Chris Grenz

Selecting and deploying a test management system is probably one of the hardest topics in BI mainly due to the lack of lightweight, easy to use test management frameworks well suited to BI.  Most of the mature test management suites target application and, most recently, web application development.  And that’s not all that useful for […]

In order to know the expected “after” of a test, you need to know the “before” (usually!).  Testing in BI requires test fixtures, a defined state of the system in the “before” state.  In BI, this is almost the same as a test data set, but we add in non-data system configurations, user sets, and […]

BI is built on a foundation of data.  Therefore, testing in BI requires test data, and that means we’ve got to get it from somewhere! I’ve seen two general strategies here: Load the test system directly with production data, meaning that the contents of the test system change with each “refresh”. Generate test data sets […]

“Our BI system needs better testing.  How?” always piques my interest.  The breadth of the BI ecosystem means that testing the system end-to-end involves crossing many technologies, areas of responsibility (functional competencies), and physical systems.  This covers most (all) the tool classes in this series, at very least: Data extracts/data acquisition – wide variety of […]

Documentation management (not document management!) is the rather narrow topic of how a development team manages the system specifications that are used throughout the life of a system.  In most teams, this is a huge blind spot with some teams simply not documenting much of anything and others spending an enormous amount of time (money) […]

As a data architect, iterative development scared the stuffing out of me at first.  I was accustomed to having the data model pretty well set up front and working hard to minimize or at least localize changes to the overall database structure.  Iterative development make change normal, so no more “holding the line!” Luckily, database […]

Ah – my favorite topic in BI tools – data modeling and the modeling tool.  An effective data modeling tool is the primary design tool for the database tier of the BI stack and may be extended to capture the design of nearly any system component.  It’s an essential tool in the belt of all […]

This one’s easy. Every team needs source control. Period. No exceptions. A team of one needs source control. Source control tools serve two primary purposes in BI development groups: Version control during development including playing a part in code reviews and ensuring the security (backup) of the code base. Deployment support as a controlled repository […]

Development management (or more traditionally “project management”) is concerned with identifying, scheduling, and tracking development workload.  I’ve started to differentiate development management from project management in line with the trend in many larger organizations who have tackled project portfolio management as a discipline. Basically, project management focuses on cost, risk, and value to the organization […]

The importance of managing requirements and workload for any development team can’t be underestimated. But about 50% of the time I find teams without a plan for capturing and managing requirements given to them by their business stakeholders. A definition: Requirements management tools manage the collection and evolution of functional (business) requirements. Generally they are […]

When the topic of BI tools comes up with a client, the conversation inevitably starts with either the BI delivery tool or the ETL tool…maybe the DBMS.  But unless there are serious issues in these core platforms, I generally find that the real gaps are in one of the other, “forgotten” tool classes. Here’s the […]