Things to Consider Source Data Extracts Who will write the ETL programs? Have those developers written ETL programs before? Do they understand the ETL process? Do ETL programs already exist from a previous release or another BI application? How many of them have to be expanded? Can we ask the programmers of the operational systems to give us the extract files, or do we have to get the source data ourselves ? What do we need to know about the operational systems before we can get the data? What operational programs have to finish running before we can extract the data from the source files and source databases? ETL Tool Have we worked with this ETL tool before, or is it new to us? Has the ETL team been sufficiently trained on the ETL tool? Can the ETL tool perform all the required transformations, or will we have to write some custom code? In what language (C++, COBOL)? ETL Process Dependencies What are the dependencies among program modules? In what sequence do we have to run our ETL programs (or the ETL tool modules)? How many program modules can we run in parallel? What are the dependencies among the tables? Do some tables have to be loaded before others? How many tables can we load in parallel? Testing Will we conduct peer reviews? Are we using extreme programming (XP) techniques? How many testers will we have on the project? Will the subject matter expert and business representative participate in testing? Who will be the testing coordinator ? Who will log the test results and maintain the test log? What type of testing do we need to perform? Integration or regression testing? Performance testing? QA testing? Acceptance testing? Which business people will participate in acceptance testing? Only the business representative? The subject matter expert? Other business people? Technical Considerations What technical platform issues do we have to take into consideration? How is the staging area set up? On a dedicated server? Will the ETL process be split between the mainframe and one or more servers? What environments does the ETL tool run in? What type of middleware do we need? |