Key Takeaways:
- A comprehensive Tableau dashboard testing checklist covers six key testing areas.
- Data accuracy, regression, performance, interactivity, visual alignment, and security testing are all essential.
- Manual testing misses issues — 45% of dashboard errors go undetected for over 30 days without automation.
- Datagaps BI Validator automates all six areas for continuous, scheduled validation.
Ensuring the quality of a Tableau dashboard goes beyond building. According to Gartner, the long-term effects of poor data quality increase data ecosystem complexity and lead to poor decision making. Systematic dashboard testing prevents this.It requires thorough testing to validate its reliability and usability. This tableau dashboard testing checklist focuses on essential aspects like verifying data accuracy, evaluating functionality, security testing to protect sensitive data, stress testing for performance under load, and visual testing to maintain clarity and design standards.
What Are the Key Aspects of Tableau Dashboard Testing?
Testing Data Sources:
Ensure the dashboard is connected to the correct data sources and that credentials are set up properly.
Checking Data Accuracy:
1. Check whether the source data is reflected in the dashboard. This involves cross-checking the data on the dashboard with the data from the sources.
2. Verify that the calculated fields, aggregates, and measures are as expected.
Functionality Testing:
1. Report or dashboard design check.
2. Filters and parameters testing to see if they work as expected and do not display incorrect data. Also, if the dynamic changes to data visuals are applied and reflected.
3. Drilldown reports checking.
4. Ease of navigation, interactivity, and responsiveness in terms of usability.
Security Testing:
1. To check the security for report access and Row Level Security Permissions.
2. Integration of Single Sign On (SSO) security.
3. Multi-factor authentication.
Regression Testing:
Any change to the BI Dashboard/Model can impact the existing reports. It is important to perform regression testing so that after updates or modifications, the data/visuals shown in the dashboard remain the same before and after the changes.
Stress Testing:
To test the load time, run time, filter application time, and to simulate the access of reports and user behavior.
Visual Testing:
To check alignments, layouts, consistencies in terms of texts, visuals, or images to ensure all the elements are properly aligned.
How Does DataOps Suite BI Validator Enable Testing of Tableau Dashboards?
Datagaps BI Validator automates all 6 testing areas in this checklist.BI Validator is a no-code testing tool to automate the regression, stress, and functional testing of Tableau reports and dashboards.
Checking Data Accuracy:
DataOps Suite allows users to validate the data from the visuals of the report to be compared to the source databases. On connecting to Tableau and selecting a report, the datasets underlying the visuals of the reports are accessible through the suite as well. Each Visual has its own dataset, which can be compared to a source database used to build the tableau report.
This is possible with the help of the Data Compare component in the suite, which can compare the aggregated data from the databases and the datasets of the visuals. The differences are captured, thus allowing users to check the data accuracy between the reports and databases.
Functionality Testing and Visual Testing:
Once the connection is established, the users can access the reports and the exact workspace to work with. The specific workbook/report is accessible. The report will be loaded without any changes, and the visuals and filters of the report can be accessed from the BI Validator itself, thus verifying the responsiveness of the visuals and filters and verifying whether the dynamic changes are reflected.
The BI Validator comes with the Tableau Upgrade component to compare two reports, which can be the same or different from one or different data sources.
A common use case is the comparison of views and worksheets across multiple environments. Comparison can be done in terms of both text and appearance, where the differences are captured and pointed out wherever mismatch occurs in both reports. Also, BI Validator allows the differences in the filters of both reports to be pointed out on enabling “Capture filters after applying.”.
Security Testing:
BI Validator connects with Tableau through direct trust authentication, default authentication, or personal access token, where the users must provide their respective Tableau credentials, secret key, and secret ID (in direct trust connection) and the necessary web login commands (for default or personal access token connection). Thus, ensuring the authentication is secure so that only the users with valid credentials are accessing their reports to be validated.
BI Validator restricts the users from downloading the testing results when it comes to BI Reports to prevent the sensitive information from being downloaded.
The DataOps suite also has user-based access through roles and containers to prevent access to reports for everyone. The BI Validator can only allow users with defined roles and permissions to access reports.
Regression Testing:
BI Validator supports regression testing of the reports through the Tableau Regression component, which automates the testing of Tableau reports during any in-place upgrades and workbook deployments. This testing happens by comparing a benchmarked/baseline version of the dashboard/report with the live version. The filters can be changed accordingly if needed before/after the benchmarking. These filter changes can be bookmarked as the latest checkpoint before running the test.
Similar to upgrades, regression test runs can validate the differences in terms of appearance or text. Also, differences in the filters can be pointed out on enabling “capture filters after applying.”
Stress Testing:
BI Validator comes with a stress test plan to simulate concurrent users accessing reports to evaluate how reports and dashboards perform under heavy load. The plan typically involves running multiple users through different types of interactions, such as viewing reports, applying filters, refreshing data, and interacting with custom visuals.
The stress test plan allows the users to select the pages/dashboards from required workspaces to perform stress testing. These pages can be either from the same or different report.
Users can run the stress test plan on specific run options like number of parallel users, time spent on each page, total simulation run time, number of seconds to reach parallel users, refresh time, and other options to run the stress test plan.
The runs will result in showing metrics like Average Open Time and Max Open Time, Average Filter Apply Time, SLA Failures.
Frequently Asked Questions
1)What should a Tableau dashboard testing checklist include?
2)How often should Tableau dashboards be tested?
3)Can Tableau dashboard testing be automated?
4)What is the difference between regression testing and performance testing for Tableau?
5) How do you test Tableau dashboard security?
RajMohan Achanta
Associate Product Manager, Datagaps
Associate Product Manager at Datagaps. Shapes the product experience across ETL Validator, BI Validator, and Data Quality Monitor.
Narendar Yalamanchilli
Founder & CEO, Datagaps
Founder and CEO of Datagaps. Sets the vision for automated ETL, BI, and data-quality validation, built on deep enterprise data-architecture expertise.
