What's the industry standard for test data preparation for DW testing?

[DWQAtester]

Hi,

Currently our team spent 20% - 35% of testing time to prepare test data for Data Warehousing project testing. I wonder is this % too high? what's the industry standard here?

Thanks!

 

[johnherman]

At most of my engagements, there are one or more test regions in which the transaction systems generate test cases and test data, and we use these in DW testing. That is, we have a DW test environment which can be fed by the test transaction systems. If the project is DW internal, such as a new summary table or cube, then, again, the DW test environment can be used. If you use "live" data for testing, take care to insure compliance with respect to PCI, PII, HIPAA, and other regulated data elements.

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