Experimentation in the Industry for Automation of Unit Testing in a Business Intelligence Environment

This paper presents an approach to automate the selection and execution of previously indentified test cases for loading procedures in Business Intelligence (BI) environments based on Data Warehouse (DW). To verify and validate the approach, a unit test framework was developed. The overall goal is achieve data quality improvement. The specific aim is reduce test effort and, consequently, promote test activities in data warehousing process. A controlled experiment evaluation was carried out to investigate the adequacy of the proposed method for data warehouse procedures development. The results of the experiment show that our approach clearly reduces test effort when compared with manual execution of test cases. Keywords— Business Intelligence; Data Warehouse; Software Testing; Data Quality; Experimental Software Engineering.