ETL / Data Warehouse Testing – Tips, Techniques, Process and Challenges

This is a guest post by Vishal Chhaperia. If you want to publish your article please read our article guidelines.

Today let me take a moment and explain my testing fraternity about one of the much in demand and upcoming skills for my tester friends i.e. ETL testing (Extract, Transform, and Load). This article will present you with a complete idea about ETL testing and what we do to test ETL process.

It has been observed that Independent Verification and Validation is gaining huge market potential and many companies are now seeing this as prospective business gain. Customers have been offered different range of products in terms of service offerings, distributed in many areas based on technology, process and solutions. ETL or data warehouse is one of the offerings which are developing rapidly and successfully.

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10 Tips to Survive and Progress in the Field of Software Testing

These tips not only survive but also advance you in your software testing career. Make sure you follow them:

Tip #1) Written communication – I repeatedly saying this on many occasions that keep all things in written communication. No verbal communication please. This is applicable to all instructions or tasks given to you by your superior. No matter how friendly your lead or manager is but keep things in emails or documents.

Tip #2) Try to automate daily routine tasks – Save time and energy by automating daily routine task no matter how small those tasks are.
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Team Building in Software Testing – How to Build and Grow Your QA Team

Like in any other software development life cycle, Testing too requires some important factors to develop and maintain for continuous process improvement. One such factor is Team Building. While building a right team, focus should be on the following key elements:

Roles and Responsibilities

It is very important for the team members to understand what they are supposed to do. This was quite often not communicated or discussed with the team. Before start of a project, the team members must be explained on the typical tasks which they will be performing on a daily basis for their respective roles. Be it a tester or a test lead, setting the expectations and explaining what is expected out of them will give correct results without unnecessary delays or errors.

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How to Achieve Level 5 Maturity for QA and Testing Process

This article explains what are CMM levels and how to  achieve these CMM levels for QA processes, explained with best examples.

For any process whether it is a QA process, development process or any non-technical process, there are levels of its maturity. By levels of maturity we mean that the level of formality and processes improvement, like ad-hoc processes – to formally defined steps – to managed result metrics – to optimization of the processes.

CMM (Capability Maturity Model) is process based model which is used to assess the maturity of an organization for different domains. Although this model is normally termed as the software development model but eventually it was used for other processes as well like QA and testing.

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Manual Testing Help eBook – Free Download Inside!

I am glad to share “Manual Testing Help” eBook prepared by one of our readers. The content of this eBook is very useful to understand manual testing concepts, testing methodologies and preparing for software testing interviews.

Here are some of the topics covered in this book:

  • Fundamentals of software testing
  • When defects gets introduced in SDLC?
  • Why does software have defects?
  • What is Verification?
  • What is Validation?
  • Software Testing Techniques
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Database Testing – Properties of a Good Test Data and Test Data Preparation Techniques

A couple of months ago, I wrote about database testing strategies. It covered the aspect that is entirely related to the execution of test cases. It was all about black-box testing of a database. There is another important aspect of DB testing activity which we will cover in this article.

As a tester, you have to test the ‘Examination Results’ module of the website of a university. Consider the whole application has been integrated and it is in ‘Ready for Testing’ state. ‘Examination Module’ is linked with ‘Registration’, ‘Courses’ and ‘Finance’ modules. Assume that you have adequate information of Continue reading →