Imagine it’s a Monday morning and you are heading into work thinking about your upcoming day when the phone rings. It’s your lead infrastructure team and your shared Business Intelligence environment is having issues. Your users are complaining that their dashboards are running extremely slow and others are complaining that their dashboards are not being refreshed with the most current data.
You rush into work, well let’s just say that you follow the speed limit and eventually make it into work. After hours of research and examining log files you determine that a dashboard was pushed into the production environment over the weekend which has a complex data model and large data volume which is affecting other users. You wonder to yourself, how could this have happened? How could a dashboard make it this far without the proper checkpoints? A proper Quality Assurance Framework (QAF) while not foolproof does help to identify suspect dashboards that may affect your shared services.
What is Quality Assurance? According to Wikipedia, QA refers to the systematic activities implemented in a quality system so that quality requirements for a product or service will be fulfilled. Two principles of QA are:
- “Fit for purpose” – the product should be suitable for the intended purpose
- “Right first time” – mistakes should be eliminated
In regards to your shared BI Platform, whether it’s QlikView, SpotFire, or Tableau, we at Bardess have been entrusted by Fortune 500 companies to implement a solid Quality Assurance Framework to ensure the integrity of their shared platforms. Highlights of our QAF program include:
- A set of industry recognized standards, best practices, and videos for developers to reference
- Access to industry experts to advise on fixing and/or improving dashboards
- A defined set of quality reviews at key points in the development cycle to identify issues as early on in the process as possible
- Tools to allow developers to easily understand where they are in the process and access key artifacts from each stage
Our program has helped promote quality builds of dashboards as well as grow BI Tool knowledge and protect the health of shared platforms.
