Best practices for a testing environment for ETL pipelines

Like any ecosystem, each player in the group participates in altruistic, interactive relationships that build from the least complex to the most complex player. Since we need to establish a multi-layered testing strategy that covers everything from individual functions (unit testing) to the entire system (end-to-end testing), we need to discuss the key design principles for creating a testing ecosystem for data pipelines.

Defining testing objectives

Before writing any code, it’s important to determine the what and why of your task. Why do you need testing in your pipeline? What do you want to achieve with your tests? Using the previous section as a reference, this can range from verifying data integrity or confirming data transformation accuracy to validating business rules or checking pipeline performance and resilience.

Establishing a testing framework

Choose a testing framework that aligns with your technology...