AgileScotland - July - FIT for data - Adrian Mowat

I've got a few spots left for Adrians session this coming Monday (28th).  Contact me if you'd like to come along.

 

Clarke

 

The tools and techniques needed to do Test Driven Development are extremely well documented for Object Oriented languages, but how do we do TDD data management and business intelligence projects using 4th generation ETL languages like Ab Initio?

In this talk, I will show you how to do TDD when transforming data is the sole aim of the project. The talk will be divided into two parts. First, the theory of TDD in data management applications and, second, the application of the practices using FIT4Data.

FIT4Data is a testing framework for data management applications built on the Java implementation of FIT. It allows developers to write FIT-like tests using the programming language of their choice. This is essential in the ETL domain where the key technical skills are UNIX scripting and the ETL language used on the project and most developers do not know Java (or any other OO language) so they are not equipped to write fixtures in the usual fashion. Furthermore, FIT4Data provides direct support for common ETL tasks like integrating with a UNIX shell environment and maintaining reusable data sets.

FIT4Data is available to download at it's home on Google Code -http://code.google.com/p/fit4data

In the first part, I explain how to break a typical set of customer requirements an business rules down into chunks suitable for TDD and then how to define testable scenarios around them. In the second part, I will show how to use FIT4Data to build and run the tests and build the application using TDD using practical examples.

Once again Napier University have kindly provided us with a meeting room in Central Edinburgh.