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BI Testing Tools:
Everything you need to know
All You Need To Know About BI Testing Tools
Business intelligence (BI) testing plays a crucial role in ensuring that the data-driven insights that organizations rely on are accurate. However, testing BI content manually is time-consuming and error-prone, leading to increased costs, delays, and inaccuracies. In this article, we’ll explore why BI testing is important, highlight the pitfalls of manual testing, as well as review the types of tools available to help organizations test smarter, not harder.
The Challenges Of BI Testing Without The Right Tools
Utilizing testing tools is essential for business intelligence testing at scale. Without automated BI testing tools, the accuracy and reliability of data in curated datasets, dashboards, etc, and analytics are massively compromised, leading to costly consequences. First, manual testing often leads to missed errors because of the extensive human intervention involved. Second, manual testing is a very time-consuming process, which can cause delays in getting dashboards and reports to production where stakeholders use this content to make business-critical decisions. To complicate matters even further, BI testing isn’t only done when BI content is first developed. Monitoring your reports and dashboards in production is important to proactively identify errors and breakages.
Why You Should Be Investing In BI Testing Tools
Business intelligence testing tools allow organizations to proactively identify and address issues, ensuring the reliability and accuracy of data and analytics. These tools automate your testing processes, providing visibility into breakages before they become risks or mistakes. They swiftly pinpoint anomalies, discrepancies, and quality issues (with the data or the dashboard/report itself) that may go unnoticed in manual testing, minimizing the risk of relying on inaccurate or incomplete data, and empowering organizations to make informed decisions confidently.
There are two main areas where organizations need to focus on BI testing:
1. Dashboard Development
As the dashboard is being built, organizations need to use BI testing tools to scale testing efforts and find errors that people would otherwise miss before content goes into production.
2. Dashboard Production
Once a dashboard is in production, organizations may not have time to spot-check it for errors. Maybe a column name changed? Maybe a data type changed? Regardless of the change, errors must be found before the end user discovers the issue. A BI testing tool will continuously monitor and notify users of any breakages in order for them to be fixed as quickly as possible—especially before a business stakeholder notices!
Imagine this scenario:
Better to avoid it, don’t you think? 
In essence, BI testing tools provide comprehensive reporting and analysis capabilities, enabling stakeholders to assess the health of their BI content and take corrective actions promptly. With the aid of these tools, organizations can achieve reliable and trustworthy BI insights and take action to drive better business outcomes.
Which BI Testing Tool Is Right For You?
There are various types of BI testing tools to support an organization’s testing process. These tools help maintain high data and analytics quality to ensure trusted insights. Let’s take a look at some examples:
1. Some tools test for accuracy to ensure the data displayed in the dashboard or report can be trusted in order for the best business decisions to be made.
2. There are also tools to test for user experience to ensure all functional aspects of a dashboard are working properly. This makes sure the end user can interact with the dashboard from successfully opening it to being able to filter and consume the data.
3. Others test for performance by assessing the responsiveness and scalability of BI content and the analytics environment as a whole under different load conditions, ensuring optimal performance at all times. Nobody likes a slow dashboard, right?!
4. Some tools test for security to help protect sensitive data by evaluating the vulnerability of BI systems to unauthorized access, data breaches, and other security risks. These tools enable organizations to implement robust security measures and ensure compliance with data protection regulations, for example.
Choosing the right BI testing tool depends on the type of tests you want to perform on your BI content. We’ve written an article on the most important types of BI testing to demonstrate the different ways organizations can ensure trust and mitigate any risks associated with quality issues.
Wiiisdom Ops automates BI testing across all of these categories, helping maximize the value of your data and analytics investments and increase confidence in data-driven decision-making more broadly. Whether you use Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, or SAP BusinessObjects, Wiiisdom delivers BI testing at scale, giving everybody the ability to deploy and automate continuous testing for analytics and reporting. Discover how one of our customers, Red Hat, automated BI testing with Wiiisdom Ops for Tableau and was able to reduce testing time from days to minutes and increase trust in data and analytics amongst business users.
Test Smarter, Not Harder
If you’re using Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, SAP BusinessObjects, or any other business intelligence platform, investing in BI testing tools is critical to ensuring that organizations can trust content at all times and make data-driven decisions with confidence. Manual testing is time-consuming, error-prone, and costly and so, by investing in the right BI testing tools, organizations can streamline the testing process, increase efficiency, and improve the accuracy and reliability of their BI content.
