MS BI Conference 4: Best Practices for Migration to Microsoft BI

This was a joint presentation by Ideaca (a Canadian consulting company) and General Mills Canada. I went for the CanCon I guess.

I didn't get much out of it. The presenters weren't very good, particularly the IT guy from General Mills - he got off topic several times, and used rather simplified analogies to describe the concepts of their project, which almost were condescending - you're at a BI conference with BI professionals, you should expect that we understand the concepts, so don't explain it like you're trying to convince the execs or the users at your company.

They spent too much time repeating what was on the slides.

Take-aways from this: they used some agile practices on this - particularly "show early, show often". And they had rigorous testing. And they used an Excel spreadsheet for their data dictionary, and had a macro that created a CREATE TABLE statmenet, and added a whack of extended properties for documentation sake in the database.

Types of tests they did:

1. automated data integrity routines (this would have been great to see some examples)

2. record counts (for sanity checks. again, would have been nice to see how they implemented this - did they keep a record of their results for tests over time?)

3. Scenario reconciliation - sounds like a complex unit test.

4. Report comparison - compare the new report to the original report.

5. Business hands on.

I asked him afterward if they did their tests in an automated way, he said they did, they had a buid process, and testing, and so on. THAT would have been great to see.