Business Intelligence (BI) Testing: Sample Test Cases

Details: Last Updated: 21 January 2021

What is BI Testing?

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE (BI) is the process of gathering, cleansing, analyzing, integrating and sharing data to derive actional insights that drive business growth. Business Intelligence Testing or BI testing verifies the staging data, ETL process, BI reports and ensures the implementation is correct. BI Testing ensures data credibility and accuracy of insights derives from the BI process.

You can learn more about ETL/ Business Intelligence in this tutorial

Sample Test Cases for BI

Following are generic test cases that need to be validated for any BI Testing Project

Test Scenarios	Test Cases
ETL verification	Verify data is mapped correctly from source to target system
	Verify all tables and their fields are copied from source to target
	Verify keys configured to be auto-generated are created properly in target system
	Verify that null fields are not populated
	Verify data is neither garbled nor truncated
	Verify data type and format in target system is as expected
	Verify there is no duplicity of data in the target system
	Verify transformations are applied correctly
	Verify that the precision of data in numeric fields is accurate
	Verify exception handling is robust
Staging data	Reconciliation check- record count between the STG (staging) tables and target tables are same after applying filter rules
	Insert a record which is not loaded into target table for given key combination
	Copy records, sending same records that are already loaded into target tables-should not be loaded
	Update a record for a key when value columns changed on day_02 loads
	Delete the records logically in the target tables
	Values loaded by process tables
	Values loaded by reference tables
Data Loading in BI	Check if the target and source data base are connected well and there are no access issues.
	For a full load, check the truncate option and ensure its working fine.
	While loading the data, check for the performance of the session
	Check for non-fatal errors.
	Verify you can fail the calling parent task if the child task fails.
	Verify that the logs are updated
	Verify mapping and workflow parameters are configured accurately
	Verify the number of tables in source and target systems is the same
	Compare the attributes from stage tables to that of the target tables. They should be matched.
BI Reports	Display date and time
	Decimal precision for key figures
	In a given page display the number of rows and columns
	Free characteristics in the report
	How are blank values/data displayed for both characteristics and key figures in the report
	Whether search for characteristics is based on key or key&text as applicable
	Does search option on text is case sensitive- Upper, Lower or both