Test-Driven Development of Data Warehouses

Status Of Tdd In The Bi & Data Warehousing Space

While the data warehouse and business intelligence industry has adopted a few of the methods from agile development, such as “bite size analysis” (Arnett, 2002) and improved coding practices, the methods of test-driven development are only starting to gain use. For instance, test-driven development has been proposed as a way to verify the validity of business intelligence reports such as Crystal Reports (Landes, 2005). In the specific area of data warehousing however, test-driven development does not appear to have made an impact.

If the principles of test-driven development were applied to a data warehousing project, the resulting data warehouse would likely be of high quality and its functionality would not exceed the scope of the original request. Additionally, it would be scientifically provable through the use of the software-based test cases that the data within a data warehouse was correct – even in the face of disbelieving executives who may question the accuracy of reports generated from the data warehouse.