality assurance (e.g. ISO 9001:2000, ISO 25000, DIN ISO/IEC 12119, DIN 66272) and also standards that deals with metrics (e.g. ISO 9126-2, ISO 9126-3, ISO 9126-4). Special part was an analysis of guidelines Gamp4 and TickIT. All this selection represents about 150 standards and guidelines, which cover the area of the software evaluation. The analysis result is, that the software testing is standardized in details, but without special cases (like e.g. data warehouses) specification. The data warehouses have been used massively only in the last few years and they are specific with some properties and processes like data pump (ETT process), metadata management, multidimensional database design and management, special OLAP-reports design, etc. [1] In the first stage of the methodology design, it is necessary to focus on attributes of testing scenario.