Continuous Integration for Business Intelligence
The Motio Continuous Integration Server ("MotioCI") is a
patent-pending, server based product which increases the throughput, quality and momentum of Cognos BI development efforts. MotioCI represents
an ideal tool to enforce the best practices defined by a
BICC, as it enables continuous, automated version control and regression testing of BI content, provides visibility into changes in the BI Ecosystem, and allows for managed deployments between BI environments.
Implicit, Automated Version Control for Cognos Content: As BI Authors make changes to Cognos artifacts (Reports, Queries, Analysis Objects, Packages), MotioCI automatically tracks these changes and versions the content. MotioCI allows BI team members to
- View historical versions of BI Artifacts
- View historical outputs for each version of a Report
- Do "diffs" between multiple versions of the same BI Artifact
- Revert to a prior working version of the Artifact
- Promote an Artifact to an upstream BI environment
Regression Testing Framework for Cognos Content : MotioCI provides powerful regression testing capabilities for Cognos BI content. Customers can create test cases which ensure that Cognos report specifications adhere to project standards with respect to look and feel, report structure, local calculations, naming conventions, report parameters and more. Test cases can also be developed which ensure that when executed, reports produce the expected results and complete within the expected period of time.
Continuous Verification of the Cognos artifacts and outputs they produce : The MotioCI continuous integration capabilities allow customers to execute all configured testsuites automatically, at regular intervals ("e.g. run all tests every two hours"). This enables MotioCI to act as a virtual "smoke detector" for a Cognos environment - proactively notifying project stakeholders when a problem surfaces, rather than relying on the end users to discover it.
Traceability on "who is changing what" in your Cognos Environment: Modern Business Intelligence Ecosystems often involve a large number of moving parts: disparate upstream datasources, ETL processes, data warehouses, framework models, report specifications, applications, which front-end the content, etc. When an issue arises with the consistency or accuracy of the BI content, it is often difficult to determine what change caused the problem. MotioCI provides capabilities which allow customers to monitor their BI environment and track what changes are being made and who is making them. When issues arise, this traceability greatly reduces the amount of time required to find and correct the issue. This level of auditing is often of great use to customers seeking to attain Sarbanes Oxley compliance.
Deployment-Promotion capability: MotioCI enables the promotion of labeled, well-known baselines of BI content from one Cognos environment to another. For example, MotioCI will allow BI team members to promote a baseline of BI content (which has passed all regression tests) from a Development to QA or from QA into Production. All promoted content is pulled directly from version control so you know exactly what version of each BI artifact has been pushed into each environment.
Stress Test Cognos: MotioCI allows BI team members to design and execute stress tests against Cognos environments. Using MotioCI, BI team members can design stress test scenarios which apply controlled amounts of load (e.g. simultaneous report executions) to a BI Environment to determine how the BI content will perform under stress, before promoting this content into live production environments. MotioCI Stress tests can also be run against Cognos environments to more reliably determine the environment's capacity.
Net Results of implementing MotioCI:
- Increase the throughput of your BI staff
- Ensure the accuracy, consistency and performance of your BI outputs
- Gain increased insight into "who's changing what" in your BI Ecosystem
- Increase the momentum of your BI team (free them from the drudgery of manual regression testing after changes)
- Automatically detect issues (often within minutes of their introduction), before they are promoted out of the BI Development environment (much cheaper to correct).
- Enables QA resources to focus on higher level testing, as many defects are automatically caught by MotioCI before BI content is promoted into QA.
