I’ve recently ran into some issues where some reports were not generating the proper results. We already have a QA department that reviews the reports and then our business owners review them as well; this hasn’t prevented the issue.
I’m trying to figure out a decent way to have a test harness to ensure reports are giving me the desired result.
So far, I’ve thought about having a static snapshot of the database (point-in-time), I would then
- run the report sprocs (stored procedures) against my data with defined parameters
- save off the output
- write testing sprocs that call the reporting sprocs with my define parameters
- Verify the results matched using the EXCEPT keyword.
Can you please offer some suggestions and alternatives?
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It seems to me like you need an automated test.
You need a test data-set which covers all possible data constellations which might or might not be problematic and the desired output which is supposed to be generated from that dataset.
Then you just need a program which automatically runs the test, compares the results against the desired results and reports any discrepancies.
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