How To Build A High-Quality BI Dashboard With The Best Software Test Manager

Business intelligence (BI) involves converting data into valuable insights using software and services, and influences a company's strategic and tactical business preferences. Today, organizations use BI tools to access and analyze data sets and show analytical results in the form of reports, graphs, charts, summaries, and maps. This process gives in-depth insight into the business situation. The most prominent tool is the dashboard. BI dashboards are information management and data visualization tools that let users integrate graphs, charts, and reports onto a single screen for a quick overview using interactive elements like filters and actions. Integrating a BI dashboard tool with a software test manager is essential to build a high-quality BI dashboard.

This article covers how to develop a high-quality dashboard with the best BI solution and managing software testing with the best test management tools.

Business Intelligence Dashboard (BI Dashboard): A Refresher

  Business intelligence dashboards, as we discuss in our dashboard vs report blog, are tools for managing information and visualizing data that are used to examine your data.  In order to combine charts, graphs, and reports on a single screen for quick overviews, content developers can add interactive components like filters and actions.  One of the most widely used features of BI platforms are dashboards, which display data analysis in a simplified, at-a-glance summary, let you choose which information to examine, and give you an effective method to share the findings of your study with others in a visually engaging format. Certain BI vendors enhance their dashboard offering with other capabilities, such as automation, augmented analytics and natural language query, to provide users with easier ways to analyze information and dig into potential insights (changes, patterns, trends). Read More: 4 Key Features of a Modern BI Dashboard  

What is the Advantage of a BI Dashboard with Software Test Managers?

A business intelligence dashboard is a crucial component of a BI strategy. They should be developed specifically with the intention of analyzing data from significant datasets to improve business decisions. By using web-based dashboards, modern BI systems may access, analyze, present, and share data in place of analysts manually putting up spreadsheets. A robust, automated business intelligence platform allows stakeholders to build dashboards for evaluation, decision-making, and action. In this competitive business environment, it's crucial to have perfect, error-free business solutions to outsmart your competitors. Also, it helps you achieve the FTT (first time through) and improve the efficiency and quality of your business processes. In this case, it's vital to get innovative test management tools with the best test automation tools involved with BI tools in building BI dashboards.  

Use Cases of Business Intelligence Dashboards with Software Test Managers

One example of the application of BI dashboards with a software test manager is in this Liquorio Sales dashboard, created with Yellowfin. This dashboard shows the performance analysis of liquor sales across distributors, product ranges, and premium categories. When you integrate these dashboards into your sales apps, it's vital to choose one of the best test automation tools and test management tools, such as Jira, TestRail, etc., to ensure an error-free smooth run of your business intelligence dashboard software.     This human resources (HR) dashboard enables HR teams to track, analyze and report the trends affecting personal expenses, turnover & long-term incentives (LTI), full-time equivalent (FTE), and headcount.   You can explore more use cases for interactive BI dashboards and design examples in Yellowfin Dashboard Gallery.  

What is BI Testing and Why is It Important?

As we mentioned above, gathering, purifying, analyzing, integrating, and distributing data are all steps in the business intelligence (BI) process, which aims to produce actionable insights that promote company expansion. Business intelligence testing, often known as BI testing, confirms the accuracy of the implementation and the staging data, ETL process, and BI reports. BI testing ensures the accuracy of insights gained from the BI process as well as the trustworthiness of the data. When we develop a dashboard to be consumed by other users, it's important to perform a few checks to validate data and the design of the included reports. BI dashboards without a proper development process and a test plan may provide invalid information and mislead the entire business to make wrong business decisions and actions.  

What is the Sequence of BI Testing?

• Examine the information at the source.
• Ensure the correctness of data transformation.
• Data loading verification.
• Validate business intelligence reports.

 

What is Test Management and How Important is It?

Let's discuss test management and the importance of test management to software development projects, including BI projects, in this section. The process of managing testing activities in order to guarantee thorough and advanced testing of the software application is known as test management. To produce a high-quality software program, the method entails planning, managing, assuring traceability, and ensuring visibility of the testing process. It makes sure the software testing procedure goes as planned.    

What is the Test Management Process?

This section briefly introduces the Test Management Process and shows you the Test Management Phases. Test Management Process consists of two main Parts:

• Planning
  1. Risk Analysis
  2. Test Estimation
  3. Test Planning
  4. Test Organization
• Execution
  1. Test Monitoring and Control
  2. Issue Management
  3. Test Report and Evaluation

 

Test Management Process in BI Testing

As discussed in the previous section, Test Management is a process of managing the testing activities to ensure high-quality and high-end testing of the software application. This section will discuss how to apply this process to BI testing.

Sample Test Cases for Business Intelligence Testing

We can categorize sample BI test cases into four groups. The list below shows a few generic test cases that need to be validated for any BI Testing Project under each category.

Verification of the ETL

• Verify that data mapping from the source to the destination system is accurate.
• Ensure all tables and their fields have been transferred from the source to the target system and that the target system's auto-generated keys have been created properly.
• Verify that no fields are null.
• Ensure the data isn't jumbled or truncated and the target system's data type and format are accurate.

 

Staging Data

• The STG (staging) tables and the target tables have the same number of records after applying filter rules.
• Insert a record that hasn't been added to the target table using the key combination that has been provided.
• Once loaded, records should not be copied or transferred to the destination tables.
• Logically remove the target tables' records.

 

Data Loading in Business Intelligence

• Verify that the source and destination databases are properly connected and that there are no access issues.
• Make sure the truncate option is operational before using it with a full load.
• While the data is being loaded, check the session's efficiency.
• Search for non-fatal mistakes.

 

Reports from Business Intelligence

• The time and date are shown.
• Decimal precision is necessary for significant figures.
• Show how many columns and rows there are on each page.
• How are blank values/data shown for attributes and key figures in the report?

 

Test Management Strategy for BI Testing

Now we know what should be tested and what resources should be used for ETL and Data Warehouse testing. Let's examine the steps the testers must perform.

• Plan a test
• Test methodology
• Design the test (Your test cases won't be simply text; they'll be query-intensive. The single most critical distinction between ETL/Data Warehouse/BI testing initiatives and conventional test programs is this.)
• Execute the test (Again, in order to execute your queries, you'll need a querying interface)
• Defect, reporting, closure, etc.

 

How Yellowfin-TestRail Integration Becomes the Best Solution for High-Quality BI Dashboards

  In this section, we will discuss how the Yellowfin-TestRail combination provides the best solution for high-quality dashboards to exceed the requirements of both development and business teams. In this modern business era, developers and users expect easy-to-use analytics and dashboards with more functionality. There are a lot of solutions in the market. But, most existing solutions are hard to consume and share. Also, they are not able to be white-labeled into a native app. Also, the business teams need to have perfect and error-free BI dashboards which can be trusted to hand over all their business analytics. Let's see how Yellowfin exceeds these expectations with the perfect integration with TestRail test management tools.  

What Makes Yellowfin the Best BI Solution?

Yellowfin is specialized in transforming your business or software through data making your analytics simple. Yellowfin tools were built to solve the complexity of your data through automation. It comes with more features and tools to support data storytelling, collaboration, and beautiful action-based dashboards that are simple to use, allowing more people to see, understand and do more with their data. Also, Yellowfin provides embedded solutions to integrate these analytics within your existing applications. It creates action-based dashboards with the effect that business users will want to utilize. Yellowfin integrates operational workflows into your dashboards and data visualizations to take them to the next level utilizing a no-code or low-code development environment. Try Yellowfin solutions free now.  

How TestRail Supports Building High-quality BI Solutions with Yellowfin?

TestRail is the standard in test management to streamline testing processes, get visibility into quality assurance, and produce high-quality software. TestRail has the best tools to manage test cases, plans, and runs.     You can manage, organize and track your testing in a collaborative platform with the TestRail modern test management tool. You can access TestRail easily with your entire team, which is hosted on your server or ours. Our beautiful, highly productive, clean user interface provides the best environment to enjoy your BI testing and other testing requirements. You can start test runs and select test cases based on the powerful filters. It executes your tests, records results using TestRail's modern interface, and group, filter and sort your results efficiently.     TestRail comes with a load of other tools like getting real-time insights into your QA progress, Integrating with issue trackers and test automation, etc. Read more on TestRail advanced features and security in enterprise. Yellowfin Walkthrough  

Conclusion

A business intelligence (BI) dashboard is essential for any business organization in this modern era. It's important to have high-quality and error-free BI dashboards to deliver 100% accurate business insights to make the right business decisions. Yellowfin BI tools provide the best BI dashboard solutions by integrating the TestRail Test Management tools to exceed the expectations of both development and business teams. Try it free and experience the best solution to speed up your testing and QA process.