I recently spotted a valuable posting from SAS's Angela Hall on her Real BI for Real Users blog. I hesitate to suggest it was valuable because that implies her other posts are of less value! Not true, but this particular article was titled Testing recommendations for SAS BI Dashboard & SAS Web Report Studio and, with its structure following the data flow of a BI report, it offered a comprehensive check-list and set of suggestions for end-to-end testing of your BI reports.
Testing delivers confidence not guarantees, and Angela's posting offers advice on how to decide what amounts of testing are appropriate for you.
SAS technology is easy to work with and provides quick and efficient tools for getting your results quickly, but it cannot prevent its users from making mistakes. Beware of using the ease and efficiency of SAS technology to produce the wrong results quickly. As Angela says in her posting, "the most important thing is to do SOME testing of your reports"; that has to be the most valuable piece of advice in the posting!
