ETL Testing life cycle

ETL testing require manual testing steps and testers who understand the basic of an ETL Tool, Database,SQL, basic UNIX commands etc., following are the various phases typically followed in ETL Testing.

Requirement Understanding:-

- Review BRD, Technical specification document and data mapping document.
- Attend Technical Specification Walk throughs
- Work with business analyst and understand the structure, usage of source data.
- Identify all the issues and work with business analyst to clarify the data related issues mapping issues data transformation logic's etc., and make sure that there are no gaps.

Test Plan:-

- Test Estimation
- Preparation of test cases with all the test scenarios possible.
- Review the test cases with Business Analust.

Test Data Creation:-

- Understand the structure of source data.
- Make sure that all the tables are updated with referential data if the source or target data is in one or more tables.
- Ensure that the test data is created in all the associated tables ofter thoroughly understandling the data model.

Test case Execution and Test Results Reporting :-

- Run the ETL application jobs.
- Check the target data and structure and make sure that the data is complete and valid for test.
- Write simple to complex SQL Queries to check the expected results when the data sources is in multiple tables.
- Check the ETL tool logs for the abnormal termination error causes.
- Work closely with the developers and business analyst for all the testing related issues.
- document the test metrics with number of test cases, no of defects, source of each defect etc., for each test cycle