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Implementing Tableau Testing To Optimize Care Delivery
At iVantage Health Analytics
iVantage Health Analytics Today
iVantage Health Analytics’ mission is to materially improve the delivery of healthcare in the world and to help health organizations tell a story around analytics that is pertinent to their market. Through an array of integrated strategic and performance management capabilities, they live out that mission by providing clients analytics, insight, and support to help them achieve sustainable performance improvement. To achieve this, our customer embedded Tableau dashboards within its own application, thus making testing critical not only for data accuracy but also for customer satisfaction. Our mission is to help organizations such as iVantage Health Analytics release the potential of the data analytics landscape through testing in order for their clients to fully trust the data.
The Need To Deliver Data Accuracy
One of the key core competencies at iVantage Health Analytics is effectively battling complexity with iron-clad accuracy. Our customers’ clients rely on and expect an exacting methodology that delivers accuracy that is unmatched in the industry. To validate data and functional requirements, iVantage Health Analytics was previously using a combination of manual testing and scripts developed in-house to fetch data from Tableau Server and compare it to expected results or previously downloaded data. This process was tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone. In addition, test output was stored in different formats in different places, and results were often difficult to interpret and to draw conclusions from. The organization was looking for a solution to take all these pains away.
Along came Wiiisdom Ops. iVantage Health Analytics managed to streamline testing their Tableau dashboards with our solution. The platform is capable of testing functional requirements, such as filters, parameters, and simulating complete user journeys on dashboards, as well as validating the underlying data in multiple ways.
“I would also like to point out that in the healthcare industry the difference between accuracy and error can be the difference between life and death, so our trust in leveraging Wiiisdom Ops to help us maintain our industry-leading standards goes well beyond any purely financial KPIs.”
Ross Helenius, Analytics Engineering Lead
Creating A Comprehensive Tableau Testing Plan With Wiiisdom ops
Thanks to Wiiisdom Ops, iVantage Health Analytics is now able to validate data displayed on Tableau dashboards against the underlying data source powering the dashboards, using the Assert SQL Equals functionality. With an SQL command, they can query their data source, and the data delivered can be compared to the data displayed on the Tableau dashboards at the moment of running the test case. Wiiisdom Ops is able to connect to most data sources using JDBC drivers. It allows our customer to quickly identify and resolve any issues with data updates or database connection problems.
Data can be validated based on defined rules, using formulas in Wiiisdom Ops. With this, our customer is able to test Tableau calculation logic and various requirements towards displaying data. In addition, this feature is used to make sure regulatory requirements are met at all times.
Functions providing interactivity, such as filters, parameters, or user actions, and drilldown can also be tested in Wiiisdom Ops and these are tested on a regular basis at iVantage. This Tableau testing solution is versatile, flexible and functionality can be supplemented by external scripts created by users. iVantage Health Analytics also saves time by editing and updating test plans programmatically. For example, after 30-minutes of running a test of over 10,000 filters and values, they found 77 discrepancies within the top-level filters such as filter names. With functional testing, iVantage Health Analytics can now ensure their clients have access to data with market-leading accuracy, providing crucial insight into healthcare performance.
Example of task properties for functional testing.
The Power Of Version Control And Continuous Integration
For any track changes made by BI developers, iVantage Health Analytics has put a number of their Tableau dashboards under version control. When changes are made to Tableau workbooks, developers commit the changes and push them to the version control system (VCS), describing the changes in a commit message. This way the changelog is easy to track and team members can collaborate more efficiently. Within Wiiisdom Ops, users can integrate workbooks with their test cases and put them under version control, so both the Tableau workbooks and the test cases can be tracked in a VCS. In case changes are made to workbooks, tests can verify that the existing functionality is intact. Wiiisdom Ops brings test-driven development into the BI space, an approach that has been widely used for many years by software developers in other fields. These test runs can be automated with Windows Scheduler, Crontab, andWiiisdom Ops can also be integrated with third-party continuous integration tools, such as Jenkins, TeamCity, Bamboo, or others.
iVantage Health Analytics has now set up retrospective test cases for their existing dashboards and, going forward for new dashboards, will be implementing a test-driven development practice. QA is already in place at the development stage which saves a lot of time down the line after deploying live dashboards for clients. In total, our customer saves 3.5 months of work per year thanks to continuous Tableau testing.
Importance Of Verifying The Before Vs. After
For Tableau Server upgrade from Tableau 10.4 to 10.5, iVantage Health Analytics used Cross-Environment testing in Wiiisdom Ops. Tests were set up to compare dashboards on the new and the old server automatically to each other. This has accelerated testing and brought up formatting and other issues that would have taken much longer to realize and resolve without automated testing.
Example of a cross-environment test result in Wiiisdom Ops.
Achieving Competitive Edge Through Efficient Tableau Testing
In today’s ever-increasingly complex healthcare environment providers must have visibility into enterprise-wide performance, and access to fully transparent and accurate data across all domains to optimize their strategic position as well as operational and clinical performance. iVantage Health Analytics is well-positioned to help organizations obtain this necessary visibility based on an array of next-level technology. With a partnership and utilization of Wiiisdom Ops core capabilities, our customer maintains a market edge over the competition by delivering leading-edge accuracy and methodological integrity.
If you’re looking to achieve the same success, get in contact with one of our experts today.
Discover iVantage Health Analytics at the 2019 Tableau conference talking about Wiiisdom Ops:
